Animating Atoms With Scratch

Litium by Maddie

I'm working with an 8th grade science teacher on an exciting project. His students are becoming familiar with the periodic table of the elements and the basic parts and characteristics of elements.

Useful Math Visualizations

Over the years I've made some useful applications for people, which is very gratifying. Currently I'm seeing a program from a couple years ago come back around to see usefulness in the geometry classroom at my school due to the curiosity and insight of one of our math teachers, Matt DeGraff. He observed that such visualizations do aid in his students understanding of a problem and help them think about describing it in mathematical terms. His use of the program and our discussions about it are giving me the idea that a few different programs I've developed around it should be integrated into one to allow students to visualize a certain problem as an aide to seeing solutions and explaining them. Briefly, here are the three programs, more explanation to come:

Polygon vertex problem visualized as polygon

Scratch #GettingUnstuck #CreativeComputing Daily Challenges

I had a very rewarding time participating in the daily #CreativeComputing #GettingUnstuck challenges this month led by Harvard Graduate School of Education's Creative Computing Lab. For the last 21 days each morning I worked on and usually finished a project in response to the daily prompts posed by Scratchers karenb and paulinah. It was a great opportunity to get more involved in one of the great things about Scratch, namely a supportive community of people sharing their creative ideas and helping you figure out how to better share your own. Here is the studio I made for all the projects.

Learning From the LogoTurtle

Teaching with the LogoTurtle was an experiment for me last spring. I knew there would be a lot for my high school robotics students to learn from it but I didn't exactly know what. At the end of our LogoTurtle unit I asked the students to write about what they felt like they learned. I didn't prompt them to write about any specific aspect of their learning, I just wanted to see what would come out. I've been thinking about what they wrote and realized a few things; 1) each student is on her own learning adventure, 2) the LogoTurtle is actually teaching them as much as, and maybe more than, I am, and 3) what are often called the soft skills of learning-resilience, collaboration, making mistakes, perseverance-were a significant part of the experience for them.

Developing A Light Logo NeoPixel 24 Curriculum

Light Logo, created by Brian Silverman, is a version of the Logo language that is used to program a few versions of the NeoPixels, from rings to strips, through an Arduino. See Josh Burker's post for how to get started, and see my Instructable for how to get a 24 NeoPixel ring more-or-less classroom ready. I'm developing a curriculum for it with 8th grade students as my guinea pigs and here are some thoughts that have come up as I use Light Logo in the classroom.

Teaching HTML Coding with Chromebooks and Drive

UPDATE 2/1/17: This was great while it lasted. But it seems Google no longer provides a hosted link for html pages in Drive. Too bad.
Making web pages with HTML and a little JavaScript is a great way to introduce middle schoolers to text coding. Over the years I've introduced 6th graders to web coding using syntax coloring programs like Notepad++ and Text Wrangler, plaintext editors like Text Edit, and visual editor Dreamweaver. But this past year our school moved to Chromebooks and I had to find a cloud-based solution for HTML editing.

After trying several Chrome apps I settled on HTML Editey. Chrome Dev Editor seemed like the

How To Get From Blocks to Text With Robotics Coding

  
So many rich block-based programming environments have become available during the last several years. The release of Scratch into the world by MIT Media Lab's Lifelong Kindergarten Group catalyzed the invention of similar block-based environments for all sorts of purposes and a revolution in novice learners' ability to use the building blocks of computer science to imagine and make things. Block-based environments provide the important affordance of building programs without making

Do Women Make Technology Differently?

This is a very nice post by Carla Diana. It makes me more determined to bring opportunities to my school for girls to make technology.

Great Student Opensim Build: St. Peter's Basilica

St. Peter's Basilica, Maderno's Facade

A ninth grade student at my school, Susannah Meyer (she was happy to be credited), just finished an amazing build for her history class Renaissance Faire event. I really did very little of this beyond advising her on how to approach it and it's really gratifying to see a student get so much out of an experience like this and produce something that is such a sight to behold! She didn't do any more than the facade of the building, but that was plenty to tackle. As you get into the details of a piece of architecture like this you begin to appreciate what an immense task it is to make the real thing.

