Makerspace at IS 24

Curriculum connections -- in what ways are the activities in the makerspace connected to the current curriculum in your school? Describe collaborations, if any, with teachers.

I am working with the 6th grade social studies teacher who is teaching geography and ancient civilizations right now. She has already brought her classes into the library for a research lesson on the ABC-CLIO World Geography database. The students have to research a country and make a travel guide book and for me, since I teach the entire 6th grade a library skills class, they will make a website about their country. Or maybe just a web page. I haven’t gotten to this yet. This way, I am teaching both coding, and how to create something that is relevant to what they are doing in social studies. I only have 18 students in my computer programming elective but I have 30 kids in each of my 6th grade library skills classes. I tried teaching coding to a much larger group last year and it was really challenging. Some kids understood that you had to be absolutely precise when copying code but some kids didn’t. Hence, they did not understand why their code wasn’t working when they went to look at it in a browser. For some kids, having to be so precise is tedious and takes too much effort. I understand. But the reward is worth it to see your creation on the web and know that you made something for the internet. So with a large group, if everyone makes just one little mistake, I have to check the code of 30 students, which means that while I am helping one student, 29 other students are not getting my help. It is much easier to teach coding to a smaller group so I am glad I have my computer programming elective this year. I will give it a go with coding with my larger classes, whereby I want to integrate their social studies lessons into my library classes, and see how they do.

Who is using the space? Do teachers bring classes to use the space during the day? Is it an afterschool club?

Last year I held an afterschool club on Wednesdays from 3-4. I taught the students how to use http://codecademy.org because I thought it would be fun for the students to work at their own pace, but it turned out that the site is really fun for adults and not for kids. It is an unforgiving program that doesn’t give you enough hints when you have made a mistake. It also lacks the bells and whistles that middle school students have grown accustomed to. I also introduced the students to other programs like Tynker and RunMarco. This year however, I am not running a club. Instead the principal gave me my own computer programming elective, which meets on Mondays and Thursdays, two periods a week. I received 12 laptops with the INNOVATION! grant money and I use them with the class. No other teachers use them as I need them for my own program and can’t risk them being broken and waiting for tech support to come out and fix them. Hence, the materials, the laptops, are solely for the kids in my class(es). (I do teach a “library skills” class to each 6th grade homeroom as well and I use the laptops with those classes also). Since my makerspace is an actual class and teachers don’t bring their students to my class, they nevertheless come for research classes and although I am not teaching HTML coding to those classes, I am teaching research and I take out the laptops during those times as well. So the laptops are getting a workout. They are used not just for my makerspace.

What is your makerspace like today?

My makerspace has become an actual course in the middle school that I work in. I teach a computer programming elective this year, which I did not teach last year. Last year I held the makerspace activities after school once a week, and taught a bit of HTML5 programming in my middle school library classes and in my college research skills class, but this year I have my own class dedicated to HTML programming! It is an elective class which meets twice per week. There are 18 8th grade students in the class and I am teaching them, at this point, very basic HTML5 commands. We are up to learning how to link documents to each other and to link to outside URLs and will very soon start to learn how to add images to our web pages. The students use two programs this year that they did not use last year. One is the Editra text editor. This is a free program available for download that allows students to type in their code and save it to their flash drives. Next, students check their files at http://validator.w3.org. This is a site that allows you to upload your HTML files and it will tell you line by line where your errors are. It is very important to be able to check your code line by line because one small error can mean the difference between the page showing up properly in a browser and not showing up at all. If students have made mistakes, they will have to go back to that line and correct their code before saving and uploading again. Students then log in to their Neocities accounts where they upload their files to their website hosted by this free HTML hosting site. In preparation for each class, I create a sheet of code like the one below and I print out 18 copies with the printer that was purchased with the grant. Students are to copy the code exactly as they see it on the sheet. I thought of making a wiki and copying the code to the wiki, but then I ran the risk of students cheating and copying and pasting the code directly into their files. And they wouldn’t learn the code if they did that. It would certainly save on paper and ink, but the students wouldn’t learn anything. Once students have uploaded their HTML files that they create in class to their Neocities accounts, they are “live” on the Web. You can see one student’s site here: http://ahhcp.neocities.org/relativeURLs.html. Not everybody has gotten as far as this student has (most have), but you can go to the site, hit ctrl-u and take a look at the code underneath. All of the code was done by hand.

Run Marco!

Yesterday and today I taught my students how to use Run Marco! It is very similar to scratch in the way you drag the commands to the left of the screen to tell Marco what to do. It was a success as 90+% of the students were doing the program. It is so much more fun than Codecademy, whereby many of my students gave up with it. One of yesterday's students didn't want to play it though, she wanted to continue to work on making a Web page using the Editra program, which of course was great. I found Run Marco! through edshelf the other day and gave it a try with my students yesterday and it was overall much much more fun than Codecademy.

