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.