Students Managing Their Own Data

Moodle RSS block

Post on Tumblr

Post pulled into Moodle page

I'm trying an experiment this year with my high school robotics students. I had been wanting them to document their work in a fun and creative way so I thought I would have them set up Tumblr accounts so they could easily post not only their code but videos and photos with their phones. Then I got thinking that I could pull in the RSS feeds from their Tumblrs to our Moodle class site. There's a block, or widget, for just that in Moodle. Then I thought why not just put them in the teacher role and give them an assignment to figure out how to connect up their own feeds. They didn't know what RSS was but I explained the concept and the purpose and gave them a couple hints. A few of them did figure it out and the rest did the next best thing, which was adding a link to their Tumblr on the page.

Why go to all this trouble? I think this exercise is important because they need to have experience making things with web tools for real purposes, not just using the web.

UPDATE on this: So one of my students got re-blogged by a porn site. I had to end the experiment. Fortunately I caught the spam before she could see it. Made me disappointed in the Internet.

Learning with Gestures

A sneak peek at Windows 8 reveals that Microsoft wants to integrate its os with tablet hardware to keep up with the huge growth in people's desire for the gestural UI of tablet devices. This should be a much bigger post because there are so many issues this transformation raises for schools but all I can come up with right now is a list of problems to think about and questions:

• How does learning through apps restrict learning possibilities and how does it facilitate new learning possibilities?
• Microsoft seems to be trying to simplify the user experience while still providing access to the file system (explorer.exe still exists!) but iOS removes a layer of user control in that sense. What happens to the learner when this level of control is taken away? Granted, file systems are simply TMI to many users, but if you know what you are looking for and aren't allowed access to it that takes away an important level of control over your machine.
• The rush to gestural UI is happening so fast. My feeling is we're being led into making significant decisions about how best to provide and use technology by consumer preferences. It's way too early to say learning with apps is more effective than learning with software on a more open and transparent os. Of course, both can be effective, but it all comes down to how they are used, and there's still so much to learn about that.

Much more to say, but it will have to come in future posts...

Understanding Photoshop Documents

I find that my students often have a superficial understanding of aspects of how computers work that persists even after they've been explained. For example, after giving instructions to 7th graders recently to save cropped screenshots they were taking as jpegs to upload to voicethread, I saw one student navigate to her psd file in Windows Explorer and simply change the file extension from psd to jpeg. No, that won't work! I've been doing a lot of research lately about the need to provide visual representations of concepts, especially for girls, who tend to process information in the language areas of the brain rather than the spatial areas. I left it free of text so people can make their own points with the visuals. The main points are layered information vs. compressed "flat" information, Photoshop-specific platform vs. universal program platform, and large vs. small file size.

Photoshop vs Compressed Image from Erik Nauman on Vimeo.

Paving the Road To Digital Success

7th graders are creating 3D cell models with an interface
they've never seen before. 

I imagine it would be an exciting time to be a kid learning to use computers thes days. There are so many computing environments that make so many things possible there are new cool surprises around every corner. But from an educator's perspective this poses a tough problem. How can they develop a solid foundation in all of these important tools? Video editing, image editing, web publishing, collaborative document editing, non-collaborative document editing, physical computing, digital game creation, programming...okay, I'm dizzy. Obviously they can't. Ten years ago an instructor in a web design class I was taking warned us against becoming a 'tool monkey' by specializing in one  program in a domain like web graphics or HTML rather than understanding how any program in a domain has to work and figuring it out when you need it. I don't think anyone needs to be told that now. There are places in the world for Dreamweaver or PHP gurus but not that many. For the power user or anyone who gets under the hood of hardware and software technology has always been what Rand Spiro calls an ill-structured domain, but the ubiquity of apps, platforms, and insinuations of technology into so many areas of our lives now forces the average user to contend with some very complex user experiences. 


As a technology instructor this problem is always foremost in my mind when I design new lessons and units. I want to strike a balance between telling students enough to feel comfortable with something and challenging them to relate what they know to figure out a new situation and test out their own theories. Sometimes I have to reteach things because I've thrown too much at them with too little scaffolding and the class has gone haywire with requests for help. 