Commands in Run Marco!

It is colorful, has music, is fun, and is somewhat easy. The students did run into snags though. I had several hands raised and I went from student to student helping them and I found myself challenged as well. Even though the program took about five minutes for me to learn, there were still things I wasn't familiar with. One thing I found with many students was that when they ran into problems with their code, I had them drag their commands to the trash and start again. This worked on at least two occasions and I was glad I was able to help.

Some additional coding programs

Run Marco: a coding adventure around the world

From edshelf: "Play an epic adventure game and have fun while learning to code i.e. program computers. Use visual instructions to guide Marco through a series of levels as he tries to discover himself. In this journey you will learn how to think as a software developer one step at a time! Instructions are in the form of the standard visual programming language “Google Blockly”, which is used by the official code.org tutorials."

Tynker

From edshelf: "Tynker is a new computing platform designed specifically to teach children computational learning and programming skills in a fun and imaginative way. Tynker is inspired by Scratch from MIT. It is a completely browser-based implementation written using Open Web standards such as Javascript, HTML5, CSS3 and does not use Flash."

Made with code

From edshelf: "Made with Code builds on our long­-standing commitment to increasing diversity in Computer Science. Since 2010 we’ve invested $40 million in organizations like Code.org, Girls Who Code, NCWIT and Black Girls Code. We are committing an additional $50 million over the next three years to further these efforts."

Code.org

From edshelf: "Launched in 2013, Code.org® is a non-profit dedicated to expanding participation in computer science by making it available in more schools, and increasing participation by women and underrepresented students of color. Our vision is that every student in every school should have the opportunity to learn computer science. We believe computer science and computer programming should be part of the core curriculum in education, alongside other science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses, such as biology, physics, chemistry and algebra."

LearningDataScience.org

From edshelf: "LearningDataScience.org is a collection of some of the most powerful and effective data science learning resources from across the web, including online classes, books, coding tutorials, articles, and lectures."

Kodable

From edshelf: "LOST IN SPACE The furry aliens, known as Fuzzes were exploring space when their ship unexpectedly crashed on the maze-covered planet Smeeborg. The naturally curious fuzzes need kids to program them to explore all the colorful Technomazes on the planet’s surface.ACCOMPANYING CURRICULUM (Common Core Aligned)Upload your roster for easy sign on, get lesson plans, and track what concepts and standards students are learning when you create a free account at Kodable.com. (Homeschool and Parent curriculum available as well)WHY CODE WITH KODABLE?Even before your children can pronounce the word “algorithm” they have an astounding ability to learn how to use them. Today’s best programmers fell in love with coding at a young age by experimenting with the concepts taught in Kodable. Understanding the basics of programming empowers your child for the jobs of tomorrow, and expands your child’s mind to solve problems today in more intelligent ways.Kids learn the fundamentals of every modern programming language in a fun and inviting way."

Trinket

From edshelf: "Trinket helps you teach with code."

ComputerScienceOnline

From edshelf: "ComputerScienceOnline.org is an in-depth website for potential and current students considering a career with computers, software engineering, and more. Our staff is passionate about technology and dedicated to helping others find the information they need to make decisions about their future in the fast moving and rapidly growing tech industry."

K-8 Intro to Computer Science

From edshelf: "This 20-hour course introduces core computer science and programming concepts. The course is designed for use in classrooms for grades K-8, but it is fun to learn at all ages."

Coding Club: Day 2

Two boys seeming to enjoy themselves

The coding club met for the second time yesterday. This time I took photos. Most kids went on Codecademy and continued where they left off the week before, and some kids went on Scratch. Scratch they learned with Mr. F. in technology class and they love it! I can see where it is a lot more fun than Codecademy because it's like a game and you can program the characters any way you like - make them certain colors, make them run around, make them talk, give them speech bubles, etc. Codecademy is not like that. You do lessons and you have to read the instructions. I can see where kids are having trouble though. It is because they are not reading the instructions. So I help them with their code and I tell them what they are doing wrong, but I don't think that is helpful. I have to model reading the instructions for them and with them. I also have to get farther in the lessons myself.

Three girls coding after school

This week I had just a few fewer kids than last week so I had enough laptops to go around. I had exactly 20 kids for exactly 20 laptops. The four MacBooks that I have are still the favorite. I would have loved to buy more of them but they are almost $500. more expensive than the Windows machines. Still, I hope to buy more of them in the future. They are a big hit and the first to go when the club starts.

At least two kids gave up with coding already and decided to use the time to do their homework.  The whole point of the club though is to turn kids on to coding and to expose them to coding and hopefully spark an interest that might develop into a career for them - a lucrative career.