This week in One Laptop per Child we cleaned off old laptops from graduated CSG students and downloaded new software onto. These computers will be for the children in the YWCA program downtown. We also have been working on our pamphlets to give to teachers in every place we go to teach. Whether it be the YWCA or the kids we will visit in Barbados, these will promote the learning of coding and allow knowledge to be passed from us to them easier.
This week I learned how far our help reaches. The kids in the YWCA and in Barbados will have this valuable knowledge and will be able to use the skills from this experience. I feel like we’re really making a significant impact on these people’s lives using these helpful pamphlets. The infamous saying, “Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day, but teach a man to fish and he’ll eat for a lifetime,” encapsulates what we’re doing perfectly.
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In class we have been working on creating pamphlets that describe a specific activity that you may do on Scratch. This is to better help create a super helpful and convenient way to begin teaching newer Scratch users the basics on the activities. I learned a lot through this process. It is pretty easy to take for granted the simple things when it comes to activities like these. We’ve had a lot of discussion on the best way to integrate creativity into the teaching process. This seems to be the hardest one because it is easy to give steps to teach but teaching creativity isn’t something you can do. I’ve really enjoyed working on this project because it has not only taught me significantly more about scratch but also about teaching and what it may be like when we do go down to Barbados. These projects are also making me very excited to go to Barbados and have the opportunity to try and bring new creative ideas to the kids and spread the world of scratch with them as well.
As second semester begins, my excitement for the Barbados trip continues to grow. Julia and I will be heading down a few days early to prepare the laptops before the entire group arrives. I am super excited to have both an individualized experience as well as one working with the entire group. In class, we have been working on drafting an instruction manual for people learning how to use Scratch. The manual includes step by step instructions as well as symbols (such as a star and lightbulb) next to the different points that indicate an important point, big idea, etc. Some members of the class have gone to the Lower School to practice teaching Scratch, but unfortunately, I have not had any of the periods free to do that. Because I have not had this teaching experience, I am a little bit worried about teaching the kids in Barbados. However, I have had experience teaching children in Guatemala, and know that it requires patience and repetition. I am ready to take on this challenge!
Lately in OLPC we have been working hard on a set of instructions/lesson plan for the teachers we will be working with in Barbados. This lesson plan summarizes the skills we will teach the students while we are there, and other skill sets that the teacher can teach once we leave Barbados. This lesson plan ranges from simple skills such as how to move, all the way to how to create a complex maze with add-ons. As we end this process, we have also begun looking at projects created by CSG students that we can use as examples for the students and teachers. These example projects will help the teachers and students visualize what they can create.
From this process I have learned lots of new things about teaching others. I have learned the importance of not only explaining things, but as well as why we do these things. I also find I am much more confident in my abilities in Scratch while I work on this lesson plan for the teacher. I am teaching others and myself through this process. How to teach others is definitely a skill I have improved upon during this class. In OLPC class this week, it was hour of code day so we got to do an hour of any sort of coding we wanted. I did the google coding game that you could find by going to google and clicking on the logo. It was a simple fun game that has a bunny who you are trying to help get all the carrots. You help the bunny reach these carrots by dropping programming blocks such as the arrows or turns into the space below and hit the orange button when you want it to start. This is very similar to scratch but much more simple. Once your bunny gets all the carrots you can move on to a harder level and are introduced to more blocks such a repeat, so you can try and find the simplest/shortest code. This game has taught me how simple coding can be and that it can be turned into a game! It was a lot of fun! My favorite part about this particular program was that I didn’t even realize I was coding. I am excited to see what we are doing in this week’s OLPC class.
In OLPC class this week, we have continued working with Scratch to make some games that the kids in Barbados will be able to recreate or play when we visit. Making these games has helped and will continue to help us grow more and more accustomed to Scratch so that we can be in the best shape possible when we head to Barbados. We have also been looking at some of the pre-made Scratch games that the Scratch Team created. Before opening the game, it gives you a brief description of the end goal of the game, and what’s actually going on with the game. These games have slight problems that cause the games to go wrong at some point, and we were tasked with finding the problem and figuring out how to fix it. Doing this will allow us to help the kids in Barbados when they have a problem with a game that they may create.
