Friday, July 31, 2015

On Plug and Play Curriculum

One of the most loaded questions that you are asked as a teacher during the summer is "what are you doing this summer?"

en.wikipedia.org
The answer, depending on how you respond, is either used to reinforce someone's view about the general laziness of teachers or to reinforce their view that you are a sadistic workaholic who can't appreciate your time off.

In short, answering the question is a trap and you should simply avoid the question if you want to see the people you are talking to again without any sense of resentment.

During our tinkering session today with the Arduino based robots one of the other teachers there pointed something out that I already knew but hadn't thought about recently.

"Often, especially in junior highs, a teacher is handed one period of robotics or applied technology as an afterthought. This wouldn't be a problem except that as that teacher I now need to sink a ton of time into learning and developing this stuff that I may only use once."

A part of what I am putting together is aimed as an entry-level Arduino course that educators can use to begin an Applied Technology or Robotics program quickly.

I say quickly because our conversations at these sessions came back to inquiry and project based learning again and again. For those not paying attention to the current education system, we have produced a generation of kids that appear lazy and entitled to the outside world. In fact, what we have done is empowered these kids to not just ask what they are doing today, but why they are doing it.

To this end, we have to look at task and instructional design differently because very often there are other people doing what we do far better than we are doing it as educators. Which brings us to the problem of the internet and why we need an education specific sandbox for Arduino that educators can plug-and-play.

hyerboleandahalf.blogspot.com
I was lucky enough to have an education that straddles the internet divide, that is the point in time where the internet left the hands of the early-adopter and entered the mainstream to decimate the Encyclopedia Brittanica and make poorly written cat pictures a part of our collective consciousness.

In straddling this divide I went from the problem of "where can I find that?" to the problem of "What parts of this can I ignore so that I get what I need?"

When designing instruction in this age, the focus should be on an end-game where we release the students into the world to do something relevant with what they have learned or else structure the task within something relevant to the student's lives so that they learn via collateral-damage.

In the robotics world this is simple because we can easily structure a robot-build around any number of real world premises and then hand the students some basic tools and let them choose what is relevant to their particular project.

On a side note, I find this this last statement scares many educators. It implies that the teacher is no longer the centre of the class that manages big ideas, but instead they become a technician that uses a structured a challenge and troubleshoots the small problems that arise from inattention, limited foundation skills or technical problems(three problems that send teachers into fits of rage in my experience).

wikimedia.org
I'm in the process of revamping my basic electronics assignments which come in Google Form flavour to address the foundational skills in electronics. Would I be happy if they are never used as a part of a major project? Sure. Would I expect that a student should look to that smaller pool of knowledge before the ocean of the internet? Also yes.

If anyone reading this has found a plug and play Arduino curriculum, please post where it is below. I know that many introduction courses exist, but I find that they aren't aimed at absolute beginners in that they introduce too much superfluous information too early. My goal is to have something basic that can get students rolling quickly so that they can return to more theory later once they have a taste of success.

Wednesday, July 29, 2015

On Thorough Testing

Today I had the pleasure of attending / helping to host a session about Arduino as put on by my friends at Solarbotics.

These guys do awesome work in both supporting the local Robotics/Electronics community in Calgary (among other places) as a supplier and as an educator. I have had many trips out there to make sure that a piece of hardware or concept that I was using were being used correctly.

For all of you aspiring or prospective educators, check out their well built and cost-effective Sketchboard for Arduino fun.

Today's session allowed me to test out some of the Arduino Theory presentations with a couple of beginners and a couple of experts.

To no one's surprise, the experts found some holes in what I had created and the beginners found some errors in the presentations as well. Those holes have been fixed in Arduino 01-04.

What I took away from it is that even at my stage of being very new to this system I come with some assumptions including how a breadboard works. This is something that is very simple but that could throw a beginner for a loop. the main problem this illuminated was that the earlier units in my course this year are going to need to be slightly longer as I may need to sneak in some foundational skills from one area, such as breadboarding, into units where they don't explicitly belong, such as programming.
For anyone not aware of how a breadboard works, Colin Cunningham has one of the most informative lessons on them through his Collin's Lab Series on YouTube.

He also has a fantastic video about building an old-school breadboard.

With this being the case and my programming module being at a place where I can leave it, until the robotics project credits at least, I am going to tackle these electronics lessons next. Luckily, those were some of my more well developed assignments and sections so revamping them for 2015/2016 should be relatively simple.

This event was also a lesson that reminds anyone developing curriculum and lessons that your assumptions are invisible to you. Nothing is as humbling as watching something that you created to be simple and self-explanatory need significant explanation.

Good thing it's July and not September I guess.

Cheers.
Way

On Arduino Theory

Arduino Theory Folder

Monday, July 27, 2015

On Assessing Real World Skills

A significant amount of the current educational rhetoric has been focused around the idea of teaching real world skills to our students rather than institutional skills that are important for school.

