1. Week 01

This week we talked about culturally relevant and reflective working, collaboration, programming and electronics. You can see notes at my blog

Project Description

Given I am a Physical Computing teacher, basically all of my projects use electronics in some capacity. You can read my reflections on my Module 2 activity, for instance. The picture below is from one of my classes working on that activity - this student was learning about how the bend sensor could be programmed.

Over break, I reminded myself how to use Ohm’s Law to ensure I didn’t blow out an LED, and added an LED to a breadboard powered directly, then wiht a button, then with a Circuit Playground. I also lit up the Circuit Playground based on the values I was receiving from various sensors (a potentiometer, an ultrasonic sensort) that I had hooked up to the circuit playground through alligator clips and the breadboard. I worked on this with my brother, who had just completed a college electronics class himself. I introduced him to how one could use that knowledge in a programmed circuit, which he had not done before. I intend to run lessons on this subject next term, as students will by that point be very familiar with programming the circuit playground and how to connect different sensors to it.

I have used Makey Makey with students as young as kindergarten before, mostly to show them what things can conduct electricity, including their whole class holding hands, and with older students to de-mystify how keyboards work.

Reflection

1. What are the challenges of using electronics in your space? How can you design an activity using electronics that takes into accounts your children age and cultural backgrounds?

My space was built for me to use electronics in, which is very helpful; it is literally my job to teach programming and electronics. Electronics can be hard, because as soon as you’re programming physical things, there are more things that can go wrong. Is it something wrong with your programming? is there something wrong with the wiring, or possibly the wires themselves? Has something short circuited? Is your battery out of power? Are the values you’re looking for from your sensor off? Is the sensor itself working? It is no longer easy to find the one place or one thing that is broken because each of these need to work (a multimeter does help!). This is also a good thing because it means that students learn to persevere through these challenges, and how to debug in a more real-world case.

Electronics are, of course, also expensive. Luckily for me, it is my job to teach this material, and I have the budget for it, so it is not a barrier for me in particular at the moment.

My students attend a school with a makerspace. They spend their freshman year doing mandatory digital fabrication. Their sophomore year, they learn to program. Their Junior year is when they start playing with physical computing, and integrating sensors. So, by the time they start working with electronics, they are already familar with most of the things one needs.

From there, it is important to motivate the learning in what the students know and understand is part of their everyday life. I introduced the concept of IR messaging with a remote control, then let them program circuit playgrounds to send and receive IR messages. Serial communication had me asking them what they knew about USB, before they programmed it. When they learned how to use the capacitive touch sensors, I showed them a video about how touchscreens work and why. Generally, I want them to see that microcontrollers and microprocessers, sensors and outputs, make up a lot of their world, and empower them not only to know how those things work, but to know that they can create it.

Electronics can be fun for students of any age, really; people of all ages love things that light up and make sound, that you can press buttons on and react to movement or sound. From the excitement factor, you only have to worry about accessibility. My students who are Juniors and Seniors in High School are using the drag and drop Makecode language to program their Circuit Playgrounds. This helps ease some of the cognitive load of typing and getting the syntax correct, and lets me focus directly on the concepts. It also helps

1. Explain one successful educational activity in which you collaborated with other educators. What are the advantages and disadvantages of working with other educators? What are the main aspects to take into account to prepare an education activity among 2 or more educators?

When I was working on my AI curriculum, I was in contact with an English teacher who is a good friend of mine. I was providing the technical concepts around how a Large Language Model works, and she was helping me contextualize that lesson with ideas around poetry and sharing your own voice, vs the voice of an author, vs the voice of probabilistically generated text meant to sound like that voice, and what the similarities and differences are. It is very important to me that cross-curricular connections make sense to people of both subjects. Because I was working directly with an English teacher, this lesson felt like an English lesson. Because I am myself a technology teacher, it felt like a technology lesson. It was authentic in both concepts.

I have tried to work closely with other teachers at my school – I planned to have students create animations that were reminiscent of the book they were reading in English class, or have them look at the mark-making they were learning in art class and connect it to what they were drawing using Processing, and randomness, and how these kinds of drawings were similar and different. However, it was very hard to make sure that the timing that made sense for that book, or the art context to be correct for the timing of the Computing class I was teaching. When classes are at somewhat random times, and all have their own content to get through, it can be hard to collaborate. Still, it can help students contextualize each class by connecting them with each other.

I am lucky at my school to have other Digital Fabrication based educators. I learn from both of them all the time. One of them is our FLA instructor who frequently helps me understand the Digital Fabrication tools in my school, and can help me and my students debug them. He also has years more experience in the maker movement than I do, and can help me center projects more, and consider where students need to be. The other Design instructor at the school also helps put things in perspective - she is a very physically-minded person, in a way I am not. I usually keep my ideas on the computer. She helps me consider ways ideas can be brought in the physical world. This is why I collaborated with her on the FLA Module 1 project - she helped me see a concept in computing it would be helpful to work with physically, and I gave her the things to write on the poetry.

1. How could you integrate both culturally reflective learning and digital fabrication in your environment? Could you come up with some project ideas using digital fabrication in which cultural diversity of students is highlighted?

In a classrooom built around creativity, you can often allow students to reflect their cultural diversity with a prompt. For instance, I am currently having the students make a decorative object - 3D printed, lasercut, vinyl cut, or embroidered. The idea is for them to make a design that looks good in the physical world, and to practice using loops. I could have included in the prompt that it could represent something about themselves or their culture, or a culture of my choosing, showing Arabic or Nigerian designs and the ways they repeat. I should probably consider doing that next year.

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