There are “Games in your Classroom”, and then there is turning your classroom itself into a game. I’m working on the gamification of some projects in the Planetarium over the next month and doing some further research on the topic. Below is a graphic that sums it all up… stay tuned for gaming updates!
Created by Knewton and Column Five Media
Anytime now a large box will arrive at school with a just-assembled-in-Brooklyn Makerbot Replicator 3D-printer inside for the students and teachers at Poinciana to begin exploring with. The Replicator works like an ink-jet printer except that it prints in layers of melted ABS plastic, allowing you to create actual objects from 3D computer files. Check out the website, play some of the videos, you will see why I’m excited to use this new technology along with my students.
In preperation, I’ve introduced my Mad Panda engineering club to some 3D modeling software that they will use to design objects to be printed on the Replicator. There is a vibrant online community (Thingiverse is a major portal) of makers who create models and share them with the world. I want my students to be able to find, download, and print things from sites like this when they need to, but from a teaching aspect I think it is more important for students to learn to create their own objects. The math, geometry, and logic necessary – not to mention planning and perseverance, are all things students learn best through meaningful projects that occur in the real world as opposed to the “textbook world”. As cool of a toy as the Makerbot is, these skills are the real reason we are getting one.
As is the case with most new technologies, finding the right software to use with students is the key to making it practical and useful in the classroom. I generally tend to play with software myself first, completing a project that I need to get done, or completing something equivalent to what I’ll ask students to do so I can get an ideas of what works and where my students may struggle a bit. Don’t get me wrong, struggling is good – even necessary – for true learning. But there is a point where frustration overpowers learning and I try to stay away from it.
The two programs my students and I have started with are Google Sketchup and Tinkercad. Sketchup is free, fairly mature, and has a large userbase. Google offers a number of tutorials on YouTube (witch I downloaded at home to get around the district’s filters and installed on my classroom iPads so students could watch them while working with the software on a laptop). The initial tutorials guide you through creating a house, so I asked my students to follow along with them, and then create their own “Dream House” using what they learned.
Everyone was able to get started, and make some version of a house. There was some frustration when trying to add multiple objects, getting the sizes just right, and working out small details. A few students seemed to master it really quickly and designed some amazing houses! The sample size is too small to come to any conclusions, but it happened that the students who were most at ease with the software were all girls. I’m looking forward to following this trend to see if it continues.
To address some of my students (and my) frustrations with Sketchup, I decided to try out Tinkercad which is an online CAD editor. In many ways it seems easier to get started with, and I like the way it manages 3D space more intuitively for my students. It has a set of tutorials set up as badge challenges for you to get started with that give you the basics. I took one of the challenges and made it an assignment – to create a 90X130 mm 3D nameplate with the student’s name and some objects they like on it to be their first printed object. Here’s my example.
Overall the kids and I liked Tinkercad and I think they found it easier to use. It is more limited in many ways than Sketchup, but a great intro. Also, for some reason it began asking some of my students to upgrade their accounts (for $10) in order to use the letters and some other objects that other students and I can still use. If this doesn’t straighten out and I have to pay per student I’ll have to stop using it.
update After digging around the Tinkercad discussion boards I found that they are placing the “pay to upgrade” buttons in just to see if people will push them – I know, doesn’t make much sense to me either. Anyway, click on it if it shows up for you and it will let you move on.
So I’m still searching for a better software solution for kids. And for myself! The past few days I began learning a completely different type of modeling software named OpenSCAD. OpenSCAD has no GUI – it is text based. I’m playing around with it and my initial reaction is more positive than I expected – it will need it’s own post….
My friends and family know that I live for new experiences and change. Adult ADD? Maybe, but it’s the reality of how my brain is wired. So I’m feeling pretty energized after the last few days here in San Francisco where I collaborated with a group of grad students from the University of Michigan School of Information to pitch an online Badging System based on Poinciana’s developing STEM professional development program and the SoI team’s badging infrastructure. All of this was part of the DML Teacher Badges Competition, and if we “win” we will share just under $150,000 to bring our program to life over the next year.
We find out if we win tonight, fingers crossed! You can see our app here.
Our two teams met only to weeks or so ago, and we had to combine our ideas into a 10 minute “pitch” to 5 judges. Stop for a second and consider the skills and traits that each member of our team needed to have to make all of this work.
Planning
Writing
Organizing and prioritizing ideas
Leading and being led
Cooperating and collaborating
Ability to use a variety of software packages ( off the top of my head, we used email, Google Docs, PowerPoint, Illustrator, inspiration, photo editors, probably others)
Working under a short deadline to produce something with a strict time limit.
I’m sure I’m leaving things out but you get the idea. Now, as with most things I do I am asking myself the question: ” Are we preparing our students do be able to do things like this?”
Initial answer…no.
Most of the things on the list above aren’t tested by FCAT ( I guess it’s got the time limit part covered pretty well), and so are ignored by the leaders of our district, the state, and the Feds. I worry that our new generation of teachers don’t see the use and importance of untested skills because few or none of their leaders seem to.