Aside from appropriate scaffolding I've been working on making sure that whatever new topics students learn are placed in a meaningful context so they have some compelling reason to be learning a confusing, complex subject. Recently I had my 9th grade robotics students learning to calibrate the four types of sensors we'll be using for our next project (photocell, ir reflective, distance, and a temperature sensor I hacked together). They went haywire and had much frustration, sometimes saying things like "I don't get what we're doing at all." That's a sign something isn't making sense, right? So for the next class I put together a worksheet and emphasized the main purpose of sensors. "Sensors are the robot's ONLY way to know anything about its environment. Without them it exists in a dark, silent, empty world." That conjured an intense image for the students and while they still found it challenging to get it to work they enjoyed investigating the sensor readings much more.

Amazing Building Communities Workshop

Futuristic buses in Beijing

Working In-World

We just wrapped up an amazing four-day workshop on design and engineering of public spaces. Each year we spend this week after winter break teaching special collaborative courses with multi-age groups of students so I worked with a math teacher, a science teacher, and another technology coordinator to put together a series of amazing field trips and a design and building project in OpenSim with nine students in 9 - 12th grades. Our field trips were unbelievable, starting at the MOMA with Design and the Modern Kitchen and Design Over Time, then to the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum's Why Design Now? exhibit and a workshop, and finally into what felt like the center of the Earth with a tour of the NY Metropolitan Transit Authority's excavation of the planned 2nd Ave. subway tunnel. (More amazing info and pictures of that here!)

Working RL

Renewable Energy Community

Interspersed with those experiences was our project using OpenSim to design and build communities. The students broke into groups,  picked a location in the world to design for, and researched the needs, cultures, and geography of the local region. Once they had chosen their places I created approximate heightmaps and imported them to adjacent regions. I had hoped to use Virtual White's steps to importing USGS Seamless Server data to OpenSim but I couldn't find anything similar for international GIS data. So I did some quick brush work and came up with some okay approximations, though way off scale. The areas they chose were Syndey Harbor, Fengtai in Beijing, and an area modeled after Table Mountain near Capetown, South Africa, though the actual Table Mountain is a nature reserve. Each group focused on different aspects of their communities. The Beijing group worked primarily on a transportation center with a station and a futuristic bus. I got them started with a script to move the bus with passengers inside that they obsessively refined to suit different transportation objectives.

Sydney Harbour Bridge

Syndey Harbor Heightmap

The Table Mountain group focused on a community supported by renewable energy resources. They chose their location because of the high winds in the area and integrated purple wind turbines inspired by Ener Hax's amazing work and solar panels on light-filled structures. And the Sydney Harbour group worked really hard on a fantastic replica of the actual bridge complete with a waving flag and built an extensive housing complex. They had fun inhabiting the city with some pretty awesome kangaroos they built, though I doubt those are roaming as freely as they would like to imagine.

Aside from Ener's work, we looked at an amazing video of Encitra's model for integrating a podcar system in Uppsala, Sweden. And we took a virtual tour of some Second Life regions, like Ijinle 1796, a composite Yoruba village in Africa Illuminated, the impressive Edmonton Civic Center build, and a nice Chinatown build called Chukagai in Yokohama. I don't know how to do SLURLs but if you search in SL you should be able to find these locations. And we read and discussed some passages about affordances and affective elements of design from Donald Norman's books, The Design of Everyday Things, and Emotional Design.

I was so impressed that they really got some essential concepts about what it means to design things for people. On one of our field trips the guide asked them some questions about design and they said things like, "You design things to solve particular problems," "Your first design will never work," and "At some point you will have to use math to get your design to work right." I was so proud of them!

A bit of fun on the bridge

What else can I say....It is so rewarding to work in a way that allows for learning from such different angles, gives them such great latitude for creativity, ingenuity, and collaboration, and provides a social element that really makes it fun. At some points we all feel like it's a game that we're playing together but there's enough freedom to set goals together and for the students to set and revise their own goals. There are even a few girls who want to continue working and create a replica of our school building in the sim! It's also the kind of work that is tremendously engrossing and the concentration is exhausting. They liked working steadily on something and then sitting back and realizing how tired they were from concentrating so hard. In all, what an amazing experience. I look forward to next year's Winterim class.

