3. Field Activity 03

This week we met with educators that use design thinking in their classroom. We also worked on the field activity.

Reflection

1. Collaboration: Reflect on how you worked with colleagues or FLA participants during the Field Activity. At what stages of development and testing did the collaborator contribute? Please be detailed in your description. How did your collaborator’s perspective change the way you developed the lesson?

As a collaboration, the lesson mostly just worked out well. The timing just happened to be near perfect for what we were discussing in my class, and the Skills teacher and I only needed to communicate the timing, and that she was doing this with the students.

1. Instructional Challenges: What challenges did you encounter while teaching this lesson? How did you address or plan to address them? How are diverse learners’ needs being met in the lesson plan facilitation?

This is a lesson where figuring out what the high level learning goals are for my subject is somewhat hard. How much do students need to understand vs just be able to do? What does the understanding add to? Also, I don’t know very much of the Psychology behind galvanic skin responses, so I couldn’t talk as much about the ethics. When you’re having students make something, however, you should always be able to talk about the ethics, so it’s important to make sure that discussion happens with a proper ethical framework and consideration for those who are disporportionately affected.

1. Integrating Disciplines: Where does your lesson plan fall on the continuum and why? How might you move the lesson plan along the continuum to the next level?

The lesson that this lesson is supporting is already a transdisciplinary lesson. In order to find the culprit of a CSI investigation, the students need to use skills from every discipline in the school, and understand how those disciplines affect each other and are part of each other.

1. AI Usage: If you used AI, describe how it was used and in which steps of the Field Activity.

I did not use AI for the field activity, but I extensively documented using AI for the Module 3 Week 2 reflection.

1. Reflect on the course in general:

5a. How has your teaching changed as a result of this course?

A lot of this course has covered topics that I have previously studied - PBL, UDL, backwards planning and going from standards to learning goals (including “soft skills”), Formative vs Diagnostic vs Summative assessment, culturally relevant vs responsive teaching, having a teaching portfolio. However, some things I knew about already were used in contexts I hadn’t considered in exactly this manner. The phrase “common knowledge is another name for bias” is a useful thing to keep in the back of my mind.

The project I did for the Field Activity for Module 3, where students were programming physical objects is not a thing I would have considered without this class, or in this school, thinking about how to bring digital fabricaiton into my practice more thoroughly. I do not think without this class, I would have considered as much how much physical making can be empowering and catch a bunch of students who might not be interested in programming. Also, it was working on a project for this class - a 3D printed fidget that I edited a program for - that made me think this project could work at all.

Working on the projects for this class gave me empathy for students learning technical topics. I thought metacognitively about what I needed in order to be comfortable with the laser and vinyl cutter, and was able to consider that my students would like that kind of time and occasional fully direct instruction. I experienced taking all the wrong notes, and not being able to repeat the process for myself, even though I had taken meticulous notes. So, I’ve worked a bit on what kinds of notes I encourage students to take, when, and how, and been more ok with direct instruction when necessary as a step on their road to understanding.

This class also forced me to consider AI use - Donn Koh made some interesting points on how AI can be used creatively, and how even using it for things it would be bad at can help you understand things about the thing it will be bad at and the AI itself. I also appreciated that AI was used during the class actively as a collaborator and assessor, to help us consider AI in our own practices, which also helped me interrogate my use of AI.

Relatedly, I appreciate the ideas generated by my fellow students and the guest speakers. Different people’s projects made me think about unique ways to use digital fabrication in my class - I particularly appreciated changing the amount red, green, or blue a light was using LEDs and potentiometers to understand RGB values. I thought using the laser cutter to help make woodprints was a brilliant idea that worked well with one of the classes one of our art teachers teaches. Somekone seemed like a very useful tool for explaining privacy and social algorithms to students. Kirk Lin’s obvious connection to culture was inspiring.

I really should consider more about sustainability. I haven’t quite integrated that into my practice thoroughly yet.

I have definitely appreciated learning how to use all the digital fabrication tools. While I occasionally stressed about using tools to create things I could use in my classroom,

Finally, while I already try to be fairly reflective in my practice - considering what things are working or not working with my students and how I’d do things differently next time, the journaling in this class forced me to reflect one level further down and more generally.

5b. What are some concepts that you would like to learn more about?

I would love to keep hearing about projects people are doing with digital fabrication, especially projects that are authentically integrating with other subjects. I would also love to hear more about how to plan long-term projects students can work on.

5c. How can you support other teachers in your practice to use digital fabrication with their students?

I would like to have more set-aside time to understand the curricula other teachers are teaching, so I can show them where they overlap with what the students are doing in the Digital Fabrication, Media Computation, and Physical Comoputing courses. Then, I would like to show the teachers what we can do together, and how I can help them. This lesson happened because of a chance encounter. I would like for those encounters to be more stable.

Code Example

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