EDIM 514 Week 2_Using New Technologies

For this assignment, we were posed to interview someone who is using a new technology with students that we weren't familiar with. I have decided to rewrite all of my curriculum this year so that it is more fun, covers more advanced topics, and allows for better collaboration with the other teachers in my STEM program. One of the new topics I am trying to incorporate into my class is robotics and programming. I was able to secure over 50 robots from an upper level engineering teacher in my department. He no longer needed them because his curriculum changed and now demands a different type of robot. This worked out perfectly for me!

BoeBot. (n.d.). Retrieved September 16, 2015, from http://www.robotika.sk/holls/2008/images/BoeBotFamily.jpg

The robots are called BoeBots and SumoBots. They require a week or so of class periods of building and program testing until they can do what you want. Since I have no background knowledge on writing code, reading code, or problem solving with code I need to learn it myself. For that reason and this assignment, I reached out to a different engineering teacher in my department today to talk about coding. This teacher teaches Honor Computer Science and AP Computer Science. He also actively participates in the national "hour of coding" each year. Obviously this is a good person to talk to about a new technology that I don't use that could help me out.

He informed me that his students latched onto coding pretty quickly and enjoyed it. That was good to know, but his students are also that type of student who would like to learn code. They signed up for a coding class...He then told me about this website / free program called Scratch. Scratch is a coding program that is as basic as drag and drop preset codes onto a timeline. For instance, if I was trying to make a character I drew move across the page, there is a move command that allows me to pick the direction and distance. Pretty simple if you as me...There is more to Scratch though. You can look at the actual coding and understand why characters are written certain ways and what they do because it is all color coded / highlights the action when you move your cursor over that sentence of code.

Scratch. (n.d.). Retrieved September 16, 2015, from http://news.mit.edu/sites/mit.edu.newsoffice/files/images/2013/20130514110054-1_0_0.jpg

So after I started playing with Scratch some more, I asked him more difficult questions about it. One in which was what obstacles he needed to overcome with the technology. He told me that since it is free and the students don't need to register, the only obstacle is the installation process onto their computers (my students don't have the administrative powers to install programs on their computers). He then explained some ways around the IT problems that relate to my district for me.

Finally, he expressed that I cannot just give the students the program and expect them to learn coding. I need to figure out some unique way to walk them through a simple activity to learn basic coding before getting into the robotics project. That's when I came up with the idea of creating a basic maze that all of the students would have to solve individually using the basic coding techniques I teach them. Then from their, they will have to use coding to create their own maze, switch maze files with a classmate, and use coding to solve the classmate's maze. This is a great lead into my robotic project because they will be building a BoeBots that will need to navigate its own way through a maze that uses different navigational coding aspects.

Couldn't be happier I had to interview someone about technology today!