2. Assessment and programming

This week I worked on programming with “Scratch”.

My Scratch-Quiz

I decided to work with the “Scratch” program. I have already worked with this program outside of the School FabLab. I used the program to create a small quiz that can be used to get to know our Fablab. I chose an existing math quiz to start my project and then adapted it. The aim is to answer simple questions about the number of different devices in our Fablab.Implementing the quiz was easy because it can be programmed very intuitively. However, two difficulties arose that bothered me for a longer time:

1. It was initially not possible to change the character for the program block without deleting the entire block. I had to search for solutions on the Internet, and in the end I succeeded.

2. It took a while before I could roughly assign the positioning coordinates to their location in the stage set. This was important to move the character exactly to the devices depicted in the stage design during the quiz.

Regarding the stage design, I didn’t like the templates provided well enough for my project. At first I thought about using a photo of our FabLab. But I then decided to use ChatGPT to create a comic image of our Fablab because it fit the quiz and the robot character used much better. I was very impressed with the creation of the image because the results were very good. However, it should be said that texts are not displayed correctly in the image. I researched this on the internet and found out that this is a fundamental problem with AI-supported image creation.

Here ist the link to my quiz: - EBGS School-FabLAb-Quiz

Reflecting questions

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?

It can always happen that certain aspects of diversity were not taken into account in advance. Specifically, this situation is currently occurring with refugee children from Ukraine. These children have very little knowledge of German and therefore do not understand the work assignments well. This situation is often embarrassing for children and they don’t react at all when you talk to them. Even if they somewhat understand what you have asked, they do not answer. This situation can only be solved with a lot of patience. It helps if you use very simple language and, through friendly interaction, convey to the students that it is not a problem if you only answer in fragments or, for example, switch to another language. Online translators that students can use with their smartphones have also proven to be a good solution. We use explanatory videos specifically in the FabLab that students can play at their own speed. The YouTube videos we create ourselves have the advantage that you can also display foreign language subtitles.

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

a) It is important to differentiate here. You can either develop simplified tasks or establish a help system, e.g. in the form of help cards. When simplifying, you have to make sure that the students are able to solve the tasks on the one hand, but that they are not under-challenged on the other. It is also a good idea to let students work in small groups with students without restrictions. To do this, group work must be well organized and it must be ensured in the groups that all students can contribute to the result at their own level.

b) If students have physical limitations, you have to discuss very carefully beforehand what they can actually do. There are supervisors in our school who know exactly what these children can and cannot do. The School FabLab is very suitable for integrating children with physical limitations because the children can decide for themselves which projects they would like to implement and which machines they would like to use. For example, I had a student with a visual impairment who had great difficulty using the 3D construction program “onshape”. As an alternative, I let them work with Tinkercad because it doesn’t have to be so text-heavy. Even in the case of physically impaired students, it is a good thing that the students in the FabLab support each other. This usually happens without any specific prompting.

c) It is particularly important here that some of these students can work best alone. This should then be made possible so that, for example, you can let them work alone in group work phases. In addition, you also need to know exactly how the children deal with special challenges and what should be done in special situations. For example, there are children who have a very low tolerance for frustration and who become aggressive if they cannot solve a certain problem immediately. But THERE are ways to avoid this aggression in advance, for example by agreeing that the student will take a short break if he notices that he is not making any progress. For some students, it also helps to talk to them reassuringly or give them tips on how to solve the problem.

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?

The assessment works best if you have previously discussed the evaluation criteria and their weighting together. You can then have a discussion with the students about which assessment is fair for a particular project. It is important that the teacher is the one who is ultimately responsible for the assessment. Neither the student who self-assesses their performance nor other students who evaluate them are responsible. When students know this, they are more honest about their performance and that of other students. It has also proven to be helpful to include students’ assessment skills in the assessment. I myself could discuss more in my lessons about how to enhance the work process. When it comes to the summative evaluation of finished products, this is much easier and it also has a much more objective effect on the students. Indicators must also be found for process evaluation, which can ultimately be used to make the assessment more objective. What I could also talk about in more detail in class are the reasons why different evaluations can occur when different people carry out an assessment.

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

When students learn to program, a major hurdle is the rigor of a programming language - regardless of whether it is blocks of code or text code. Students often mix intuitive ideas about instructions with the commands of the program code. For example, it is often a problem to specify waiting times for the program between two blocks of code. For example, if a character is supposed to jump up and down in the “Scratch” program, there will be no visible change in the result without the waiting times. Students also often believe that a task ends automatically when a new command is entered. This problem arises, for example, when programming a traffic light: the students indicate that the “red” should be turned on. Then they specify a waiting time and then specify that “green” should be switched on. But then you forget that “Red” remains switched on and that you have to explicitly switch it off in the program code. A problem that does not occur with code blocks is the problem that exactly every single character is important in the program code. It often takes a lot of time to repair a program code in which, for example, you forgot to put a bracket in the right place in which a variable was written down incorrectly.