Over the past couple of weeks we have been using the old version of Scratch because it can be downloaded and it doesn’t need Wi-Fi in order to run. This means that the kids in Barbados who don’t have access to Wi-Fi will be able to use Scratch which is really awesome. Exploring Scratch this past week has been interesting, and it’s allowed us to find new controls, new solutions to problems we might have, and new ways to do things in the program. We are all looking forward to what is in store for the upcoming OLPC classes!! This week we were given an easy task to do on “Scratch.” The small programs that we are designing should be simple enough for a fourth grader to complete. At the same time, it can be more complex depending on how much detail the programmer wants to add. For example, my partner and I designed a “Scratch” project where the animation can change its costume. At first, the basic outline of our project focused on having two identical sprites with the same costume with 0.5 seconds between the switch. But then we wanted to make it more complicated by adding more details. For example, we added an extra costume change and actually designed the costumes ourselves. Then we wanted our “Scratch” project to have even more details by adding sound right before the change. One of our sounds came from “Scratch” while the other we recorded ourselves. We decided not to add any more details because we did not want to overwhelm the students who would eventually learn how to create this.
I learned that in “Scratch” it is best to first develop an outline and then slowly add more details. It's also easier if you run the program multiple times when you add an extra detail to your project because it helps you stay more organized. My favorite thing so far is how creative I can be in OLPC. I can be extremely creative in “Scratch” because I have to find the best and simplest ways to design programs. It is fun to develop new ways to improve my code to help younger kids understand. I also can be very creative in the way I teach little children. I try to make fun analogies and pose specific questions that will help guide toward understanding new concepts. The thing I will remember for a long time from OLPC, is the wonderful feeling I got when I helped teach the 4th graders. It brought me joy to see how happy the kids were and it was amazing to see how differently each child thought when you give them freedom to design whatever they want. When children are young, their imagination is wild and it's wonderful to see them come to life on “Scratch”! In class, we have continued to teach the 4th graders. Recently, we have gone more in depth about teaching them Scratch and how it works. In our most recent lesson, we taught them how to make a maze. In the beginning of this lesson, we asked students very general questions about how they think they could make a maze using the earlier ideas and concepts we taught to them. Many of the students were not entirely sure, however, after explaining more in depth about the maze, and asking them questions like “What is the purpose of a maze,” and their prior knowledge of how to make a Sprite move, most of them then understood where in Scratch to look.
So far, this has been fun, but also more challenging especially because making a maze is much more difficult and complex. I learned that it is very difficult not to tell the 4th graders the answers of where to look, and where to put things. This is because it would sometimes be a complicated task that could be difficult to explain to the 4th graders, and we wanted to just show them the answer right away. However, challenging them makes them better in the long run, and it is better that they only complete the challenges on their own so that they not only better get to know the software of Scratch, but also feel proud of themselves when they learn/try something new. I also learned that asking the students more questions allows them to think about it more in depth, to formulate more of their own questions, and to understand Scratch better. Overall, I enjoyed teaching the 4th graders Scratch, and I am excited to see what we will be doing the coming weeks in class! This week in OLPC our class had the opportunity to teach our first lesson of Scratch to 4th grade students at CSG. We started our class by asking questions to engage the 4th graders. These questions included: “What is programming?” and “Have you used Scratch before?” Next, we gave a quick tour of Scratch to help familiarize the students and completed a drawing game to illustrate how specific the students need to be when coding. Last, we broke into small groups of one or two 4th grade students and an OLPC student to start exploring scratch.
I learned a lot about teaching during our class with the 4th graders. The first thing I learned is it is hard to watch the students struggle while they are learning a new task, but you have to let them struggle. When they struggle, they remember how they got to the answer better than if you just tell them the answer. Second, when the students figured out the answer on their own, it boosted their confidence making them want to complete harder challenges. I also learned it is exciting to watch your student complete a challenge and feel proud of themselves for learning something new. This week I learned a lot and had so much fun teaching; I am excited to teach another class next week! We just had our first day of teaching CSG's 4th graders. Please check out the photos page for a peek into our work there.
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April 2018
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