Coding Matariki Stars with mBots

This week we have been celebrating Matariki and we have had lots of activities and competitions. Many of these activities involved the theme of stars so  decided to continue this theme with my Year 8 class this morning. We have been coding our mBots to move, make noises, make lights come on, react to sensors. Today, we were coding our mBots to move in a star pattern.
First of all, we drew stars on paper without taking our pencils off the page.
Then we looked at what we would need in mBlock to code the star. They already know the repeat block.
These were the blocks they needed to use. The tricky part was setting the variables to the correct values so the mBot will turn the correct amount on the points of the stars.

The students showed fabulous resilience today and went about the task of trial and error really happily.

We went out into the carpark about half way through. We drew big stars on the ground and walked the path so they could feel the actions that the mBot needed to take.

When they were testing the movement of the mBots in the class, we decided to tape a board marker pen to the front so it could draw on the table top. The students could then see the motion clearer and see what changes needed to be made.

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The students have been writing this up on their blogs and explain it much better than me.

Florence
Giovani
Karlos
Sakshi
Ellenora
Akuhata

AS91627 - Form Development - Prep for students

Planning for AS91627 - Producing drawings in 2D and 3D, looking at form sheet. .
We are looking to develop their work on form in a more abstract way, slowly moving towards product concepts. We need to have completed the design brief and the design elements sheets before starting this step.

Resources

Link to blog post planning - Pattern and Texture
Link to blog post planning - Form
Link to blog post planning - Colour and Shape
Link to class site

Link to help page on the class site - includes worked examples and screencasts of explanations

Learning Outcomes

• Look at their drawn work in different ways.
• Learn how to use a wider variety of media to create their work and rely less on the standard use of drawing pencil and coloured pencil.
• Create 2D and 3D drawings based on their form sheet.
• To be able to use the information from the design brief to guide them in their developments.

Materials and Equipment

Drawing pencils - only to be used in a support role, not as the main media for the work
Black outliner pens
White pencils
White paper, brown paper, coloured sugar papers


Form drawings and models in pencil and various media.
Look at these drawings as a base to find forms to use. If you are reminded of anything else as you work, then include images from that into your sheet.

Inquiry Question 5 - Hypothesis

1. Share your findings about the nature and extent of the student challenge. Make sure it is clear what evidence from your inquiry supports each finding.
2. Explain how some of the data you have used to build a profile of the students’ learning will be used as baseline data at the end of the year.

Learning Issue	Reflective Questions
The students start their project work and don’t finish it at all or to a standard that does not achieve at NCEA Level 3. Blog post here with analysis of results. The NA results are nearly all because the work is incomplete. The class is very mixed in terms of experience in DVC and in motivation.	What can I do to encourage my students to finish their design projects and achieve at NCEA Level 3 DVC? Can I teach the whole class to the same high level as the 4 potential scholarship students in the class? How can I support my students in feeling positive about what they can achieve?

If ... Then thoughts...

• If I let all of my class work at a higher level then they will be motivated to complete their work and achieve.
• If I focus on improving the mindset of the whole class, they will be able to think more positively about their ability to complete all of their work to a high standard.

Initial Data

Overall results analysis over time

Inquiry Group - Know your Learners - Statistics

Sharing the why

Preliminary findings

Mindset check in

Warm Up Activity - Back Drawing

Today my senior class did a short warm up activity to get them loosened up for the lesson. They got into pairs (and one three). One rested on the back of the other and drew on paper. The other had to lean on the wall with their paper and draw what they could feel being drawn on the paper on their back. This then evolved into writing messages to see if they could understand them. This then changed to larger groups trying to pass messages through a few of them like a drawn version of the  Chinese Whispers game.
It got them all laughing and warmed up at the start of the lesson where I wanted them to start drawing developments of their forms.

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Organising the Literacy on my Class Site

I have been having a shuffle about on my class site today and have started to put all of the literacy activities that I have made over time into one tab so they are easy to fond and access.

So far, there are three sections. Activities / Games, Literacy related to design analysis and SOLO structured activities.

A lot of these activities are included in the process of the projects as well as being seperated out in this section.

Here is the link to the Literacy page on my blog as it is at the moment

Mindset Check In

Today, I gave my students some sticky notes and they were asked to write their reactions to 5 statements.

Here are the statements that were put up on the board.

