When I applied for the Digital Technologies position, I knew I wanted to develop a course that involved creating physical digital outcomes but it wasn't until I started actually planning what this would look like that I realised how many resources and options are out there!
There are a multitude of microprocessors and components on the market as well as robotics kits like Lego Mindstorms and Edison, down to Sphero and Cozmo. I knew what I wanted to achieve in my programme, the challenge after choosing a focus was deciding which products would be the best tools to help with this.
When it came to crunch my three major specifications for the products I chose where that they had to have good online support in terms of lesson plans, projects and ideas. Secondly they needed to be open-ended enough that students could be creative and develop their own ideas with them. The third specification was that I could purchase everything I needed in one go as a kit or from a salesperson who knew the New Zealand Curriculum and their products well, therefore knew what I was talking about when I said I need it to be able to do this or that.
The one product I'm going to talk about in this blog is the micro:bit. My goal for the overall course was to provide experiences for students to learn to develop digital software and hardware using play-based pedagogies.
It was easy to find resources and tools to facilitate this for the junior school. Modern Teaching Aids were able to meet my three requirements above for the junior school resources. However, finding tools that were open-ended enough for the senior school, yet still provided enough resources for me as a teacher starting out in this area was tricky.
Until I stumbled across Mindkits. The staff at Mindkits were incredibly helpful. They knew what they were talking about and more importantly, knew what I was talking about with my vague questions!
Tim steered me towards micro:bits and moto:bits as an answer to my search and I am so pleased with the purchase.
So far I've used them with Years 11-13 and they love them.
We started off with play-based sessions. I gave the students a basic kit between two and asked what they might be able to do with these. I really want the students to be comfortable playing to learn as too often they want us to give them all the answers but I believe learning in technology becomes much deeper when students develop the understandings through trial and error. Of course, I've given them basic guidelines and supported them to find solutions when they've been really stuck but my favourite question is "what do you think?" and it's amazing how often they quickly come to a solution and feel so proud of themselves for being able to work it out.
It was also an interesting way of getting to know my learners. Some of the students worked really well in pairs, communicating and collaborating effectively. Some of them sat back and didn't contribute, while others took over and found it hard to describe what they were doing to their partners. Some students wanted instructions so found tutorials on the internet, while others were happy to just play around with the software and figure out intuitively how to complete the challenges I set.
This week the Year 11s have been using them to develop their programming skills. We started off the term programming in Pycharm but some students were finding it really difficult to get their heads around the flow of programming. When they create similar programs to run on micro:bit they are much more engaged and seem to be motivated to persevere and problem solve much more effectively. It also helped that if they were stuck they could convert their program to blocks and find their errors or add in a block for code they didn't know and then convert it back again to see if it worked.
The Year 12s and 13s are creating robots incorporating the micro:bit with a moto:bit (another kit from SparkFun that I purchased from Mindkits). Again this was a brilliant option for me as it has all the components needed to build a basic robot that will meet the specifications needed for Level 2 and 3 as long as the students add some components they have created and are able to test, debug and modify their robot in an iterative manner.
I am planning to build up electronics skills throughout the junior school program also, so in future years students will come in with some basic electronics skills and experience. I began introducing these skills in Year 9 with paper circuits today. What a fantastic experience this was! Again using my play-based pedagogy I gave groups of two students a small lithium battery, some copper tape, two LEDs and a piece of A4 paper and asked whether they could make one LED go and then two. The students were so excited to have a go, it was really great to see how they used their cross-curricular and prior knowledge from within their groups to collaborate and figure out how to get a complete circuit. There were great discussions about the importance of getting the LEDs around the 'right' way, what the + on the batteries actually meant and experiments to see the maximum number of lights they could get one battery to power.
Learning can be fun!
There are a multitude of microprocessors and components on the market as well as robotics kits like Lego Mindstorms and Edison, down to Sphero and Cozmo. I knew what I wanted to achieve in my programme, the challenge after choosing a focus was deciding which products would be the best tools to help with this.
When it came to crunch my three major specifications for the products I chose where that they had to have good online support in terms of lesson plans, projects and ideas. Secondly they needed to be open-ended enough that students could be creative and develop their own ideas with them. The third specification was that I could purchase everything I needed in one go as a kit or from a salesperson who knew the New Zealand Curriculum and their products well, therefore knew what I was talking about when I said I need it to be able to do this or that.
The one product I'm going to talk about in this blog is the micro:bit. My goal for the overall course was to provide experiences for students to learn to develop digital software and hardware using play-based pedagogies.
It was easy to find resources and tools to facilitate this for the junior school. Modern Teaching Aids were able to meet my three requirements above for the junior school resources. However, finding tools that were open-ended enough for the senior school, yet still provided enough resources for me as a teacher starting out in this area was tricky.
Until I stumbled across Mindkits. The staff at Mindkits were incredibly helpful. They knew what they were talking about and more importantly, knew what I was talking about with my vague questions!
Tim steered me towards micro:bits and moto:bits as an answer to my search and I am so pleased with the purchase.So far I've used them with Years 11-13 and they love them.
We started off with play-based sessions. I gave the students a basic kit between two and asked what they might be able to do with these. I really want the students to be comfortable playing to learn as too often they want us to give them all the answers but I believe learning in technology becomes much deeper when students develop the understandings through trial and error. Of course, I've given them basic guidelines and supported them to find solutions when they've been really stuck but my favourite question is "what do you think?" and it's amazing how often they quickly come to a solution and feel so proud of themselves for being able to work it out.
It was also an interesting way of getting to know my learners. Some of the students worked really well in pairs, communicating and collaborating effectively. Some of them sat back and didn't contribute, while others took over and found it hard to describe what they were doing to their partners. Some students wanted instructions so found tutorials on the internet, while others were happy to just play around with the software and figure out intuitively how to complete the challenges I set.
The Year 12s and 13s are creating robots incorporating the micro:bit with a moto:bit (another kit from SparkFun that I purchased from Mindkits). Again this was a brilliant option for me as it has all the components needed to build a basic robot that will meet the specifications needed for Level 2 and 3 as long as the students add some components they have created and are able to test, debug and modify their robot in an iterative manner.
I am planning to build up electronics skills throughout the junior school program also, so in future years students will come in with some basic electronics skills and experience. I began introducing these skills in Year 9 with paper circuits today. What a fantastic experience this was! Again using my play-based pedagogy I gave groups of two students a small lithium battery, some copper tape, two LEDs and a piece of A4 paper and asked whether they could make one LED go and then two. The students were so excited to have a go, it was really great to see how they used their cross-curricular and prior knowledge from within their groups to collaborate and figure out how to get a complete circuit. There were great discussions about the importance of getting the LEDs around the 'right' way, what the + on the batteries actually meant and experiments to see the maximum number of lights they could get one battery to power.
Learning can be fun!
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