Week 4: A little more open ended

Last week, we were pretty good about keeping the kids focused and on task, and I think we were helped by having very specific plans for them.

This week -- not so much.

With regards to the Vietnam collaboration we brought up in our last post, our contact set up a Google site for us that can be found here: http://sites.google.com/site/olpcneedhamvietnam/

Anyway, without letter writing to get the kids focused on a uniform task this week at the onset, I feel like we made it difficult to get them on the same page later. Any suggestions for small 10-15 minute exercises/activities to engage them?

Some kids settled down and went back to their TurtleArt name-writing activities -- the ones that took to it have really gone for it! Two of our fifth graders are almost finished, and it's fascinating to see how they work with the program since it can be pretty inefficient. One kid piled a bunch of his frequently used blocks in the lower corner as he worked so he wouldn't have to keep scrolling back up. The two kids (of the seven) that were actively working on the name-writing project got to learn about the 'action' blocks, though I'm pretty sure they're still a bit away from grasping the concept of encapsulating commands into a function :P
It was also super cute -- both kept asking the others, "Hey, are you going to try writing your name in TurtleArt?"

One response they did get was, "No, it's too hard for me."
Dear readers, do you have any advice for us as to how we might be able to re-engage some of these students?

(On the other hand, we did take a little mini-foray into TamTam today, and came out with a pretty fun remix of the Star Wars theme from an unexpectedly musically talented kid! We'll try to obtain a recording for next time!)

Week 2: TurtleArt + Maze

We were excited to see how the kids responded after a week with their XOs -- had the novelty worn off? Did they continue to explore at home? Last week, we asked them to come back with the most interesting thing they found. Unfortunately, we didn't find the range of distance or chat over the mesh in the sleepy suburbs, but the kids brought back some cute videos and 'Speak' provided general amusement.

This week, we introduced them to TurtleArt. I can't speak for my collaborators Elsa and Andy, but I was pretty skeptical about our ability to keep them engaged and interested in the program. I'm glad to have been proven wrong!

It took us easily the first half of class (if not more!) to get the kids to settle down and get to the task we'd set up for them this week, but that's something we're working on. We think we'll have it a little more under wraps next week by setting up something more structured not involving XOs at the beginning.

The challenge this week was to get a turtle to navigate the maze, as demonstrated in the screenshot below:

[screenshot coming soon!]

It was pretty cute -- it took them a little bit of nudging to get them to catch on to the fact that each grid represented more than one unit, but even the second grader understood the task! (I suspect more guess and check may have been involved, but still.)

We mollified his "oh, this is hard" response by telling him this was the sort of thing that much older kids were doing! I'm not sure how motivating he found it, but on the whole, I was really pleased to see that the collaborative theme established continued on :)

Next week, we're planning to set them up with some penpals in Vietnam -- Elsa knows more about this, and introduce arcs in TurtleArt by encouraging them to write their own names.

First Day of Class

We taught our first after-school class today. The idea behind the curriculum we're using is to teach math and programming skills to our 7 2nd-5th graders by using turtle art. Our class is all boys, which is unfortunate, but they're all very well-behaved and excited to be there. Today, we talked about OLPC and handed out laptops. Lots of chaos ensued.

We started off the lesson by talking about what XO's are, and what OLPC is. Mostly we just explained some of the differences between XO's/sugar and what the students are probably used to using. The first thing they wanted to know was if they could get on the internet. So much for not telling them about networking on the first day, as we had planned... We also showed some picture of kids using XO's in lots of different places, and were surprised about how excited they were to see that. They all started leaning over their desks to get a look. We're thinking about maybe incorporating a weekly OLPC story, since they seemed to think that was pretty cool.

Next we had a discussion about care of the laptops, and came up with 7 of the most ridiculous contracts I have ever seen, ranging from "No distrucshun, no spilling" to "I will treat my laptop as if it were my DSi." We sent home forms for their parents too.

After that, we gave them their laptops. We had originally planned to give them some instructions for using the Record activity and then have them find something they liked about the XO and make a short presentation on it. They were way too busy changing their name, solving mazes, making friends on the mesh network, and, in the case of one of the students, programming in turtle art, to do any such thing. I'm sure if we hadn't taken all but five activities off the home screen they would have opened all of them. We did manage to teach them how to find the journal and how to get files of a USB drive, how to turn off the computer properly, as well as some other practical things like unfreezing the touchpad and left vs. right click.

About 15 minutes in, they remembered to ask about chat again, so we told them about the rest of the activities. They are going to try to figure out if the mesh network stretches between their houses tonight - there's a chat scheduled for 7pm. We also have a pair of brothers who said they would try to see how far the network stretches. They also learned about the different mesh channels and that there's a limit on how many people can be connected on one at a time. There were about 5 people in one chat before it stopped working.

Some of the things we thought were interesting:

• If we can get one kid excited about something, then the whole class will know in about 2 minutes. If not, the only way to spread information is to make everyone close their computers.
• All of the kids started deciding how good they were at the Maze activity (e.g. "I'm really good at this!", "I'm ok, but not the best") even though they couldn't see each other's work.
• Some things they picked up on right away, like how to open activities. Some things that we would have expected them to have seen before on other computers, like left and right mouse buttons, we had to tell them several times before they got the hang of it. Our turtle art programmer figured out how what turtle art was for right away, but couldn't figure out how to delete blocks.
  
• They didn't think the computers were slow at all, which we had been worried about. The only time they got impatient was the initial boot-up and opening an activity for the first time

Planning for next week - We are going to have them solve mazes in Turtle Art, so we were really glad they liked mazes so much. We'll distribute some sample code that loads an easy maze and draws a grid and then tell them to try to solve that one, then harder ones. They will learn basic turtle art controls and also Cartesian coordinate systems in order to solve the mazes. We're also going to try to introduce making presentations again, but that's a secondary goal.

Things we're concerned about for future classes - we'd love suggestions!

• The atmosphere today was really collaborative, and we'd like to harness that in the future to make sure we don't get too much of a learning gap. This is particularly important because we have a large age range in the classroom - we don't want the 5th graders to go off on their own. We also have one student who seems to know a lot more about computers but is less social, so we're trying to think of ways to both keep him engaged and get him to interact more.
  
• A lot of the kids seemed really interested in seeing the inside of the laptop and learning about repair, but we're hesitant to unleash them with screwdrivers. We're thinking about maybe showing pictures, or taking them out in groups of 2 to see the laptop taken apart.
• We're planning on only talking to them as a group at the beginning of class to minimize the amount of times we have to get their attention when the computers are out. Hopefully they'll get most of their initial exploring done during the week before next class, but we're still a little concerned about keeping them on task.