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?"

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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).

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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.