Statement 1

Your intelligence is a fixed thing

Statement 2

You can’t get any smarter

Statement 3

You can learn skills up to a certain level then stop

Statement 4

You can’t learn how to do everything - we are only good at
certain things

Statement 5

I can’t get any better at things I am no good at

Here are their responses. They wrote them onto the sticky notes and I typed them up as they wrote them.

"Educators who value the importance of providing challenging opportunities for students find that students react to the challenge in different ways. Some students have a “Bring it on!” approach and embrace the challenge with enthusiasm. These students realise that they may not be successful and might even fail at a task or two, but want to take the risk and stretch themselves. Other students feel threatened by the challenge, are afraid they will not succeed, and will often give up before they put much effort into it. It is imperative that teachers develop a climate in their classroom where failure is viewed as an expected and very important part of the learning process and students learn to reflect and redirect so that they can approach a challenging task in a new way or with more effort." 

(from "Mindsets in the Classroom: Building a Growth Mindset Learning Community" by Mary Cay Ricci)

The student responses were interesting. They started off with quite short answers and as we were getting to the last one they were getting more and more away from being totally positive in their mindset towards the statements. It is good to see a lot of positivity in their thoughts. There is room to work with them and try and get them to apply that positivity to their design work. That is where we come to our wall, when they are designing. I need to work through some strategies with them. Drawing is a skill. They all see that anyone can learn a skill and spend time to improve it. We need to work through strategies about the designing / thinking / analysis part as this is where we stick.

Mindset - Presentation from the HOD Physical Education

As part of our work on mindset, my inquiry group had a visit from the HOD Health and Physical Education today.  Mr Moyes brought over some of his art boards that he did when he was at school and talked about how he approached the work in a positive mindset.
It is good for the students to see people in different lights and to see different skill sets that they did not know about in people.



Mindsets in the Classroom: Building a Growth Mindset Learning Community
Mary Cay Ricci

Link to book details

"Neuroplasticity is the ability of the brain to change, adapt, and “rewire” itself throughout our entire life."

"We need to step back, take a breath, and realise that it is not about how fast students master learning. It is about the perseverance and effort that they put forth and the strategies that they utilise."

In order for my students to develop and use a growth mindset, they have to see it in action in different situations.

Using Games for Critical Thinking and Mindset

I am currently reading "Mindsets in the Classroom: Building a Growth Mindset Learning Community" by Mary Cay Ricci.  Link to readings
Some of what she talks about is how she went into a classroom and did an experiment to try and increase and give them confidence in critical thinking and using a growth mindset. They got the students in the class to play non verbal reasoning games. This was to get the students to try and think in critical ways and for the teachers to see the students working and thinking in different ways.

"The addition of the games did something more than build the reasoning abilities of these students; the reasoning and problem-solving games contributed to a mindset shift in the teachers and, in some cases, the students as well. Many teachers reported that they saw potential in students that they would have never seen without the games. Some of the students who spoke little English flourished when the games came out. Some students who were functioning below grade level showed great strength in reasoning through playing these games. Teachers became more reflective about their own mindsets, viewed students differently, and raised expectations for many students." (from "Mindsets in the Classroom: Building a Growth Mindset Learning Community" by Mary Cay Ricci)

I wanted to try something like this to see if it would work in any way with my target group of students in my inquiry.

I had done a little of this last year - blog post here - so I decided that this same Towers of Hanoi game was a good place to start. I want to do this as my inquiry is about seeing if teaching the whole class in the same way as I am teaching my 4 scholarship students will improve the achievement of the whole class. This will involve the rest of the class feeling that they are able to do this level of work so I am wanting to do a lot of work with them about mindset.

Here is my collection of homemade games that we tried out today.

Here are my students having a go this afternoon when we had a lesson in the last period of the day. We worked in pairs today. One had to explain what to move where and the other had to follow instructions. They ended up helping each other. As you can see from the pics, we also got the big chess set out where there was also a lot of discussion and helping. It's all about the tatics.

Inquiry Question 6 - Readings

"Share three pieces of academic or professional reading and explain how they and other sources helped your form hypotheses about aspects of teaching that might contribute to current patterns of learning."

This is my academic reading.

I will be updating this list and the notes that go with it as the year progresses. The notes will be links to appropriate blog posts that relate to work done in response to the readings.

