Week 12

Assignments

• Task 1: Use one development board (arduino, microbit …) and use it to sense something in your class (noise / light / movement) and produce some kind of response (audio, light, movement)

Process

• Using a MakeCode I created a simple code for a Microbit to sense the noise level around it and display it on its LED Matrix. If the noise surpasses a certain level, it sounds an alarm through the speaker, which gets progressively louder the higher the sound level is so it doesn’t get drowned out by the room’s noise. - -I downloaded the code onto a Microbit and tested it. It works! In the future, a bigger speaker would be a good idea to make the noise noticeable in an actual classroom setting. -Video

Reflection

-Did you bring several disciplines together in your own teaching? Do you collaborate with teachers in other disciplines? What are the opportunities and challenges. I always bring at least Digital Fabrication and one more discipline into my lesson plans, and sometimes more. It can be challenging to get the students to connect all disciplines together, since they tend to want to either fabricate something, or do something related to the area aside from fabrication, so the lesson plans need to be particularly compelling to have them follow the actual curriculum. I do not normally collaborate with teachers from other disciplines, since my coworkers are focused on the same topics as me.

-How do you envision a makerspace in your school? How does it look like? If you have one already, how would you modify it. I do not need to envision it! I work at a makerspace already and we work closely with schools that come to us or we go to them. Finding a way to organize both the space and processes in a way that’s easy to understand and find material is one of my priorities right now.

-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? Honestly, although I personally think and work following what computational thinking is, it’s been a struggle to get some students to operate that way. Getting them to decompose problems instead of them becoming a roadblock for the student has been hard, specially when many students try to pivot to something else the moment a project becomes harder and more complex than what they originally thought it would be. I need to test how to combine the creativity they seek with actual problem solving. There are many students that do want to solve problem but many want for the problems and solutions to be already digested and prepared for them instead of doing the decomposition and abstraction.

Tools

• Microbit
• Laptop