Reflections of a Techie

Dust off Donald, Let's see the Magic in the Golden Ratio

I'm old so I remember the glory days of Disney.  I have to admit that this little jewel had slipped my memory, but when we dusted it off and used it with our students....wow....the power of Disney to make something interesting came to life.

Donald in MathMagic Land does many great things.  We are in the process of studying ratios, specifically the golden ratio.  This is the perfect movie to show them.  I think one of the most amazing parts of the movie is where Donald shows how this ratio comes into play with musical instruments...ha!  get the pun?  (We have an old VCR copy of the movie, but you'll get the idea from this YouTube clip.)

Well, we tried it.  Some of the strings students went and dragged their instruments into our classroom.  At first we couldn't stretch the string tight enough to just do as in the movie.  But eventually we were able to replicate Donald's experience.

Students at this time of the year are darn hard to engage nevermind impress.  This old, old movie did it.  Now the kids are totally pumped to learn about the 2nd most famous irrational number.  In our class opinion, pi takes 1st place and phi takes 2nd place.

It will be fun to see what kinds of drawings they are able to make of the nautilus shell.  The best part of all this is that learning is fun and it is setting them up for their next unit at the start of 7th grade.

I Hate ROBOLAB

That's a pretty strong statement but it sums up my 7 years not so pleasant experience with the software. 

Picture this...we're working on our bots and my kids have been working hard to figure out gear ratios.  OK, they're 6th graders and ratios are still a bit foreign to them.  We've spent the whole week talking about ratios and what they mean.  And they've got their bot built and are ready to start the trials...we were to change into different gear configurations and see what the effect was on speed.

I only needed Robolab to allow the kids to create the simplest of programs...just a short 4 second turn on of both motors.  Not so much to ask.  But Robolab IR interface is a continuing problem in our school environment. 

First of all, we don't have the proper network permissions for the kids to be able to plug in the USB Infrared Tower...so I have to log onto the computers.  So much for network security.

Then it won't "see" the IR tower because we have too much light.  We try putting the tower in a box, under a desk in a box and so forth.  Still our program won't download into the RCX brick.  I find out that we haven't installed the patch.  Whatever the darn patch is..........

It's enough to discourage teachers and students.  It's why I hate technology.  When it's so complicated that you just want to throw in the towel ....well, all the cool learning is gone.  The kids were so disappointed that we could run their tests...

Not to worry.  I called a friend who has a stand alone computer not invovled in the network.  She brought it over to my room and we just wrote one program that everyone used.  The IR towers worked great and the bricks got the instruction set. 

Monday we'll run our trials.  I wish I could permanently borrow my friend's computer.  That's so not practical.  I simply lack the resources or know-how to get this to work on what I have in my room.  And by the way, let me tell you that our NXT software, LabView, works like a charm.  If I only had enough NXT bots, I'd be just fine.

Using motion dectectors to explore speed and velocity

I used the Go! Motion Vernier probes this week to teach about speed.  Historically students have struggled with this idea and the graphing as freaked them out.  Not this year.  I borrowed a motion detector from a colleague and set it up in the front of my room.

The labs that Vernier suggested were powerful teaching tools and my kids "got" it.  Right off the bat and better than any other year I can imagine.

It was powerful to project the graphs onto my Smart Board.  These huge graphs made getting everyone at the same place at the same time pretty easy.  I loaded a blank graph onto the SB and used 2 students of very different heights to slowly walk a distance I had pre-measured.  This way they figured out how the detector worked and got into the spirit of the activity.

Next I projected a graph onto the board and they took one minute to plan how they would walk so that the line the motion detector plotted would match the one I displayed.  Discussion between shoulder partners was abuzz with tons of ideas.

When they started to walk, it only took a couple of student tries for them figure out what worked and what didn't work.  Once they had the idea, we worked on strategies for getting a closer and closer match.  Without even realizing it, the students learned that to have a flat line on the graph you needed to stop moving; to get the line to have a steeper slope they needed to speed up and so on.

One of my perennial science ba-humbug kids said to me..."hey I actually get this."