I’m spending the next three days at DML looking for some hope. I suspect it is going to come from outside our formal education systems. Museums, after school programs, informal online education organizations – they seem to be reaching out to fill in holes in learning left in our public schools by the current “education reform” movement. Great news, but as a career public school teacher its all kinda sad.
John came home from school singing a “Little Ghost” halloween song, and we decided to turn it into a Scratch project. He imagined the whole thing, and I helped him make it happen in Scratch. Lets see if I can post it (and make it available inside the school district so he can use if for show and tell today!)
My little labelmaker has lead a good life in my various classrooms over the past 10 years or so, but it is slowly dying. Two of the little printhead lines don’t work at all, leaving blank areas in the label and it is making a strange squealling noise that sounds like its last breaths. I knew that to survive the upcoming school year and meet my many labelmaking needs, I would need to replace it.
In searching this weeks Sunday paper ads (the Sunday paper is a bunch of the stuff that was current on the internet 24 hours before printed on dead trees, with some extra comics and advertisements thrown in – if you are confused ask your parents) I found what I hoped to be my new labelmaker. The Brother PT-2430 PC. It plugs into a computer and lets you design and save your label designs! Fonts! Graphics! Whoo hoo! And on sale for $40 at Staples this week! The only downside… the “PC” part. Its only for Windows, and I’m a Mac guy.
Enter the wonderful internet. I found a fine, upstanding netizen named sdschramm who who posted a YouTube video of his PT-2430PC working on a MacBook Pro. Ok, it’s possible. There were some brief explanations in his narrative, and a few more in the comments section that gave me enough clues to get started.
Before I tell you how to do it, a brief digression. Brother, the company who makes this device, makes it clear on the box and instructions that it will work great on Windows, and in no way mentions Mac. Ok, their company, their choice. I figured that their buisness folks decided that it wouldn’t be worth the money to pay the programmers to write drivers and editing software needed to run the device on Mac. Hey, if they don’t think they are going to make money, why should they do it? Makes sence, right?
Wrong.
The drivers are written, I just had to download them from the Japanese Brother site. Thank you Google Translate. The editing software is written too – I downloaded it from the American site – they released it for another version of the printer. So all the components exist, but Brother didn’t put them together in the box, or even on their website page for this printer. Sorry, none of this makes sense to me anymore. Doing whatever little testing and tweaking needed to release the already-existing components for Mac, with millions of Mac users (many of whom are hyper-organized and love labelmaking devices) just seems stupid to me.
Here is how to do it anyway…
The lesson from all this? Don’t allow yourself to get frustrated when things don’t work the way you want them to. Solutions are out there – either someone else has come up with one or you can come up with one yourself! Put in a little time to figure it out. Your stuff will work the way you want it to, and you will feel great as the master of your stuff!
Oh, one more thing…. If you are looking at this labelmaker and the price of its labels scare you, don’t worry- if you search online you will find them for about 1/2 the price of in the store!
It’s almost 48 hours since I had the privilege to stand 3 3/4 miles away from an Atlas 551 rocket as it lifted the Juno spacecraft away from Kennedy Space Center and onto its 5-year voyage to Jupiter. Juno will probe the inside of our Solar System’s biggest planet to try to figure out what lurks beneath its swirling clouds, and record Jupiters massive magnetosphere as it flies in and out of it for 12 months. For a day and a half before the launch, the NASATweetup folks treated myself and 149 lucky Tweeps to a series of speakers, presentations, and tours that for a lifetime space-geek like myself were a dream come true. A couple of thoughts…
First, I can’t remember spending time with a nicer group of people – and I mean the Tweeps, the NASATweetup folks and everyone from NASA and JPL. The speakers, the tour guides, the cafeteria workers. Everyone was just wonderful. When you stop and consider what the NASA employees and their contractors do, the life & death, the million and billion dollar budgets, the fact that one mistake can literally ”blow” all of their hard work, the only way they can be so up and positive is that they simply love what they do. A lesson for all of us.
As I wrote in my last post, NASA does live. Last week I saw the continued strength of the planetarium exploration programs, and the beginning of the rebirth of manned spaceflight from within our borders. It will happen faster than you think. After the time I’ve been allowed to spend with the Scientists and EPO staff (Education and Public Outreach – it’s NASA and you have to deal with the acronyms!) of the MESSENGER mission, none of this surprises me. This experience just confirms what good hands our space program is in, and that the people of NASA will continue to push human knowledge and experience onward.
I have more to say about some specific experiences, but will break it up into chunks. Stay tuned.
Atlantis returned to its home at Kennedy Space Center a few weeks ago, and as its wheels touched down the shuttle program ended. One of the things that goes along with teaching in a Planetarium is that I am the “go-to” guy for friends and aquantances to ask questions and have conversations about all things space with. I have lost count of how many people in the last few months have said to me something along the lines of “So, what do you think of the end of NASA?” My reply: “NASA Lives.”
