This was my 3rd semester teaching an Electronics class for 7th and 8th graders, and I’m learning more and more every time I teach it. In this class, I want students to learn the basics of electricity, circuits, and programming – and I also want them to learn a maker mindset. How to invent, remix, tinker, recover from setbacks, persist through difficulties, use your resources, collaborate with others. How to teach yourself what you need to know. How to present your project to others so they can build on it and make it even better.
I use some formal lessons, but this class is not as structured as a programming or computer science class. For the most part, students are given resources and inquiry questions, and they use the resources to teach themselves what they need to know. Everyone starts in a different place. Everyone has different needs. I want them to create something challenging that they’re proud of – a launching point for future exploration and learning in the world of invention.
I love the projects the kids made! Many made interactive holiday displays, and I got a great variety of others including videogame-themed projects, an LED cube, games, and even a car. I created a simple Google Sites page to showcase their work.
I also have some reflections on the semester and the class in general. The learning is just as good for me as it is for the kids.
- Purposeful learning: I believe in giving the students a good foundation in circuits such as understanding measurements and parallel and series circuits. However, students report to me that they find the beginning of the class “boring” and I don’t think I connect it well to the Arduino projects later. I’ve been involved with a project called Engineering Brightness, spearheaded by Tracey Winey, our media specialist, and John Howe, our assistant principal. It’s part extracurricular and part co-curricular, where students build lanterns in our school’s makerspace to send to third-world countries. My kids get involved with the EB program through soldering lessons, field trips, and guest talks and Skype sessions, but it has not been fully interwoven into the class up to this point. Tracey and I have been planning to co-teach this coming semester – we’ll use the EB project to teach basic circuitry and the innovator’s mindset, and infuse cultural/global awareness into Electronics class. I’m really excited about making this partnership stronger. The kids will understand the circuitry much better with this style of learning. Imagine learning about serial and parallel circuits, volts and amps by designing your own lantern for other people. They will love what they’re doing and find it more purposeful. There’s a good body of research that shows this is how to draw girls into engineering, too.
- Open-source culture: The open nature of Arduino is what makes the platform so beautiful to work with. I have encouraged students to remix found projects and to share their work, but haven’t really tapped into the community to make their sharing more real. One thought I have here is that there is a style of communication that comes with sharing projects. Look at good projects you find on instructables.com, or ehow.com, or youtube or any of the Arduino sharing sites. Look at some that are not as well done. There’s a structure and a style that makes your project accessible, interesting, replicable, and fun. Kids in the modern world need to learn to communicate in the medium that best suits their work, to code-switch and adapt their style as needed. I wonder how to teach open-source sharing and communication to middle schoolers. I would love to make the writing and video editing and photography and commenting a really key part of the class, as I’m not satisfied with the work I’m getting at the moment. It would be so important for the Engineering Brightness part of the curriculum as well as the Arduino part.
- Appropriate level of challenge: I ran into challenges you always run into with a project-based class. Some students got in over their head and tried to do too much. Some kids who were perfectly capable of finding answers on their own raised their hands many times each class and waited for me to help them. Some finished early with a half-baked project that didn’t meet requirements but did not want to challenge themselves further. Work was shared unevenly between partners. Some finished early and asked me what they should do for the next three class periods. Some pushed the deadline right up until the last minute of the last day of class. Some did not understand how to read rubrics or project guidelines. I expect all of these challenges each semester, and sometimes I do a good job working with these situations, but not always. I continue to look for good structures for project-based learning. It’s really hard with one of me. This may be a great opportunity for me and my teaching partner next semester to put some good practices in place for the kids.
I’m late blogging about this because our days were so busy with CS Ed Week! I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my partner in crime, Tracey Winey (Twitter: @premediawine) , who listened very nicely when I said “I have some ideas about Computer Science Education Week I’d like to brainstorm with someone”, and she agreed to dive right in and plan a bunch of activities with me. She’s an outstanding organizer and is becoming a darn strong engineer as well, so the world better watch out.
We arranged for teachers to do an Hour of Code with their students over the course of the week, in their regular classes. Many students are doing multiple Hours of Code and they love it. The three activities garnering the most positive feedback from students are the Minecraft Hour of Code on code.org, the Anna and Elsa Hour of Code on code.org, and the BitsBox Hour of Code (which actually lets you download your apps to your mobile device!). I love how the Hour of Code makes coding accessible and fun for every student. Tracey and I wanted to infuse coding into a little bit of a cultural celebration at school. We envision that students should not see coding as a niche activity for a geeky few, but as a normal problem-solving tool that everyone uses.