I phrased this early in teaching school by asking the question, "is school a place for learning key skills or for social normalization."

I always found it cynical when I didn't receive a clear answer so I've always tried to shift my focus from the latter to the former.


To this end, our department has routinely used a work habits and employability rubric to assess our students and in accordance with 21st century learning, we also ask students to have a (rather significant) role in assessing their progress. While frequently a sore spot in your Gluteus Maximus, the information gathered by these type of activities has frequently allowed me to refine and develop my own teaching practice.

Image from




The rubric itself can be found at http://goo.gl/forms/dH4jPr4KE7 and any teachers reading this can feel free to email me if they want access or their own copy of this rubric. I have been an early adopter of Google Drive and I find the data collection power of Forms to be excellent.

If you choose to use this kind of rubric, you will need to trust that students are being honest about their names; in our district we have district email accounts that are automatically recorded if the Form is set up correctly.

The rubric clearly states what is expected of students and while some parts, such as attendance, are as institutional as they are practical (especially in creative or knowledge career fields), the rest allow students a peek into what is valued in the real world, especially that of technology.

The joy of jumping into the water of assessing real world skills, especially in technology, is that we can begin to modify and redefine what the tools we are teaching and using to teach mean, because we are less constrained by the expectations of a traditional teaching expectation. See the graphic on the right for the most succinct analysis of this effect that I have run across.

The most important part of that rubric is the Peer Support section in my opinion. This portion comes with a story from me because I have experienced this peer support early in my teaching career and I credit it with keeping me going through the rough early years of a teaching career.

The way peer support helped me was, as far as I know, through serendipity. During my first full year teaching contract I was tasked with teaching a full year of English as a replacement for a long-tenured teacher who had gone on disability leave for health reasons. This contract eventually branched out into Phys Ed and Robotics but not before I realized that I had the best classroom in the school. The school was built as one C-shaped hallway that encircled the library. Many of the classrooms, including mine, were attached to the library; but my room had the distinct advantage of being the perfect shortcut, being attached the the PE hallway and the library, to avoid one frequently locked door to the library (and therefore the photocopier).

This gem from theoatmeal.com is essential reading for all teachers.
Even those of you who claim to not be caffeine dependent.
It is important to note that I made a conscious effort to invite people to use my room as a highway into the library early in my year there. This veritable tide of people who wandered through were a great source of inspiration, motivation, and occasionally a place for post teaching-disaster counselling and gripe-fests (for myself and them).

The following year I was a part of a school that was at capacity due to a reshuffle of language programs. Myself and two other teachers were assigned to an office in the coffee room. Not the staff room mind you...the coffee room. Like my previous experience, having a couple of people to bounce things off of and help out was hugely helpful for me and, I hope, for them. The other advantage was that since we were teaching in other people's classrooms being at capacity, it frequently displaced other teachers to our Nomad's Hut...sorry, coffee room...to share their wisdom with us just starting out. Nomad's Hut was what I preferred even if other staff liked Cart People as our nickname(even though my cart was predominantly digital).

To any administrators reading this blog, please keep my experience in mind as I attribute this peer support experience to keeping me in the profession. Designing spaces to make people interact, and yes to occasionally come into conflict, is something that should be included in any plan involving new teachers. A quick shout out to @principalwise who was our fearless leader at the time and who, intentionally or not, spurred the development of these real world skills in a handful of her young teachers. I, for one, thank you for it Michelle.

The conclusion to all of this is that through technology, and good instructional and behavioral design, we can make sure that our students, and our developing teachers, can harness real world skills to not only survive but to thrive in challenges that may be impossible for somebody in a traditional learning or teaching environment.


Cheers, and enjoy the summer coffee detox. (Says the teacher still writing a blog after midnight in July)

Monday, July 20, 2015

On Arduino

Wow, so much for a post a day.

Life...right?


Anyways, I have made some progress on fleshing out one of the units that I feel I did badly this year and wanted to improve upon in the coming campaign. That unit was the introduction to Ardunio programming.

The awkward part of using the Arduino system is that it is quite new and many people disagree on how exactly to teach it to beginners. Some methods focus almost fully on teaching code, such as Arduino.cc 's tutorials. Other methods focus instead on hardware integration with no small amount of electronics such as Adafruits tutorials.

Since I have to blend this in my room I decided to focus on the software first and then work specific pieces of hardware into the curriculum when we embarked upon our robotics challenges.

sparkfun.com
The Arduino portion of the unit is meant to be used by students after they have completed CODE.ORG 's Accelerated Introduction to Computer Science Course.

This course is a great introduction to coding concepts and it can be administrated from a teacher account by having students add the teacher's course code before they start working.

It is advertised as a 20 hour introductory course, but I often selectively skip the unplugged activities and focus on the code-building. This course typically takes a motivated tenth grader no more than five classes (~7 hours) to complete.


