Robotics are the new Computer Science

At the Grace Hopper Conference 2010 I attended a workshop on getting girls in grades 4-12 excited about computing, and 2 of the 4 technologies featured used robotics of some sort.

Scratch & Alice are programming languages, and allow students to make incredible animations (2D and 3D respectively) limited only by their imaginations.There are lots of programming challenges for students to participate in throughout the year to really flex their programming muscles.


Pico Cricket & Pleo Dinosaur kits were passed around for us to program and play with...total fun! During a meeting with my peer computer teachers I also learned about Pico Boards, which are like Pico Cricket connections but powered by Scratch...totally awesome...gotta get a few!!!



Then this article about a robotics lesson plan came in my e-mail and I now know that robotics are the next big thing in student computing. Of course it makes sense: artificial intelligence has remained behind the scenes in computing, we have a number of domestic robots (the vacuumers and floor cleaners, and toys) that make us more comfortable with independently operating machines. So the next wave of computers is to develop programmers who are comfortable and familiar with robotics. This means we technology teachers have to step our game up!

Adding Interactive Lessons

I now have to practice what I preach: I have a severely learning disabled student in my class for whom I CANNOT give text-based lessons. In addition we read an article in our staff meeting about the purpose of homework and types and length of assignments we should give students. All of this coalesced in my looking for interactive lessons on cyber safety.

• BBC WonderWebWorld
  Impressed by Dance Mat Typing I Google'd "bbc internet safety" and found this site.
• TEA - Internet Safety - Activities and Lessons
  Texas once again leading the way with links to really great resources
• Teachers First
  Haven't reviewed because the first few were already on TEA site
• DMOZ
  Really came through on interactive sites
  
  

We increasingly discuss students who grew up in a multimedia, multi-modal world, yet because we teachers grew up in the text age and are comfortable in the text age, we tend to give students...text. The test will be if students retain the internet safety lessons better through an interactive module than with reading through.

Teaching Logic Using Board Games

Today I had the privilege of fore knowledge of a planned network outage so I brought in some board games and cards that had been used in an outreach 10 years ago to keep students occupied. My 7th and 8th graders were mystified by Kerplunk, a game that came before their 1999 birth years lol! It got me thinking that it's possible to teach logical thinking "unplugged" using certain board games that promote logical thinking:

• Kerplunk: modern version of Pick Up Sticks where marbles fall through a column, winner has fewest number of marbles in receptacle
• Mancala: strategy game that requires counting, and quickly or your opponents confuse you
• Ludo, Parcheesi or Sorry: game of chance and strategy as you try to get all your pieces "home" while keeping your opponents from reaching "home" first
• Dominoes:
• Uno:
• Go:
• Monopoly:

The thing is these games may be old fashioned to us because we are of the "7 channel"-"do homework every night"-"play board games or play outside" because "there was nothing else to do" generation. These games are not familiar to our students because they are about 100 generations away from ours, their teachers. So for your next fundng cycle, be sure to invest in a few board games to take your logic-teaching lessons offline and to a whole new level.

CS Unplugged

I have been using CS Unplugged to reinforce computer science concepts after teaching technical skills that have been abstracted. CS Unplugged is a great curriculum for teaching computer science concepts to students without being plugged to a computer. I've found students are able to complete the worksheet activities with little to no assistance, though I have class discussions to ensure students take away the main point of the activities. I expect that for students younger than 7th grade may require more guided discussions in addition to an ending discussion to ensure the main concept is taken away.

Anytime-Anywhere Learning

It's 11pm on a Wednesday evening, final email check, lo and behold there are changes to the class wiki. Students are working on the class project, sharing resources by commenting on each others' pages...isn't this the learning we educators want to see? I thought students would only work during class time...I go to sleep happy that they are enjoying the activity enough to show off at home :)

Oh So Connected!

Reflecting on today's classes and I feel...Oh So Connected! Using Web 2.0 tools, my students have created blogs and are now using wikis. Having covered internet research (search engines), depending on how much they remember, they're now equipped to find information on any subject for school.

I will not be able to cover word processing before time ends with 2 classes, but I am confident that the Web 2.0 tools and cloud computing are what this generation needs to learn...even Microsoft is getting in line with online office productivity and smartphone apps.

Class Blogging as a Computing Activity

Image © 2010 M.Agbowo

Blogging is a Web 2.0 tool, meaning users can contribute to online discourse without knowing how to manually code (WYSIWYG-What You See Is What You Get). I had students create their own and write in wikis daily as a computing activity for the following reasons:

• technology exercise: to wrestle with setting up the blog as a means of reading and following directions, and the experience of setting up an online account
• writing exercise: students can always more time for language production and idea generation, so blogs allow a space for free writing
• communication exercise: blogs allow students to read and comment on other student's thoughts, and collaborate on ideas, all remotely, which is a 21st century skill

All in all, except for a few students who just missed the idea, I am satisfied that students understood a bit of technology and a lot of writing and idea generation.

We started off with Edublogs, which seemed so simple. Well, we really started off with trying to sign up for Google's Blogger and some of the other common blogs, but students were not allowed due to their correct years of birth. And some students did not have e-mail accounts so there was no possibility. Edublogs was to accommodate students without e-mail accounts, but there were networking issues where we could not always access the site.

Though Edublogs did not work out for us at this time, the site is very robust in student and class blogging, with lots of ideas and resources for the innovative teacher, and a blogging contest for students. In fact, I ran across a 9-step how-to guide for class blogging.

Some students started blogs through Webs, TypePad (not sure about age restriction), WordPress (Edublogs is the education version of WordPress; not sure about age restriction), and students with existing e-mail accounts were able to create Blogger blogs.

After some research I ran across KidBlog, which seems promising, because everyone is linked through a class page, where I or each student can create student accounts and a list of blogs is generated for the class. More to come on this :)