Link to presentation

Blog Posts
Using games for critical thinking and mindsetMindset Check In

Inquiry Question 4 - Preliminary Findings

"Begin to collect evidence and data and share your preliminary findings about the nature and extent of the student challenge i.e. using your baseline student data and evidence"

I have some initial findings, basic data in the Inquiry Question 3 - Tools, Measure and Approaches - link to post here

Copy of information from that post is below.

Analysis of results from previous years

Internals

Externals

This is to try and give me an idea where the weaknesses are in my own planning.

Analysis and breakdowns of ethnicity, achievements in previous years, in both DVC and other courses, literacy and numeracy abilities.

Know your learners blog post here

This is to get a general overview of who I have in the class.

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I have some initial information from the mindset questionnaire that I asked my inquiry group to fill in.

The questionnaire is shown below here. I intend to use this information to compare against the same questionnaire at the end of term 3.

Here is the link to the results so far (9 responses out of a class of  15 - 2 of who have not returned to school yet after lockdown)

AS91627 - Design Elements - Student Work

My Year 13 class have been working on AS91627 in Design and Visual Communication.

Before the country went into Level 4 lockdown, we were well into the work. We have had training sessions with Pippa Lawler - blog post here and have been working our way through analysing our observational drawings through the lens of some of the design elements. 

My planning for this is here - Blog post - Lesson prep part 1 - Lesson prep part 2 - Lesson prep part 3

Now we are back to school, we have been working on a combination of the design brief for the product design project - link to workspace here or continuing on with the design elements work - link to class site. While we were on lockdown, I had started to put together examples and screen recordings of the design brief work so that students can get up to date when they are ready to. Link to help page on the class site here. This is an ongoing project for me, and this will expand over time as I make more "help" elements for the students to refer to.

The upshot of all of this is the students choosing what they want to focus on when they come into the class.

I have started putting together a presentation of the completed design element sheets as they complete them. This will be shared with the whole class so they can see each other's work.

This is no where near all of the students or all of their work (as of typing this post). I will keep it up to date as they complete this work.
I am hoping that seeing each other's work as they progress, it will inspire them to feel good about their own as they can see similarities in process in the work of others.

AS91627 - Colour and Shape - Prep for students

Planning for AS91627 - Producing drawings in 2D, looking at shapes from their observational drawings. Also looking at the colours used in the original source material.
Part 3 of looking at the design elements to develop their work in a more abstract way.


Link to blog post about part 1 of planning - Pattern and Texture
Link to blog post about part 2 of planning - Form
Link to class site



Learning Outcomes

• Look at their drawn work in different ways.
• Learn how to use a wider variety of media to create their work and rely less on the standard use of drawing pencil and coloured pencil.
• Create 2D drawings that are relevant to their starting point observational drawings that focus on the shapes that they can see.
• To be able to simplify from their observational drawings to just focus on the shape and not any details.
• To be able to analyse the colour combinations seen in their source material.

Materials and Equipment

Drawing pencils - only to be used in a support role, not as the main media for the work
Black outliner pens
White pencils
White paper, brown paper, coloured sugar papers

Paint

Brushes

Press print / EVA foam

Scissors

Printing ink

Observational drawings in pencil and various media.
Look at these drawings as a base to find shapes to use. Look at original source material for the colour references.

AS91627 - Form - Prep for students

Planning for AS91627 - Producing form in 3D and drawings in 3D from their observational drawings.
Part 2 of looking at the design elements to develop their work in a more abstract way.

Link to blog post about part 1 of planning - Pattern and Texture
Link to class site

Learning Outcomes

• Look at their drawn work in different ways.
• Learn how to use a wider variety of media to create their work and rely less on the standard use of drawing pencil and coloured pencil.
• Create forms that are relevant to their starting point observational drawings.
• To be able to simplify from their observational drawings to just focus on the form and not surface, details or colour.

Materials and Equipment

Drawing pencils - only to be used in a support role, not as the main media for the work
Black outliner pens

White pencils

White paper, brown paper, coloured sugar papers
Plasticine

Card
Scissors

Craft knives

Glue

Eva foam sheets

Found media (for example -flax leaves, cellophane sheet etc)

Observational drawings in pencil and various media.
Look at these drawings as a base to find forms to use.

Methods used :-

• Make the forms in 3D with plasticine. Focus on just the form with no surface texture or decoration or details.
• Use card to simplify the form in 3D - or part of the form.
• Photograph the 3D built elements and print out the photographs.
• Draw from the photographs using a variety of media and papers.