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I-Create Student Teaching Day

 Teaching Students Reflection: 3D Printing & The Butterfly Life Cycle 1c: Leverage CT and CS experts, resources and professional learning networks to continuously improve practice integrating CT across content areas. 5b: Empower students to select personally meaningful computational projects. 5c:Use a variety of instructional approaches to help students frame problems in ways that can be represented as computational steps or algorithms to be performed by a computer. Today my partner Mariam and I gave a short mini-lesson to the 4th grade students at TAMU-CC. We started by first showing the 3D models we created of the butterfly life cycle. We tried to address their background knowledge on the subject. The first group we had taught us more about butterflies than we taught them. We also showed them how to use a computer to make a 3D print but the computer was not unlocked. At the end we had the students glue pictures of the life cycle in order and color them. We made the mistake of...
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Digital MakerSpace

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 Chrome Music Lab I explored the digital makerspace Chrome Music Lab today. What this is is an app or website you can use to create music by clicking on different buttons with note choices put up and down in a column. The columns extend quite a bit so you can make your own song or beat. You can play multiple notes at once or just one and when you finish making your song you can play it by clicking a button. There is also an option to changed the tempo or pace at which the software plays the song. I had a lot of fun with it and found it to connect with the content areas through making patterns with it. Almost every subject area can relate to patterns in one way or another. Math has patterns represented in shapes or numbers as early on as kinder. Reading has patterns, especially in poetry. Science has patterns such as life cycles. Everything has patterns. As I will show in the video, this game gives us the chance to demonstrate patterns to our students. Chrome Music Lab Website:...
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I-Create Day 1 Exploration

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 Using the I-Create Lab Equipment for a Computational Standard 1C: Leverage CT and CS experts, resources and  professional learning networks   to continuously improve practice integrating CT across content areas. 3a: Model and learn with students how to formulate computational solutions to problems and how to give and receive actionable feedback. 1e: Recognize how computing and society interact to create opportunities, inequities, responsibilities and threats for individuals and organizations.      I saw a couple of machines that I would use for connecting different technology to the content areas. The first one is the Printing Press. The printing press they have in the I-Create Lab is from the 1800s and is a great asset to use with history. It is important for the children to see and learn about the technology of the past and how it effects technology now. It is also amazing because it can teach students about the struggles of the children of the past who ...
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Drone Blocks How-To and Experimentation

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 Drone Blocks How-To 3a: Model and learn with students how to formulate computational solutions to problems and how to give and receive actionable feedback. 1d: Develop resilience and perseverance when approaching CS and CT learning experiences, build comfort with ambiguity and open-ended problems, and see failure as an opportunity to learn and innovate. Safety:  The number one priority when using drones is to remember safety protocol. Drones need enough room to move around and students need to practice keeping a safe distance from the drone and letting the drone get close to others.   The first thing you have to do is connect the control device to the wifi.   Connect control device to drone by going to the right hand corner and clicking Connect to Tello. Type in the name of the drone and connect. Once you are connected you should perform a test flight. The different steps you need to accomplish this is to start with a Take Off code. Once you have that set up yo...
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WeDo Bots Activity

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 Activity Design 1c: Leverage CT and CS experts, resources and professional learning networks to continuously improve practice integrating CT across content areas. 2c: Choose teaching approaches that help to foster an inclusive computing culture, avoid stereotype threat and equitably engage all students. For our activity we chose to make and experiment with the coding for "Frog's Metamorphosis".  Activity: The Lego frog/tadpole shall be prebuilt so the children will have more time to experiment with the coding itself. I have planned this activity so the students do a lot of exploring and experimenting to discover their own findings and then we can share what we found together. Instruction Link for Making a Frog: https://education.lego.com/v3/assets/blt293eea581807678a/bltae23720e9e93bd04/5ebe64df2a79326d92da759f/tadpole-instructions.pdf  Activity Steps: Step 1: Hypothesize and explore what the different green codes do Step 2: Explore how changing the numbers on the code...
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WeDo Lego Bots

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 WeDo Lego Bots                          5b- Empower students to select personally meaningful computational projects. 1a: Set professional learning goals to explore and apply teaching strategies for integrating CT practices into learning activities in ways that enhance student learning of both the academic discipline and CS concepts.                          1d: Develop resilience and perseverance when approaching CS and CT learning experiences, build comfort with ambiguity and open-ended problems, and see failure as an opportunity to learn and innovate . Today I had the chance to explore the WeDo 2.0 Lego Bots kit. I enjoyed being allowed to pick my own design for my Lego creation I found the assembly of the Legos to be easy, however, connecting to the bot through an app was difficult. I could not find the app I needed to download o...
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Week 1 Coding

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  Coding                                  Learner 1a:   How can I enhance student learning by setting goals and integrating a multitude of teaching strategies for Computational Thinking?                                 Learner 1c: Leverage CT and CS experts, resources and professional learning networks to continuously improve practice integrating CT across content areas. This week I had the opportunity to explore a few online coding games. The games explored how functions work in computer coding. I learned functions are a specific set of instructions to accomplish a certain task. I pictured functions as a ready made recipe that I gave my computer so it could create the code automatically without me having to provide the individual steps every time.     While playing the...
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