1. Week 01

This week we talked about Transdisciplinary learning, Fab Labs, and Physical Computing.

Project Description

Reflection Questions

1. Did you bring several disciplines together in your own teaching? Do you collaborate with teachers in other disciplines? What are the opportunities and challenges.

This past term, I tried to teach programming as part of a class on Planetary Science, because a lot of Planetary Science involves Data Science and Machine Learning to find things out about the planets. Another design teacher knew all of the Science, and had a guest speaker come in to talk to them about research Methods that included Machine Learning. and I merely supplemented it with some things Python could do. I intend to do more with data science in the future, hopefully having a full elective based around it that will give students the chance to consider art / design / programming / data / graphing / storytelling / social studies.

My school is generally interested in teaching about Systems Thinking. Next term, I will be running a class on Board Game Design that encourages students to find the stocks and flows in a board game, and think about them in terms of systems archetypes and balancing loops. They’ll talk about how board games tell stories with these systems and mechanics. I’ve talked to the teacher who teaches most of the Systems Thinking to see what the students know, and what would be helpful to supplement. They’ll practice providing actionable feedback and critiques, which is a thing we discuss in design classes, but also in Art (and presumably in their writing). I’ll talk to the teachers who teach those things too. Of course, they’ll also use Digital Fabrication - which is another class we teach in the department - to prototype their game pieces.

1. How do you envision a makerspace in your school? How does it look like? If you have one already, how would you modify it.

The Fab Lab at my school is what drove me to apply to work there. I love that there is a space for making that is integrated with the classroom space. This allows people to be teaching formally while others are working. We also have slightly separate rooms for the vinyl cutter, laser cutter, and CNC machines because they are generally louder and require more space.

If I could change anything about it, I would make there be more of a space for works in progress to be on display and easily shared. Currently, works in progress are mostly labeled “mess” and hidden as much as possible. The best makerspaces, in my opinion, are the messiest.

Conversely, it’s important to always know where the tools you are looking for are. My team has done a lot of work to organize our fab lab, and we already try to keep things in clear containers that are also labeled, but particularly the electronics have a long way to go on this front.

I wish I knew how to make the space more welcoming. We don’t have much space for posters of role models that are diverse in terms of gender, race, etc. though we do have a poster where each letter in it was actively designed by a student. Our Fab Lab is mostly used for classes, where it is traditionally hard to let people work at their own pace, but I try to make my classes such that you can run with things at whatever level you are interested in running.

I love the idea of having a silent space and a group work space. Our Fab Lab is almost big enough for that, but it is almost always too loud for silent space.

1. After the definiton of computational thinking? Are you somehow using computational thinking in your teaching? How? Do you think you can take advantage of computational thinking? How?

One of my favorite teacher moves is to ask what students notice and wonder. I love taking out things I know they have used before, and asking them to connect what they see on their Circuit Playgrounds to the Makey Makey for instance, or how a given sensor variety might be used in their phone or simiar. Pattern-finding helps give students a hook for new knowledge.

At several points, I ask my students to break down problems. Teaching Object Oriented programming requires students to notice things - what are the specific elements you notice in this program? What are they doing? What attributes do they have? Helping students break that down helps them build their programs in smaller, more manageable chunks. I encourage them to consider an end product, what the individual pieces are, and what needs to be done each day to get there - consider my most recent project which was more about kanban boards and project management than the tech itself. goblin.tools can be a helpful place for students to look to break down tasks.

Of course, the subject I teach is programming, so algorithms (why did this draw on top of that thing? You did it second! What is repeating here? What do you need to keep track of?) are a clear part of basically everything I do with my students.

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