Squeak...That Motivating little Mouse Strikes Again...Programming with 7th graders and Writing to an Authentic Audience

Today was a great day in the classroom.  Kids were engaged and actively working with their programs and editing their user's manual that they've started to create in a wiki.  The room felt like there was purpose and so on target.  Not that everyone was doing the same thing by any means, but each student had their own mission and was "about it".

Squeak is just a great program.  I have so many kids that go home at night and can't wait to finish the project they started at school.  So they have downloaded the program on their computer and come in with a finished product.  Everyday I have to think up something new for them to solve.  So today I thought I'd let them do the problem solving.  They're going to take one of the problems that another class is working on in MicroWorlds and try and solve it with Squeak.  Those little pets that use to run by batteries...they're going to invent them with Squeak.

Other students were busy editing what we've learned about Squeak.  Since there really hasn't been much of a reference source to go to for help, the classes decided they'd rather write a manual than another portfolio reflection.  We sat at the beginning of class and worked on listing what each person had learned as a comment, grouped those comments and now they are going back and summarizing those comments into some kind of cohesive pages that will form a user's manual written by kids for kids.

Today they are still editing and they decided they should be putting in screenshots to make it better.  That required me to show them how to use Photodraw and then they were off.  It really doesn't take much steering and they're focused on what they want to do.  On Tuesday we decided as a class to start using the Page Discussion feature of the wiki to leave messages for each other to help with knowing where the editing needs to be done.  We'll see how well that goes.