Robotics started at both school last weekend. They’ll run for 9 weeks on Saturdays till mid-December. Unlike my other classes, I am supported by a group of great volunteers from New York Cares and a teacher from the school. This allows us to work with a larger group of kids with smaller internal groups.
We tried this out last year at one school with older Lego RCX and a group of fifteen 4th graders. The kits were good, but programming was difficult. We did some fun atypical robotic projects (dancing flowers, baseball robots) and the school deemed it enough of a success to order new Lego Mindstorm NXT kits. I also talked the other school I work at into starting a similar program so that the kids from the two schools could meet and hold their own local competitions or fairs.
Most of the volunteers from last years robotics and video game program returned this year for the new robotics class. The classes are staggered so that I can run the first hour at one school then hustle over to the other school and run both hours. One of the volunteers from last year is kindly running the second hour at the first school.
Back to back classes made it easy to compare between the two schools. Kids responded differently and took the lessons down different paths, but they both ended about the same. One school is definitely rowdy than the other, but maybe the kids are just tired at the other school (it starts 90 minutes earlier). At one school I had to use a smart board because they didn’t have a regular white board; at the other school I used a paper easel because they didn’t have good white board.
I try to conceptualize how the lesson will go before starting, but I don’t usually write things down in advance. It’s probably not the best use of time, but we get everything done in the end. Or maybe we don’t, but we get done what we want done and the kids feel like the learned or accomplished something new. Last year in the Saturday robotics class, I gave vague projects for the kids to mold into their own. One student turned the dancing flower into an dancing flower with an elaborate security system. Video game design and robotics are perfect for these kinds of open projects to let the kids explore their own thoughts, like creative writing or art backed by science and math. Perhaps I’m offloading my own planning problems onto the kids, in which case they handle the situation gracefully.
I do make worksheets from time to time. I have a handful of full page worksheets I crafted for electrical components and cryptography theory. I’ll post those when I come back to them in the breakfast classes.
Breakfast classes started last week. Back in January I started breakfast classes in the morning to work with students that couldn’t make it in to the science club in the after school program. I recruited four 5th graders and two 4th graders and split them into groups of three. The groups met Mondays & Thursdays or Tuesdays & Fridays from 8:00am to 8:40am a table at the end of the hall way. We built a few projects (LED valentines, piano glove, electric guitar), but didn’t work through them as quickly as I had hoped. Science club in PAZ (the after school program) also suffered the same problems. I’m hoping the changes to breakfast classes structure will fix the problems we had last year and increase overall throughput and make it more fun for everyone.
Before classes started this year, I spent a couple weeks talking with the kids during breakfast in the cafeteria. I mostly wanted to get to know the kids a little better, but it also gave me a chance to see who shows up early. I restructured the class to be five days a week with one group learning at a time. The groups will be small (4-5 students) and meet from 8:00am to 8:40am Monday through Friday. Projects will be organized for one or two week increments. Girls only too.
Our first set of classes is on video game programming. I started with two 3rd graders and two 5th graders. One of the 5th graders is bored with it and the other doesn’t always show up on time, so now it’s three 3rd graders. Two of them are picking up the techniques pretty quickly, or at least they are can follow directions. Hopefully by the end of the week they’ll have the fundamentals down to start designing their own game next week while I work with the 5th graders on a different lesson. I don’t know if this pipeline approach will work, but it’s worth a shot to increase student project throughput.
I could tell CX was bored with game programming. I think she kept showing up because she knows I have other projects to come. I assured her that we’re starting another project for 5th graders on Monday and that it’ll only take a week to complete, not like those 3 months projects from last year. She seemed excited by the prospective projects and staying out of the game design lessons. KM, another 5th grader, comes late to school and isn’t keeping up with the game lessons. She doesn’t like eating the cafeteria though, so she’s flipping through my sewing tech books and picking out projects that interest her. Tomorrow I’m going to show her a video from Diana Eng’s Fairytale Fashion project and see if she wants to send in any ideas.
I’m going to try translating all my posts into Spanish. I need to learn the language and this gives a good way to practice. I’ve never studied the language before, so they’ll probably be pretty rough. Gotta start somewhere I guess.
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