How do kids visualize science?

 My 7th grade students are building models of microscopic things they are studying in science class in our sim. The science teachers said they briefly cover many topics and don't have time to explore cell division, elements, compounds, photosynthesis, and nucleic acids in depth. So I thought it would be helpful for the students to make 3D models of these things to have a more vivid mental model of them when they come back to studying them more in depth later on.

 All I did is show them how to build. They had to find images and build 3D models that made sense to them since I'm no science teacher. Now what surprised me is that some of them reproduced 2D representations in this 3D environment. I assumed they would be able to imagine a 3D version of the pictures they were looking at but in many cases they couldn't take that leap.

 So it seems to represent a developmental snapshot of sorts in terms of their ability or lack of ability to visualize these abstract things they are learning about. As I told the science teachers, I'm not sure there is anything we should do about this. It could be that as they continue to study these topics they should make new models that reflect their deeper understanding, including what these things look like in 3D space.

To Sim or Not To Sim

I know, silly title. Here’s my main question: Are virtual worlds effective environments for the presentation of dramatic arts? Maybe some genres are more appropriate than others?

The reason I’m asking is I presented a short video of two students' inworld performance of a scene from Approaching Zanzibar. Here's the vid. Part of the dialog is about fears the characters have about visiting an aunt who is sick with cancer. To my horror the whole auditorium of 4-8 graders reacted with laughter during some of the most sobering and serious lines. I’m sure this was in part a way to relieve anxiety about a heavy subject. But I also believe it had to do with the content being delivered by awkward-looking cartoony figures. This leads me to think we really shouldn’t be trying to present serious dramatic material in this format. Kids this age have never even seen anything like this. Their closest point of reference is probably video games. If a performance with any emotional gravity comes across as goofy, funny, or unconvincing this might be the wrong medium for those kinds of dramatic experiences.

On the other hand there are dramatic genres that seem like they would lend themselves well to the fantastical possibilities of virtual environments. I would have liked to show the Alice in Wonderland scene but the FreeSWITCH service that's been so dependable kept dropping Alice’s voice during their performance for some inexplicable reason.


The Peter Pan scene might have been good, too, with Peter flying onstage and having trouble getting his shadow to attach properly. But I was kind of smitten with the local light effect and wanted the kids to see it. It's like that with virtual worlds. The magic of it is hard to explain to people. They have to see it for themselves, have the experience.

So what kind of dramatic performances are VWs good for? Now I'm thinking material that takes advantage of the special capabilities of the platform--the ability to fly, script objects to do unexpected and magical things, the ability to make amazing, gravity-defying costumes, the ability to appear and disappear magically (teleport). In our Aesop's Fable of The Frogs Desiring a King Jupiter was able to throw down a huge log onto the stage out of thin air. That was a surprising, fun experience and in that world it also made sense. It just added to the magic the kids watched unfolding in front of them.

I don't think serious drama should be avoided altogether in VWs. The drama teacher I do this with put it well when he said one of the best things about it for him as a drama teacher is it forces the students to treat dramatic devices--tone of voice, gesture, movement--more consciously since they have to do it from a distance through the narrow parameters of the avatar. They can't fall back on their own default expressions like they can in RL. So I still think it's an effective tool for students to learn more about all genres of dramatic performance. I just don't think all genres in this medium need to have an audience. 

Virtual Learning is Fun

Many times during my work with students in HewittSim unexpected things happen. Once a student accidentally attached an 8 foot tall mushroom to her spine, becoming a walking fungus. If students click on the wrong surface of a chair they want their avatar to sit on, they can end up sitting sideways with their avatar looking none the wiser.

Usually we are pressed for time and when these mishaps spring up during our short class periods as teachers we have to suppress the urge to tell students to quiet down and focus. They are very funny and you can’t blame kids for being amused by things that are so preposterous in this parallel universe we’ve begun inhabiting for our educational adventures.

