Interesting Start
Have had a couple of wait a second moments as we started this year. Looked at formative and summative assessment once again. Flashback to pre 2005 but in this space just 2006. Questions about blogging:...
View ArticleEthics
If you are teaching a coding class, this week was interesting. If you want students to read and think about programming/coding right, wrong, ethics. There is no shortage of places to start. Will be...
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Robotics and Coding Class
This year’s class is a mixture of three different groups. So I have had to change how I work with the students. For my group with no experience I started using a pair programming model where the...
View ArticleWorkflows
I am placing all of my class content into an iBook creates with iBook author. One tool I use is dropittome. This allows me to send a file via an upload form to my gDrive or Dropbox account. I can add...
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Playing With the Duo
Have finally started looking at running our Hummingbird boards in Arduino mode using text and Ardublock to create the code. Pretty obvious this will extend what can be done with the kit. With Scratch...
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Sensors
Been a while and I have forgotten to add the new things I am learning for my personal PD my portfolio. Today I looked at sensors. In this lesson I looked at the ultrasonic sensor. This sensor emits a...
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A Recent Letter
Had a number of people come through my room the other day and I was asked to add a little more to what they observed. The Middle School class you observed today is an example of how a micro-controller,...
View ArticleiBooks In My Coding Class
After trying it out for a semester and working out some issues this year all of my Coding and Robotics students will be creating iBooks based portfolios. I plan on using the reflections, photos, videos...
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Traffic Light
English: A Led Traffic lights (Photo credit: Wikipedia) Added a traffic light project to the grade seven Coding and Robotics course. As I learn, I need to make the Coding and Robotics more integrated...
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Overview
The class I am using for the Thinking and Learning in the Maker-Centered Classroom course is my Coding/Robotics 8 class. This is a one semester long grade eight class where students use Scratch and the...
View ArticleDesign Hunt
In our design hunt activity I asked students to go for a walk and take photos of designed elements found at SSIS. I introduced the design hunt via a short keynote presentation, shown below in video...
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Sensors
Last year we explored if statements and if statements with the five Hummingbird sensors. Students created code that cause a servo or motor or LED to react based on sensor readings. They used all 5...
View ArticleKids Teaching Scratch
I haven’t attended a conference in a long time. This year was a bit different as a major conference was at my school. So I made plans for my students to take part by demonstrating how they used Scratch...
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Conference Reminders
Before our student lead conference one of my students, Sue, spent some time answering questions about the code that Ben had come up with. The questions involved the use of parameters. I have introduced...
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Bean+
I’ve played with the Bean+ this break. The Bean+ is an Arduino compatible board that can be programmed via Bluetooth. The board comes with a built-in battery, LED, accelerometer and temperature...
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Interactive Poster
We came back to our interactive poster project. The plan is to create a poster that focusses on kindness at our school. The poster will contain hot spots made from conductive paint that will trigger a...
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Great Tips
Great tips via CSTeachingTips.org. Never considered number four but what a great idea. Also getting students into the habit of talking through their coding for debugging purposes is a real useful...
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mBlock Scratch like Coding for Arduino
I have tried out mBlock over the past two days. This will be a nice way for my Robotics kids to start looking at using the arduino. mBlock, based on Scratch, provides a block based interface to coding...
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Class Notes-Getting Started
Blink using mBlock and an Arduino Pin 13 has an LED incorporated into the board. So we can use that to see if everything is working. We will start in Scratch mode. Try these blocks out. This is similar...
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