2. Week 02

This week we talked about UDL, Assessment, and Programming. Here is my blog post with notes.

Reflection

1. When you design a learning activity how do you take into account diversity? Could you describe one learning situation in which you did not take into account diversity in planning? How did you solved the situation?

From a previous course I have taken on UDL I know to always ask what the important goals of a lesson / assessment are as I create it, and allow students to vary everything else. I am not grading students’ grammar in their design journals, or their ability to type or write. Therefore, they can create videos. In the current Project Planning unit I am doing with my Juniors and Seniors, I do not care what project they are planning - the content is in the group creation, so the students have varied projects from a concert, to a fashion show, to a town model. The things they are all doing are making a kanban board and having stand up meetings, building miletstones and running sprints.

In all curricula, I make sure to showcase diverse uses of the thing we’re learning. Programming gets used for art, for saving the world. I show the students diverse (ethnically, racially, gender, ability status as well as in interests) role models.

One class where I tried to consider diversity but did not consider how my own context would interact with the context of my students - I used Ron Eglash’s culturally situated design tools to teach about iteration using cornrow curls. I am white. My students were diverse, but several of them were black, several of them where Hispanic. They looked at this white lady telling them to program cornrow curls and laughed. The thing I learned from this was to allow my students to tell me their own culture, to allow my students to bring their culture to the classroom, and not to assume my students culture and take my view of their culture into the classroom. When I had the students teach dance through flowcharts, this worked much better. I didn’t assume my Puerto Rican students would want to teach me to salsa, even though some did. Invite culture, don’t assume it.

1. What aspects would you need to take into consideration if you have kids with a) learning disabilities, b) physical disabilities, c)emotional disabilities when preparing your DF activities

The best thing about UDL is it encourages you to think about all the different ways you can teach something and share knowledge about something up front. I offer students the chance to write their thoughts, or create videos or podcasts (or drawings, as long as the drawings are clear). I try to offer the material by means of lecture, slides, writing, video, and hands-on activities. I give students graphic organizers to fill out. This helps students with learning disabilities, but also students without diagnosed learning disabilities.

To help students with emotional disabilities, again, I use the same tactics I do for everyone - make sure I’ve built a safe space. This means studetns are not allowed to put each other down at all. It means I make it clear that “wrong” answers are ok, that mistakes are great because we can all learn from them. I let all students take breaks, standing, stretching, walking around, if they need to. I have had quick reset meditation moments for all students.

Physical disabilities have always provided a challenge for me, even though I have always thought accommodating them was super important - one of my good friends in High School was blind. The drag-and-drop block-based coding environments are rarely accessible to students with visual or mobility impairments, but they make programming much easier for everyone else. Students enjoy building visually appealing games. The mobility impairments can be helped by different technology. The visual impairments can be helped by programming environments specifically built for screenreaders, like Quorum. Quorum is also even built to be research-supported in helping new programmers. Switching from something like Scratch to something like Quorum changes more of the programming generally, however. I do show all videos with captions (often youtube-generated, alas over the better human generated) for students with hearing impairments, but also for students who have ADHD like me to look up and see what we’re hearing.

1. How do you usually assess learning activities which involve digital fabrication? Which is your favourite method? What aspects do you think you can change in your assessment practices?

For most of the projects I have the students work on, I have a rubric, with clear criteria and what makes each level different. The criteria often covers the “hard skills” in a section related to content coverage, that rewards students for trying things above and beyond what we have covered in class, and makes it clear what parts of the class should be in the project. The criteria also covers the “soft skills” - time management, teamwork, creativity. I do have a section on “execution” - while this is a fairly

1. What could be the challenges when integrating programming in your classes?

On the one hand, this question doesn’t make sense for the classes I teach, given they are literally about programming. However! Teaching programming for over a decade has given me a strong understanding of what exactly the challenges of programming can be. I’m lucky at this school that the students all have laptops and a very responsive IT person. That said, you still have to get libraries, and permissions. Setting up the environment is often the hardest part of programming, and it’s the first thing you have to do. Mindset is also a huge challenge. Programming requires a lot of persistence, and being ok with things not working. Students have often learned that that’s not ok. Programming teachers have to help students be comfortable taking risks, seeing things not work, and trying more. I often help my students figure things out, but this alone is a problem as it teaches them learned helplessness - they know that when they struggle I will walk them through it and they will not try to struggle. There is a fine balance between making sure students don’t give up, and making sure students know how to persist on their own.

Project

I have been programming since High School, and teaching Scratch since 1.0 was in beta, so a traditional “make an easy game” did not seem to be the correct way to fulfill this assignment. This term, however, I am having my students design their own games and program them in Processing. Most of the students chose games I already had a fairly good idea of how I would program. One group chose block-blast, however. I initially assumed this was like breakout, but it’s closer to drag-and-drop tetris. I sort of had no idea how to begin thinking about this game, so I looked up to see if anyone else had created in in Open Processing. One person had. Looking at that code gave me a way of framing the project, but actively coding it from scratch would be legitimately helpful for helping my students build it, so I am creating Block Blast in Open Processing for this project so that when it becomes time I can walk the students who are making BLock Blast through it.

Code Example

Use the three backticks to separate code.

// the setup function runs once when you press reset or power the board
void setup() {
  // initialize digital pin LED_BUILTIN as an output.
  pinMode(LED_BUILTIN, OUTPUT);
}

// the loop function runs over and over again forever
void loop() {
  digitalWrite(LED_BUILTIN, HIGH);   // turn the LED on (HIGH is the voltage level)
  delay(1000);                       // wait for a second
  digitalWrite(LED_BUILTIN, LOW);    // turn the LED off by making the voltage LOW
  delay(1000);                       // wait for a second
}

Gallery