So when today’s math class explored our completed Parthenon to measure parts of it looking for examples of The Golden Ratio, we allowed the girls to get off task a bit when they discovered a runaway piece of marble floating at least 100 meters above the building. It was just pure fun to fly up and stand on it with empty space around and below our avatars. It was just as normal in this unusual world to walk right off and fall to the ground intact and continue with the task of measuring. I actually think having a laugh at the crazy things that happen enriches the learning experience they are having because of its novelty.

Too Many Cooks Spoil the Collaboration

I tend to assume collaboration with technology is great for education. There are so many excellent tools out now that enable students to build things like stories, presentations, and concept webs together, in the process learning how to listen to each other, communicate effectively, and use the affordances of the tool to reach their goal. Google Docs, Webspiration, Voicethread, and Etherpad (one of its many manifestations is linked below) are all examples of these. I've used a couple of tools recently that highlighted the limits of collaborative environments, however, and the experience helps underscore a couple of good principles to work from when setting up a collaborative learning activity. When I worked with 8/9th graders in building The Parthenon with OpenSim the project went really well until the last session. There were just two specific tasks to accomplish--placing a few more ceiling pieces and lining the rest up better and doing the same with some columns in the chamber of Athena--and students were concentrating on doing them well, knowing that the appearance of the final product was up to them. But they kept running up against the problem of two people moving pieces around at the same time. Interestingly, there is nothing built in to OpenSim to prevent multiple people from editing the same prim. Because they were moving them into place based on their perspective, both were often trying to move them into different positions, undermining each others' efforts. The problem came down to there not really being enough for everyone to do.

Etherpad (great version at typewith.me--35 collaborators and no registration) is another wonderful tool for collaboration that I've been using with great success in my robotics class as a way for pairs of students to document project descriptions, plans, pseudo-code, and program versions that allows me to see who is contributing what. But before I start students using it I open it up as a sandbox activity for everyone to try for a bit and get their desire to play with it out of their system. It always ends up freaking them out a bit, because with a blank page and 18 students trying to type at once no one can get anything done. For this reason, when an English teacher asked if she could have her class use it to collaborate on a sort of fan fiction activity, I cautioned against her just tossing them in there simultaneously to start writing. They would just get in each others' way. I suggested small groups take turns working on it while the rest are doing something else, or somehow starting with a big chunk of text already there so they would be less likely to undermine each others' work.

So the principles I can think of that help manage collaboration with these robust tools are 1) make sure there is enough meaningful work for everyone to do, and 2) provide systems and procedures to ensure no one is duplicating efforts of anyone else.

Writing Across the Curriculum

I was interviewed this week by one of our upper school English teachers for a qualitative study about writing across the curriculum. Our conversation got me thinking about tie-ins between writing and virtual worlds and towards the end of the interview we had some head-spinning brainstorming going on. It occurred to me that virtual world experiences could set the context for some really rich writing activities. We tend to think of very specific learning activities for students to do inworld, building something, performing something, engaging in some interactive environment that is set up for them to get something out of. Why not go there to reflect and write? I started thinking of it like tourism. You go somewhere that is new to you and it can be transformative, bring out new thoughts and feelings. Yet you are the same person, just having new ideas sparked because you are seeing new things. A visit to a virtual world could be a window on that type of experience and facilitate a new perspective for writing. It's just a thought for now, but we'll likely try it out later this year.

Students Build The Parthenon in Opensim

(Can't get the blip.tv embed to work, but here's the link to video.)

 For the last couple weeks I've been working with 8th/9th grade students in their geometry class as they build a life-size replica of The Parthenon atop the Athens Acropolis. It's been a fantastic experience watching students collaborate on such a project. One thing I argued for in planning this project with the math teachers was to give the students part or all of a class to edit their default avatars. They spent the first class making avatars as ugly and as beautiful as they could (this is an all girls school) and I think the investment paid off in their apparent engagement in the project. It's hard learning to use the building tools but they are doing a great job and very proud of it.