1. Week 01

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

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.

Project Description

All year, my students have been using Circuit Playgrounds. They’ve learned how to light up the LEDs directly, make sounds on them directly, and use the on-board light, sound and tilt sensors (not the thermal sensor because I don’t want to light a fire or bring ice). I then had them explore the graph block, and what it could tell them about inputs. I followed this by having them connect with IR. They also learned how to add servos, and neopixel strips. I eventually also taught them serial connection to other circuit playgrounds. They spent last term coming up with their own ideas and using the Circuit Playgrounds any way they desire.

This term, they’re working on electronics. I showed them basic LED circuits, and then circuits with resistors, and then variable resistors (photoresistors, potentiometers) and explained that is how the sensors had always worked - they were changing resistance and the Circuit Playgrounds could tell. Finally, I had them create a circuit with a button, asking them how they understood what the button was doing (cutting electricity or not). Then, I told them programmable circuits are doing the exact same thing as the button - turning on and off power. I had them use the Circuit Playgrounds first as a battery that was always on, and then as a switch that could turn on or off the electricty to the LED. I had them use button A and B to turn it on and off. Finally, I had them use the graph block (which most had forgotten about - we haven’t really talked about it all year) to read the resistance values from sensors. They had to change the top number based on if it was the photoresistor or the pressure sensor. Hopefully, this is driving home what resistance does.

The problem is that Circuit Playgrounds connected to Macs can’t read values over Serial, and our students all have Macbook Airs. Microbit makes it easy as long as you are using a Chrome browser. So, I am moving my students over to using Microbits, which means I needed to get familar with how Microbits read data. Turns out, it’s super easy. As long as you are in Chrome, if you use the serial connector, your web browser will just graph the numbers directly for you. The LED matrix can also more easily make readable numbers than the circles on the Circuit Playground. So, once we’ve used the Circuit Playgrounds to make things turn on and read values, I’m going to have them explore the Microbits so that we can actually read and do things with data. Next year I will start with the Microbits to begin with.

I actively built the circut, though the pictures below are digital for clarity and not having to rebuild it and take pictures this time.

Gallery