The Arduino portion's theory is beginning to come together and can be found in the following links:


As always, feedback is appreciated. I will post more presentations as they are completed and plan on also posting the full unit plan including assignments.

Thursday, July 2, 2015

On Introductory Robotics

I realized tonight that I have begun to assemble resources and materials for the coming school-year without giving much of an overview of what it is I will be actually teaching so here is part 1: Robotics - Introductory Level

In introductory robotics, students are exposed to a wide variety of topics in robotics, mechatronics and engineering. A typical semester includes the following modules and credits.

ELT 1010 - ELECTRICAL ASSEMBLY 1

In this unit students are introduced to the fundamentals of electricity and safe work practices. They will learn to solder electronics components and will review the fundamental concepts involved with working on electronic circuits such as resistance, capacitance, inductance and electromagnetism.

DES 1050 - CAD 1

Using AutoDesk’s AutoCAD software as well as AutoDesk Inventor, students will learn the fundamentals of Computer Assisted Design and Drawing. They will apply these skills in a variety of design-oriented assignments that will lead them to producing portfolio-ready drawings. The skills they learn in this unit will then be applied to rapid prototyping with the lab’s 3D printer.

ELT 1910  - ELT PROJECT CREDIT A

Students will have the chance to learn a variety of system control methods and documentation for those systems as they explore the FESTO Didactic electropneumatic learning system. This system allows students to learn a variety of concepts in both manual and automatics electrical and pneumatic controls frequently used across the manufacturing sector.

CSE 1110 - STRUCTURED PROGRAMMING 1
(CSE 1240- ROBOTICS PROGRAMMING 1 for students already enrolled in Computer Science)

The Arduino programmable microcontroller is an up and coming technology that allows students to experiment with programming while seeing the results of their programming control their electronics from the Electrical Assembly unit. The system uses a variety of hardwares including the Arduino Uno and Redbot Mainboard as well as CODE.ORG to teach the basics of coding.

ELT 1130 and ELT 1140 - ROBOTICS 1 and ROBOTICS APPLICATIONS 1

Each robotics semester concludes with an overarching project that brings all of the technical and design elements that students have learned through the year. This challenge could involve an autonomous robot challenge such as RobotSumo or a remote control challenge that includes a more significant design component. This year it will likely be in the form of an autonomous challenge and a direct control challenge(either tethered or IR)


So there you have it, my upcoming semester in a nutshell. I will be updating this blog with notes and planning from all of these credits as the summer goes on.

In case anyone is wondering, anything I have created and posted here is free game for your classroom under a Creative Commons licence. Have at any of it and make sure to comment on any improvements that you make to it.


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On Condensing ELT 1010

A couple of years ago a colleague mentioned that it would be great if we had a pre-made module for ELT 1010, an Alberta Ed. Career and Technology Studies (CTS) course that is a prerequisite for almost everything that I do in Robotics.
cartoon from xkcd.com

I've taken the liberty to summarize the curriculum using the major outcomes:

1. create a health and safety plan with special emphasis on conditions and factors related to the specific pathway or series of courses.
2. research common processes and methods of hazard identification, assessment and control specific to the pathway or series of courses.
3. apply the appropriate fabrication techniques, including proper soldering and component assembly procedures, to construct and test a simple electronic circuit.
4. apply the appropriate fabrication techniques to construct and test an electromagnetic device.
5. identify and assemble common electrical/electronic cables and connectors used in power, audio and video connections.
6. demonstrate established laboratory procedures and safe work practices
7. demonstrate basic competencies.
8. make personal connections to the cluster content and processes to inform possible pathway choices.

To this end, I will be putting parts of this module together in the following order and am happy to share what I have
in hopes that it might make someone else's life more simple as they step into the realm of teaching robotics.

  • Lab Safety
    • Powerpoint (Feel free to check the link and send feedback)
    • Lab Tour
    • Safety Quiz (minimum 80% on safety quiz to participate in course)

  • Basic Electrical Theory (to run concurrently with soldering due to lack of soldering irons)
    • Circuits, Ohm's Law, AC vs DC current
    • How to measure voltage (Multimeter use)
  • Soldering Basics (to run concurrently with electrical basics due to lack of soldering irons)
    • Soldering safety, terminology and workstation setup demo.
    • Soldering Activity(LED Light Board)
  • Electronics teardown
    • Students will be presented with an old electronic device from the recycling. They must:
      • Disassemble it.
      • Identify and photograph the major components (there will be support for this).
      • Put together a presentation on how those basic components work.
  • Final unit summary and review
    • Final quiz
    • Employability and Work Habits assessment (self and teacher assessed)


This module is meant to be a quick introduction and as I develop more than the safety presentation I will toss them up here.

For those interested in the theory portion, it will be drawing heavily from Sparkfun Electronics' online resources. (The linked page is just the tip of the iceberg)

I will also be using Collin Cunningham's wonderful, and slightly awkward, Youtube Videos

Feel free to comment if you know of any resources in the vein that could be helpful.