4. Field Activity: Digital Fabrication for kids

For the field activity my colleague (and FLA classmate) and I made code magnetic poetry for the whiteboard in the Fab Lab we both teach out of. We were obviously inspired by magnetic poetry kits.

The idea is for the students to use magnetic poetry to help them make meaning out of commonly used words in computer programming, in a context that is less scary than code that has a particular function. It was written to work for students who are learning Processing as their main programming language, but could obviously be edited for whatever other language people were interested in.

Lesson plan

Here is a link to the lesson plan for my field activity.

At that link, you will find an early version of the Adobe Illustrator file we used, and a lesson that can use it, and some reflection on how using the magnets went. I intend to update pictures of the end result and some poems people used when I return to school. Alas, I took 0 photos during the creation process… but it is basically just using a laser cutter, which I have described in Week 2s documentation. The lesson plan has no non-technical objectives, but the objective is to become more fluent in programming syntax, which is not related to the type of digital fabrication we used.

Reflection:

1. How do you think digital fabrication improves the activity vs utilizing traditional methods? What is the extra value? Using Magnetic poetry instead of something written allows students to move bits and pieces around, encouraging more play than having them write something out on paper would. Magnetic poetry on a whiteboard allows them to also write things between the magnets,

Magnetic poetry also becomes a staple of the room. Generally, the laser-cut design looks great on the board. Computing can be hard to display in a room, especially code itself, and these magnets on the whiteboard help make the room feel like a computer science room. Students who hang out in the room during lunch or after school or as they finish work can create poetry on the whiteboard using code terms that other students coming to the room at different times can see and comment on, making the learning goals visible well after the lesson itself. Students often ask questions about the words they don’t recognize that are on teh board, encouraging curiosity. Paper would have been much more ephemeral.

1. What are some challenges you expect when you do the activity with your class? The main challenge is actually fabricating enough of the object to have the whole class use it in some way. In the scopes lesson plan, I recommend that the teacher make enough for each student or group of students to have their own set. This is not what we did, exactly, so I have struggled with using it as a true lesson.

In order to run a lesson, a teacher has to believe thoroughly in what they are doing. I certainly had to get behind why it was important for us to use this manipulative instead of just acting out text or writing out code that would actually run and create things on the computer. This was also a fairly abstract lesson; it is important to give students the necessary context to understand how to use code to make something that isn’t necessarily code.

1. What have you learnt in the process? The Week 3 video honestly sold me on digital fabrication for students. I had initially thought of it as a stepping stone I didn’t particularly need in order to get familiar with the material – I already intended to use digital fabrication with my students; I didn’t need to be sold on it by maming something that would have personal meaning for me (as a teacher, I looked at this assignment and thought “Oh, they’re trying to sell us on a concept by making us use that concept in a space they know we’ll all care about because the one thing they know we all are is educators). However, the Week 3 video discussed how in order to create a manipulative, you have to really think about what you’re trying to teach, and you also have to think a lot more about how you’re teaching it. To create this project I had to consider which bits of syntax I thought were important enough to bother putting in the Adobe Illustrator file and cutting out that way.

It encouraged me to think in a different way than I usually do. Honestly, physical manipulatives that are not directly on a computer do not come easily to me. I had a classmate help me figure out what would even be useful to try doing in my CS class. I had initially imagined magnetic poetry as cards that would help students get used to where to put syntax - making sure they understood correct syntax for ( ) { } where to put ; etc. This was not at all what my colleague had in mind, and she was right. The idea turned out not to be about geting syntax correct, but in getting used to syntax in an entirely different, possibly less scary creative medium. This opened the door to a widely different way of thinking about programming than I had initially considered.

1. Describe the process that you went through to create the teaching aid. What did you learn during the fabrication process? I came up with most of the terms, though my colleague added several more that she thought would work better in a poem. She helped me make the Adobe Illustrator file, and she did the lasercutting itself. We initially thought we were going to make rounded edges (which is what the draft file in the lesson plan shows) but we eventually decided on sharp edged squares, which looks more like magnetic poetry. We had initially put the magnets on the back of the wood itself, so that we would only have to cut once, but it turns out the laser cutter really did not want to cut the magnet material. So, my colleague helped with an exacto knife on each of the boxes around the poems.

Notes

Noots on the lecture available at my blog