We set up some open houses in the media center and scheduled students to come to them and take tours. We arranged for current CS and Electronics students to be tour guides and take their friends around different “exhibits” having to do with computer science. Tracey managed the open houses as I had classes to teach during most of them. We had:
Interactive Code, Art, and old Video Games on Monday:
Arduino Day on Tuesday:
Robot day on Wednesday:
Minecraft day on Thursday:
On Friday, we had our first annual Preston Middle School Code-a-Thon. I blogged about how we envisioned it working previously. We were able to accept almost 80 kids, and it came down to 11 beginner teams and 8 advanced teams. The beginner participants were mostly girls, and the advanced groups were half girls. It was busy but a lot of fun.
We recruited some adult volunteers from the community… some Preston parents who are engineers, along with some engineer friends and retired teachers, and a staff member from the Larimer Humane Society. We had four judges and eight technical mentors, and we divided them up to work with beginners or the advanced teams.
Tracey and I gave a presentation about the code-a-thon. We talked about how code-a-thons are also called hackathons, and they are engines of innovation. Google is famous for its hackathons, and hackathons usually have a theme – Virtual Reality, Rural Life, and Social Services are a few. Sometimes, employees even stay overnight and bring their sleeping bags, and code through the weekend to come up with their solution. Everyone presents at the end. We presented the theme:
Animal Welfare! The kids were very excited. We showed this quick YouTube clip to get the students thinking about different problems they could solve related to animal welfare.
The kids started by brainstorming, and Tracey set them up all over the media center with SMART boards, regular whiteboards, a SMART table, a Kapp, butcher paper, desktop computers and laptops. The kids had to choose a problem or a need to address, and what language they would code in. I had set up some group accounts on Khan Academy, Open Processing, and Scratch. One group of students chose to use MIT App Inventor, one chose BitsBox, and three groups decided to create coding solutions using the NAO humanoid robot. We offered snacks every hour, and had the kids turn their programs in using Google Classroom. They worked from 8:15 until 11:15, and then they gave presentations to the judges. We saw programs on animal abuse, factory farming, saving penguins, catching poachers, endangered animals, quite a few perfect-pet quizzes, a vet program, and a robot dog trainer. While the judges were deliberating, our Humane Society volunteer gave a presentation about what they do and how they help animals in the community. Finally, the judges returned and we gave out top-four prizes in each category.
It was awesome. The kids who gave us feedback said they loved coding something that had a purpose to it. That they really enjoyed having a reason for coding, learning and being social and of course having snacks. I heard from a couple of parents of beginners that their kids were so proud of their coding and had so much fun. Many kids asked if we could do it again. We are pretty exhausted – but we probably will!
Here is a link to many of the programs created by students during the code-a-thon.
I hope you like this slideshow of the code-a-thon. We had a great time!
Computer Science Education Week is quickly approaching, and this year we want to go a little beyond the classroom hour-of-code events (which we are still doing). My school has decided to host its first mini-hackathon, which we’re calling a code-a-thon! I have seen announcements for hackathons in my area before and the idea is always intriguing, but I’ve never actually attended one – so this is a big leap, hosting one without ever actually seeing what a hackathon is like. Our awesome media specialist and I are pulling it together and hoping to learn from the experience.
Here is what we have decided so far.
- We will have two categories: Beginner and Advanced. Beginners can be complete newcomers who have never coded before. Advanced coders have a semester of computer science or the equivalent.
- Teams will be 3-5 students.
- First thing in the morning, we’ll make introductions, set up norms, and reveal the theme. The theme will be very broad (the examples I use with students are “sports” or “space exploration”).
- Students will have 20 minutes or so to brainstorm what they would like to make.
- We will provide some technical mentors that can help students. Students will get a token or a flag they can turn in to receive a certain amount of time with a technical mentor. They should use it when they really need it!
- We’ll have breaks for snacks and drinks and movement.
- Students will get to present their projects to the judges for a short amount of time (3-5 minutes depending on number of teams).
- Judges will score projects in these categories: Problem Identification / Requirements, Usefulness of Solution, Creativity, Teamwork, and Technical Quality.
- Winners will receive prizes. Everyone will get food and publicity.
I teach a required sixth-grade tech class so I’m able to pump it up and give the code-a-thon some good publicity in class. I have also appeared on the morning announcements to advertise and give computer science trivia questions. I set up a table at lunch with some signs and sign-up forms.
The turnout was amazing! 116 kids signed up! 63 of them were girls! We are going to need to actually cut some kids from the code-a-thon… what a bummer, but what a great problem to have!
We’re excited to see how the event goes and what kinds of programs the students create. My vision is to create a culture at the school where computer programming is seen as a normal problem-solving tool used by everyone, and not a fringe activity for supersmart kids. I’m so, so encouraged by what I have seen with the code-a-thon signups. Really fun to see kids round up friends at the lunch tables and bring everyone over to register to spend a morning coding. I hope the event goes well, and I will definitely post updates as we get closer!