Category Archives: programming

Unstructured Time

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I was just thinking about getting ready to head to the after school program when I got a text indicating they were going to have to cancel. I was a little disappointed as I had pulled together some digital cameras and was hoping to work on some digital storytelling using Scratch as the production tool…get the girls interested in programming by building on their interest in digital media. I had spent an hour or so today creating two ideas for using digital photos in Scratch:

Farming Friends:

Farm Slide Show:

So, I kept working on them a bit, adding code to make sure they reset themselves when the green flag was pressed. I figured the girls could remix my work, thus learning both about the Scratch community and getting to see some code they can work with.

I finished tinkering and realized I had unstructured time. The last time it happened, I had to listen to a Coursera lecture. Today, I really could take a break from responsibilities. What to do? The dogs benefited as they got an extra walk before their supper. And my kitchen floor got a much needed cleaning.

But I was also able to escape upstairs to my makeshift sewing room where I’ve been working on my first quilting project. I had bought a kit for a small wall hanging several years ago and decided this would be the year I finished it, intending to give it to my mother for a Christmas gift. I had cut squares and done some sewing over the weekend but today’s job was to start creating the whole piece. I pretty quickly discovered just how badly I had done with the initial cutting. Some squares were more like rectangles, points didn’t match and after sewing two rows together, I found that one of the blocks was positioned incorrectly, a mistake that pretty much doomed the project. I could have taken it all apart but that wasn’t going to solve the poor cutting. I used a rotary cutter but just wasn’t as careful as I should have been. I’ll finish it as it is good enough for me but I’m going to try another one to give as a gift. This time, I’ll be better focused on the cutting, first taking some time to read tips from experienced quilters who are willing to share their secrets online.

A well-made quilt has a clean, neat look that results from clean, neat cutting. I knew that and yet it took failure to bring the lesson home. It’s tempting to give it up and go back to crocheting, a craft I do well, but I’m determined to master this new craft. Thank goodness I’m not being judged on my first effort.

Lots of lessons for educators here…first, the unstructured time and the chance to choose my activity, and then the chance to fail. We don’t allow much of this in schools since we are so focused on measurable results.

A Learning Journey

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Since mid-September, I’ve been working with a local non-profit to provide an after school tutorial/computer program for local kids. We have a group of about 16 ranging from pre-K to 7th grade that comes to us on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Volunteers help with homework and provide a meal before taking the kids home.

My original plan was to work with upper elementary and middle schoolers to teach them to program with Scratch. I’ve done a bit of that with a few middle school girls but haven’t been able to really dig in yet. With the little bit we did do, only one seemed particularly interested. I am wondering if I need to give them more choice including doing something with digital storytelling. My larger goal is to help them see that they can create rather than consume on the computer and maybe programming isn’t the only way to achieve that.

Part of the problem is space. We meet in one big space, and even with a few rolling walls, it’s noisy and a little chaotic. There’s an empty elementary school just behind our building, and we’re hoping to work with the county to get access.

The other issue that became glaringly clear last evening was the depth of the educational needs in the group. My girls had a pile of math homework so they started with that, and I spent some time with two first grade boys working through a language arts worksheet. This is the first time I’ve really sat with some of the youngest kids. These two boys were really struggling. They can sort of decode, but they aren’t really reading or comprehending. They couldn’t read the directions for one of the assignments so they merrily copied the out-of-order words that they were supposed to be putting in sentences. When I wrote the words on cards, they were able to manipulate them into sentences and then copy them onto the paper.

Other activities didn’t even make sense to me…a series of sentences with blanks and a word bank. We used  a process of elimination to finish it, but with no context for the random sentences, it was sometimes hard to figure out which word made a comprehensible sentence. If I hadn’t been there to supervise and advise, I’m sure they would have simply guessed just so that there was something on the line since that had been their strategy on the first few pages. I couldn’t help but wondering how much feedback they got on the packets.

I also wondered how much time they get to hang out with books. I’m already planning to take my pile of children’s books when I go next week and get them reading together. The middle school kids could sit with the younger ones and help them and probably improve their own skills. And then we could use digital storytelling tools to create our own books. It would tie the program pieces together.

I worry that by just focusing on helping them get their homework done, we are missing an opportunity to give them larger experiences that they don’t seem to be getting in school. There must be a balance. I have to remind myself that we have only been doing this for a few weeks. We had some sketchy plans but didn’t really know how many kids would come and what their needs would be.

We are definitely on a learning journey together….

 

 

Scratch Day!

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One of my favorite days each semester is Scratch Day.  Integrating Scratch allows me to give my students the chance to do some basic programming. Most of them have had not experience in this area. In a two-credit class, I can only devote an hour, but it’s amazing what my students can accomplish in that hour.  I give a basic overview of how the program works, show them how they can download and investigate projects and then set them loose to work on their own projects as I work on my own.

In addition to an introduction to programming, they get to see a vibrant professional learning community at work.  When we have questions, we head to the forums where we find answers along with sample code.  They turn into a learning community as well as they share discoveries and help each other.

At the end of the class, I know there are students who are relieved that it is over. They feel a bit inferior, I suppose, because they are generally used to being good at something right off the bat. I try to reassure them that programming is not always intuitive and creating something complicated takes time. Others are exhilarated and can’t wait to get home to work on their projects some more, knowing that they still have lots to learn but confident that they can learn it.

I always learn more about Scratch myself and promise that I will do more…maybe I’ll make it my next 30-day challenge.

 

21st Century Skills: Data Manipulation

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These days, the world runs on data. In our class, we looked at how data drives geography, moving from creating a very simple graph of earthquakes in Excel to incorporating data into Google Maps and Google Earth. We saw how text data can be separated from its format in order to be read by an aggregator. I think learning how to manipulate data and create databases is an important 21st century skill.

Here’s an example from the real world, aka my own life: As part of the programming I’m doing, I use a lot of comma delimited files, which allow me to quickly populate tables or create merged documents. Formatting becomes important here in terms of learning to escape certain characters and making sure there are enough commas for blank fields, etc. etc. etc. I also had a “Microsoft moment” when we discovered that the reason the csv file couldn’t be read was because its first field was labeled ID and that causes an error message. Since most databases have an autoincrement field as the first field and that field is often called ID, this seemed a bit problematic. But we have discovered that Numbers, the Mac spreadsheet program, has no such problem so we can manipulate the data there.

A Different Kind of Tea Party

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One of the reasons I love to teach is because I love to learn. During my ed tech class last week, one of my students introduced me to Alice, the programming language, and also talked about Storytelling Alice, the programming language geared towards middle schoolers, particularly girls. I had only a vague knowledge of Alice and none at all of Storytelling Alice. I had hoped to spend some time with both this week, but my own programming got in the way. I also stumbled because Storytelling Alice doesn’t have a Macintosh version. Using it would mean dragging out the Windows machine. But, I ended up doing that anyway since I loaned it to a student so it is up to date and ready to go. So, maybe this weekend…

Meanwhile, in one of those serendipitous events, I got an email today highlighting webinars being sponsored by Georgia Tech that focus on Alice. I was going to email the link to my students but thought there might be a wider audience. Here’s the link to the Tea Party website and the link to the webinar schedule.