This gallery is my attempt at a time lapse of our project to build our entire school inside of Minecraft. Next time I’ll build myself a platform so that all the shots are taken from the exact same place!  We are almost done – the celing and lighting systems are about finished, and we are starting the roof today. I’ll miss being able to look down into the school to see everyone working, but it will be great to be finished!

The fourth and fifth graders from Mrs. White’s class did an amazing job at this project, working on it on and off for the past few months. I look forward to our next phase, where they will have a little more creative freedom to build the city of Boynton Beach around us the way the students would like to see it!  Mrs. White and I have certainly learned a lot along side of our students, always the sign of a successful learning adventure.  Great Job everyone!  Stay tuned for an update soon on the completed school!

Just finished another 3-hour work-time with my Makers Club, the Mad Panda Society. I am really liking the large block of time (I think that any more time, I would start to lose these 9 and 10 year olds) we have on Saturday afternoons to dive deeply into projects and complete things. Today I gave them some plans for very basic balsa bridges, had them draft full scale drawings on graph paper from them, and then build their own versions on top of the plans.  Most of the kids finished within 2 hours or so, and had some time left over to work on redesigning their 2L bottle rockets a bit.

Next Saturday, after all of the glue has dried, we will place the bridges in THE CRUSHER to see how much weight they can hold. I’m looking forward to recording the tests on a little Kodak digital video camera I obtained last spring that can shoot at 60 frames per second.  Hopefully, the kids can identify where their designs failed from the video, and redesign for greater strength.

Now if we can just get to work on the dreaded SECME-required banner and poster…

I’ve been asked by other teachers, how did I score room to set up a Maker Space for my students. The simple answer is the same answer to the question “How did you get a Planetarium Classroom” – luck. Strange things happen when you design and build a magnet school.  Here’s how it all came together.

When I first sketched out this building to house the Planetarium Classroom sometime in 1995, I knew that I would need a workshop space to build / fix planetarium related things and for various Poinciana classroom teachers who were always asking me to build science equipment for them. In addition, I needed a darkroom, because back then that’s how productions in planetariums were produced – on slide film, developed in darkrooms. They built me the space, and I filled it with old metal shelves scrounged from the demolished former Poinciana buildings full of parts, tools, and other stuff. There were two workbenches, one for woodwork and another for electronics. The unmarried, childless version of myself which opened the Poinciana Planetarium in 1996 spent many hours happily working on various school-related projects late into the evening back in that workspace. Occasionally, a few students even joined me to work on projects.

After I left in 2000, Steve Schiff was director for awhile and he tore out the darkroom (slides were on their way out in favor of video) and turned it into a space shuttle simulator. The workshop was mostly cleaned out as well and transformed into an area for the student astronauts to meet, learn, and eat lunch when not flying the shuttle. The tools were still there, things could still be fixed, but it wasn’t so much a workshop any more.

I ended up coming back to Poinciana in 2005 to teach 5th grade, which I did for 4 years. During that time, the Maker Movement really began to gain steam. Make Magazine began publication, Instructables.com became popular, and I used both of these resources with my students both during the school day, and after school with my engineering club. Boy, did I wish I had the workshop back – this time for my students to use!

So after Dr. Schiff’s retirement, I jumped at the chance to move back to my old Planetarium Classroom, and began the transformation of the room behind the planetarium into the “Mad Panda Maker Space” (Poincaina’s mascot is the Pandas). My engineering club kids moved right in, but the space wasn’t really set up for a bunch of kids to work in – I needed some different tools, more and more accessible supply areas, and better defined stations. Cubbies for student project storage were needed too.

Over the last few years, it slowly came together.  Poinciana and I received grants from several different sources, including SECME, the Palm Beach County Education Foundation, Poinciana PTA, and some private donors.  This enabled me to purchase tools, supplies, storage containers and systems, and even our amazing Makerbot Replicator. Check out my post on this year’s opening of the Maker Space to see how it’s all ended up.

