Sphero Balls (and tracks)
Today we busted out the Sphero balls for the first time and played around with programming them this morning (10 balls for 21 students). It was really great for the students to have something tangible to go along with all the “screen-reaction” coding. We had to borrow the grd. 6’s ipads to connect to them and it doesn’t sound like that is something that we will be able to do often at all (liability issues). Last Friday we had really nasty weather (-37c) and some of the buses and students were not at school so, on a whim, we built tracks for our Sphero balls! This was really fun and they got really creative as they went on but it also made the students really, really excited to do the Spheros. I would do it again next time just for the sheer buy-in factor. A cool thing was that my “best” coders builders were the worst wood builders and vice-versa. This led to a natural collaboration that carried over to the technical building/coding today.
Automation and CAREER EDUCATION 8
Our class has had a few very interesting discussions (tied into Career Education 8) around the way the world is trending towards automation.
Curricular Content:
- influence of technology in learning and working
- factors affecting types of jobs in the community.
We have all agreed that this is an area where it is better to be the hammer than the nail and having Coding skills will help them with the potential loss of future jobs as the word moves toward more and more automation.
When I took on this Coding project/proposal last spring, it was meant to be within a Science context –and possibly dipping our toes into a few other subject areas. I am now discovering how naturally Coding blends into different areas of different subjects. I’m assuming that I am only going to be scratching the surface in the next few years. I look back on how, for example, I am a much better Social Studies or Math teacher than I was when I started teaching these subject areas 10years ago and I am looking forward to making progress in my Coding teaching skills (read: ideas and cross-curricular tie-ins) as the years go on.
Thoughts?
First Post from Neufeld
Looking forward to getting going here!
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