I have no memory of Apollo, I was born in 1970, right in the middle of it, but of course completely unaware. As a child, I was always a big space-geek though, and the Shuttle program was by no means my first memories of NASA. I remember watching the first images from the Viking 1 lander on TV during the summer of 1976 – just a few days after my 6th birthday. I remember the decade-long series of images that came from the Voyager spacecraft of the outer planets – what were once blurry telescopic images were crisp, detailed worlds of amazing cloud formations, intricate ring structures, and an unbelievable variety of moons.
The Shuttle program certainly dominated space-related news during its 30 years, its amazing achievements and terrible tragedies. Often disregarded were the many unmanned craft that explored our solar system, including our own planet Earth. We have gained massive amounts of scientific knowledge through Pathfinder, Spirit, Oppurtunity, the series of Mars orbiters, Galileo, Cassini, and MESSENGER as they probed and studied Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and Mercury. Add in the spacecraft that have orbited our Earth and her Moon, and you can see how busy NASA has been with unmanned spacecraft during the duration of the Shuttle program. And the exploration continues! Cassini and MESSENGER are sending back gigabytes of data and Opportunity has passed 20 miles on its odometer, and is rolling towards Endeavor crater on Mars.
So NASA lives, and will continue to for the foreseeable future. I am writing this from a (thankfully air-conditioned) tent in the shadow of the Vehicle Assembly Building at the Kennedy Space Center where I am participating in the Juno #NASAtweetup. If all goes well, Juno will launch at 11:34am tomorrow and start a 5 year journey to Jupiter where it will probe the inside of the Solar System’s largest planet. Next month the twin Grail spacecraft will launch for the moon, and in November the Curiosity rover will head out for Mars. I truly believe that the US Manned Spaceflight program will build a new transportation system (we will be hitching rides Russian Soyez capsules until then to keep the ISS manned and supplied), but until then NASA and its robotic spacecraft have a lot of science to do.
Reboot is my theme for this coming school year. My school, which is full of great teachers, caring families, and amazing kids needs a reboot. What do I mean? Reboot can have a kinda harsh connotation – you reboot a computer when something has gotten so messed up, or changed so much, that you need to get rid of everything in its volatile memory and start over. No, I’m not feeling that way about Poinciana, there is a lot of wonderful stuff that goes on there that should continue. I mean a more gental reboot, sort of like what JJ Abrams did with Star Trek. Yes, a geeky analogy is approaching…
When Abrams created his new Star Trek movie a few years back, he rebooted the storyline. Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Scotty… they were all still there with their personalities intact. Some time travel by the bad (and one good) guys changed the history of the original Star Trek franchise though, and a key part of the show’s history was changed. In the universe Abrams created, nothing after the crew of the Enterprise got together and started their “5 Year Mission” can be the same now. This opens the universe up anew for new adventures, no longer constricted by the “old rules” established in the 60′s series, and built upon though the rest of the movies and later tv shows. Whoever writes the next chapter can start fresh.
In many ways Poinciana needs to start fresh too. As a member of the group of teachers who helped start the magnet program in ’94, I miss some of the spirit of those first years. We were were a staff of active learners – reading, researching, attending workshops and conferences… and the kids noticed. Students can tell when their teacher is learning along with them, and it motivates them in their own learning.
Of course, much has changed in our educational universe since then – most notably the high-stakes test system implemented upon us. No, we cannot ignore it – but we must pretend to. Teaching to the test can, unfortunately, show easy short-term gains in student performance. Long term it hurts kids though, because they miss out on the details higher-level skills. Analysis, debate, creativity, the things that make learning interesting and useful are left out for too many of our students when the focus is on the limited standards that are tested with multiple-choice questions. Teaching this way is like feeding kids sugar, they get a quick burst and may do better for a short time, but then they crash, and are less energetic and productive in the long-term.
When I say we should “pretend” that the FCAT doesn’t exist, I mean that we should use the techniques shown by research and our own experience to be most effective for students to learn at high-levels instead of bowing down to the district and textbook folks who want us to ask every question like an FCAT question. If we really teach kids to read, write, compute, and think they will do just fine on FCAT – better in the long run if we stick to it.
Much of what I think we need to do is shift our priorities, and this process has begun at Poinciana. We are giving more help to primary students who come to us behind in reading and math skills. This alone will reap huge benefits in the coming years. The staff seems ready to jump in and learn new things, focusing on our new name: Poinciana STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) Magnet as a place to rally our training around. I’m excited about this next year, and the energy that is coming back to Poinciana. I’m a bit nervous about being able to do my part in helping the staff learn how to do what we need to so that Poinciana becomes a model of effective STEM education, but I usually do my best when I’m a little nervous.
MESSENGER is in orbit around Mercury and sending back lots of cool images and data! Now, how do you and your students dive in? Here are a few suggestions…
Now have them ask questions, and send them to me! See my last post for more info.