We added on just a bit....I asked them to use the Smart Board pen and draw a prediction line of what would happen to graph if they walked toward the detector instead of away.  Out of the 4 classes, 3 classes correctly predicted.  All classes "got it" before 10 seconds had passed.

Here is a perfect case where the lesson wasn't about the technology, but what the technology allowed us to discover about the concept.  It's why I love technology and can't imagine how I'd teach some concepts nearly as well without using it.  I wouldn't want to go back to the pre-SmartBoard days or not have access to probeware. 

I'm just starting to learn about probes...now I have 2 under my belt...this motion one and the temperature probe.  Maybe I can get a grant to buy a force one or the UVA or UVB dectector.  this is engaging science...it is science where we learn by doing not just by reading.  It makes the textbook stuff come alive and they really comprehend what they read.

Tapping into the best learning style

It's the end of the year and I'm knee deep in teaching Force & Motion.  I usually try and save this for the end of the year because it is highly engaging content even though kids think they'll die with all the math.  Lots of moaning and groaning when I tell them that physics uses the language of math to explain how things move!!!!

Unfortunatley we don't have enough time to really discuss cool, but only related material to F & M.  right now we're using Lego Robotics to study gears.  Specially how gears can make the TankBot go faster or slower depending on what gears you install.  I use these because the kids love robotics.

I thought one way I might continue this conversation is to use a wiki for expanding their ideas.  On the wiki I thought I'd put all the things you might expect to see in a F & M unit....Newton's laws, motion, speed, work, simple machines...but then I'd have a separate section of Robotics.  So I went in search of cool things on robots and Mars is the natural choice.

I called the page...Fact or Fiction??? and then hyperlinked to Mars rover animation.  With 4 hours, almost 300 comment flooded into the wiki.  Because I'm also trying to teach them how to actually have a conversation they did a pretty good job making reasonable comments.

Here's the thing..............they loved using this format for their learning.  They spent hours online last night and could hardly wait to see what new treasures I brought them to see tonight (can you tell me about the 7 minutes of terror???)  As we near bedtime on the second night of the conversation, they logged almost another 200 comments.  What teacher wouldn't be thrilled if even half of these comments were good one and that kids were busy talking to each other about space exploration????

As I reflect on my choice of using a wiki, maybe I made the wrong 2.0 choice.  I probably should have used a blog and then worked on creating threads.  I will consider this when I finish....and a good friend suggested that I accumulate some of the conversation and then have student summarize what was said.  I think that was a great suggestion.

Motivating Kids to Practice math

I'm always looking around for things to motivate my kids to get better and better on the basic...you know those boring old math facts.  That's not easy to do because there are so many things that compete for the time and attention.

Luckily I went to the NCTM conference in Salt Lake City.  There I ran into a booth that was selling an online version of the Game of 24.  I played this for hours when my children were young and it never ceased to challenge them and kept them asking to play more.  So when I saw the online version, I thought what could be better?

Luckily again, I was able to get a "free" subscription for my math classes to play until the end of the school year.  First in Math is the name of the vender selling this version.  It took me a bit to set up my classes (and I think the user name and passwords are way too clunky)...but then we were off.

Students earn "stickers" for successfully completing different levels of skill sets.  There are bonus games to play and different areas that all practice different skills.  Actually the documentation isn't half bad and pretty clearly explains things.  Although I'll tell you that the kids figured out way faster than I could digest the documentation where and how to accumulate stickers quickly.

Right now my 2nd hour has almost 10,000 stickers after 2 weeks of optional play on your own time and my 1st hour class has about 3,000.  The most obvious thing to do was to setup a competition between the two hours and 4 or 5 kids in 2nd hour took the challenge seriously....they have buried the 1st hour.  I think that might have been discouraging for them UNTIl I helped them see that it was really only the effort of those 4 or 5...and that if they could find 10 that would do half as much...they could be back in it.

So with a renewed commitment to beat 2nd hour they left for the weekend.  We'll see.

What I can tell you is that for some types of kids this is really engaging.  For others, they just don't care.  Like so many things in school...you have to use multiple means to find engagement.  The big question will come when I try to figure out the cost benefit of this....