Written by By far my favourite part of these Face 2 Face meetings is that I had a chance to have relevant and meaningful conversations with passionate educators who are working on similar projects. I get to hear about other peoples ideas and actions and discuss plans moving forward for both of us.
I have some smaller next steps that I will try in order to keep my plan rolling. Ruth Eichholtz had some great ideas about integrating mentorship into her Coding Club as a way to strengthen the community of coders and enrich their learning. This is an angle I hadn’t really thought of before and I hope to come up with more and more opportunities for my students to become mentors and be mentored in STEM. There are a few events on the horizon I can already think of!
I also recently watched a fantastic webinar on Global Math Department looking at Computational Thinking (the recording on Global Math Department might still be up). Although those ideas were framed differently than my action plan, there were some very similar big ideas (e.g. having students build/use tech to enable Math learning/understanding). This opened my eyes to a lot of research and work that is already being done in this area. Now that I know the key words, I can go on a big hunt for resources.
I am going to also experiment with some smaller coding tasks for my students in Math class with a little twist. For the first task I told them what to build. At this point in our Patterning and Analytic Geometry unit the students have an understanding of the processes we use. I think they are ready to be able to identify which parts of the unit can be effectively automated by computers, and build those tool themselves. Hopefully we can end by discussing the question: “when is it appropriate to bring computers into the problem solving process?”.
How will I present my findings? A scratch program would be fun, but probably an ineffective use of the tool. I’ll leave this one as undecided for now.
Thanks again to Garth and Justin for a great day.
Hi Andrew,
You HAVE to read Kyle’s latest post! You two are very much on the same path, and no doubt have a lot of good tips to share as you go down this road. I would share with you the use of digital fabrication for engagement in Math. I am in the midst of planning a Grade 6 3D Geometry unit that will integrate our 3D printer, and the accompanying software (Tinkercad). Accessing, exploring and experimenting with this software in a guided-inquiry unit will no doubt yield some great feedback.
That being said, digital fabrication is much more than just 3D printing. Check out this artile from ISTE: http://www.iste.org/explore/articleDetail?articleid=283&category=Toolbox&article=Make+math+concrete+with+digital+fabrication&utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=Promoted&utm_campaign=EdTekHub
This article talks about the use of construction and manipulatives as applicable for all ages and stages. I’d love to know what you think…
Can’t wait to read more!
garth.
Thank you for the link, that looks very interesting and I am excited to check it out further. This got me thinking that we could design a project that uses software like this for G9 optimization of volumes and surface areas next year!
Kyle and I have been having some great conversations and we will be meeting next month to put some more of these ideas into action with some other teachers, very excited.