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 having them glue the pictures down before coloring.

The second group we did a little better with. We started with teaching about the 3D printer and activating background knowledge then showed the models. We had them discuss a bit more with us and share their information. They colored the pictures first then glued them down.

The final group we decided to start my showing the models so they had an example to refer to before we showed how to start 3D printing. We still activated background knowledge but then ran into a little trouble on the computer with losing the print preview we were showing them. 

Overall, I think it was a great experience that I learned a lot of valuable lessons from.