The “room behind the planetarium” has evolved over the past 17 years, and I feel has find its most useful and wonderful state at last. For more on its history, check out this post.  Over the last few years I’ve chipped away at making the space better. It has been slow going as I’m no longer single and childless! I finally feel happy with the workshop, and just in time – this week I began using it as a Maker Space during actual school hours (Shocking, as there is no FCAT on making things, right?). 23 4th and 5th graders began building a variety of projects, all related to science and math content they are learning in their classrooms. Look for sketches, journal pages, and project pictures coming in next week.

In addition my engineering club, “The Mad Panda Society” began working in the space two Saturdays ago, and we are already getting more done in less time. Below are a few pictures showing what the lab looks like now. I still need to clean out some of the shelves, and the soldering station which doubles as my workspace is a mess, but the main student areas are organized and efficient, and the kids who have been in there this week have been very productive – my main measurement of success.

Now I’m moving on to work on our Online Space. Poinciana has begun using Edmodo for much of its student-teacher communication.  It isn’t good for sharing things with the outside world though. My love for WordPress (along with my amazing summer experience with DS106) may lead us in a different direction. Stay tuned!

The “unblocking” of this website was far less important than some other things that Palm Beach County has chosen to give us online access to in the last week or so.  Teachers can now access YouTube. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Yes, YouTube has a large amount of crap residing in it but it has some amazing instructional material in it as well, from physics demonstrations by students and professors at Harvard, to historical source material being digitized and placed online by people all over the world.  This is an important resource for students to learn to navigate and use properly, and now I can help my students do just that.

In addition, it looks like as long as I’m logged in with my district gMail account I have access to Picassa and flikr for photo storage and sharing.  In the past if I went on a trip to Kennedy Space Center with our 90 4th graders and wanted to give them access to my photos, and to each other’s photos, flash drives and “sneaker net” were our only option. There was simply no other way to easily share and navigate images.  The district even set up a Vodcast server, kind of our own internal YouTube so that I could share video, but not still images!  The kids don’t have access to photo sharing yet, but with the implementation of the rumored gMail for Students, they should be able to access these resources as well.

I’m a realist and I know that opening these resources opens a new can of legal worms for the district – and there is education of both teachers and kids needed to make it work. What all this comes down to is education and trust. As a teacher, I recognize that it is my job to teach students to use these resources responsibly while at school and while using them for school. I trust my kids will do so, and trust that those who don’t will be reported to me by their peers if I don’t catch them first. We have to teach kids the pros and cons of learning from online sources and how to use them legally, morally, and responsibly.  We can’t do that if we aren’t given access to the resources in the first place.

Geronimo!

Someone was nice enough to ask the right people to unblock my website within the SDOPBC – thanks to whomever you are! I’ve been batting .000 in my attempts to get other, way more educational sites unblocked the last few years.  It is nice to get a little help with my own site.

I’ve changed the logo – feel free to use this one as well if you wish!

The week that my school district made the wonderful decision to unblock YouTube for teacher accounts they also added this website to their “blocked” list.  I’m not sure exactly what on here is not suitable for student use, but I apologize to anyone who attended one of my workshops at the gifted conference last week and can’t get to the resources I shared on here.

If you find yourself blocked by SDPBC, please feel free to use my new “badge”!

Today we were asked to take an image and make it monochrome.  I chose an image from my iPhoto library that I had taken in my school’s native Florida garden of a wild coffee plant and its flowers.  I hoped that I could make it monochrome right in iPhoto, but the only monochromatic options were black and white and sepia, and I didn’t really think that either of those did anything interesting to the image.  Not having Photoshop on my laptop, I loaded the image into a program that I have been using a version of for almost 15 years – imageJ.  This is a scientific image processing program (originally named NIHimage) used by doctors and scientists all over the world to view, measure, and process images of everything from cells to stars.  My students and I use it to measure the change in brightness for variable stars, the size and depth of lunar craters, and the speed of hurricanes ripping up Florida’s coast.  I quickly converted the jpeg to 8bit, and flipped through a number of lookup tables until I settled on this “Hot Yellow” one. It seemed to make the details on the leaves really pop out.