scotland thoughts pt 1

On having autistic/special needs kids in workshops:

These were the first workshops I had any sort of special needs kids, which was quite the experience for me. Mostly so, because I was amazed at how compassionate and accomodating the other kids were. But also because I was pleasantly surprised at how they got on in the workshops.

There was one kid who was autistic who insisted that everything be yellow and that it had to have a clock. He was working in a group with four other kids. They all wanted to make a car. So they talked with him, and he was insisting clock, so they came up with making a car driving around a yellow clock. They started making the car, yellow car for the boy, and he set off making a yellow clock. He made the structure to hold it and they all worked together to get it all together. In the end, it was a yellow car flying around Big Ben. During the two hours I had with them, they were all engaged and happily working.

At another workshop, there was this kid who had a hard time doing anything. One of the helpers I had was really good with him, though, and would sit and talk to him about what he was doing. The kid set about making a scoop to pick things up (like... the motor spins around and has a scoop to grab things at the bottom). He stayed busy the entire time, though I don't know that he was really able to do much. His teammates were very nice and tried to give him things that they thought he could do, and included him on everything on the project.

Another girl, the last day, was this special needs kid who also had hearing aids. And apparently when she got bored or didn't want to do something, she would switch her hearing aids off and then they'd take her back to the special ed part of the school. She had done just that earlier that day at a K'nex workshop, so I was worried about how she would take mine. But she stayed until the very end, working away on making a basket full of easter eggs and helping make this chicken popping out of an egg. She seemed really happy to work on what she wanted, and her group was happy to have her do that.

And the last kid, somewhat autistic. A little slow seeming when you talked to him. He was the guy who helped everything but who didn't really come up with anything on his own. But he was really useful for the group getting their thing done (a penguin with a fish in its mouth with flapping arms and chewing mouth). When one of the visiting teachers asked what he had been working on, he said "nothing," but the rest of the team started saying "no no no... you did this and this and this and you helped with this. you were kinda the manager." Which I thought was really sweet.

Anyway. It was interesting for me to see how they worked and how they worked in the groups. And it was good to see that, for the most part, they all found something to do to help the overall progress of the projects.

scotland stories

A story from Thurso:

Four girls were making a tiger trying to paw at a butterfly flying around a tree. That's the tree, above. And they had been trying for five minutes or so to glue down the tree to the cardboard, but it just kept falling over. And still, they kept trying. So I went over to them to ask them what they were doing. They said they were making a tree. And so I asked them if this is what trees looked like. And they said "yes." So I asked, "is this really what trees look like? What to trees have to keep them standing up" They looked confused, but after a bit of thought, one of them said "trees have roots," and as soon as she said that, another one said "we can cut slits up the sides and give our tree some roots." So they did. And their tree stood.

scotland... an overview

ok. i know david is itching to have some sort of more concise thoughts from scotland. seeing as i've managed to come down with a cold and am having trouble organizing my thoughts as a result, this has been slow to come. but it's friday. and worth a shot, even though my nose is runny and my throat sore. it will be informal. forgive me.

one of the things i found really interesting from these two weeks in scotland was the observation that pretty much every group had some story to tell about their machines. here's the bunny running away from a poacher with the gun who's trying to get the easter basket. or here's a guy crossing a road who gets hit by a car over and over. albeit, short stories. but stories nonetheless. which gave me the thought that an interesting direction to take this involving a longer workshop and with more sensor/programming is to make an interactive story. and, i know, david, that you've been mentioning 3-D animation. and, yeah. i think it's a great idea and direction to go in. it's something that the teachers can also get their heads around as a way to bring english/writing skills into something technical and artistic and mathematic. multi-disciplinary. it's something that i think the kids would really get. whether it's a non-fiction or fiction story... doesn't matter.

and this kinda ties in with david nye's assertation in "technology matters" that it's impossible to determine which came first: story or technology. because technology is dependent on story telling... e.g. "i need to do this and maybe if i turn this and use it like this i will get what i want." rudimentary story... but still story. the more complex the technology, the more complex the story, in some sense.

anyway. that was one observation. the other, regarding gender, is that not only are the girls fully involved, even at an age (13/14) where a lot of girls lose interest to science/math/technology, sometimes the girls work better than the guys. especially when it comes to group work. there seems to be a better division of the tasks and less arguing. whether in mixed groups or just girl groups. and having them create something of their own design means that even though the girls may be making a pink ballerina... they're still making a pink ballerina who has to stand up and whose legs move. still technical. but something they care about.

so. other thoughts. lots of kids didn't know how to use pliers or wire cutters. and in the groups where i didn't introduce this to them, it was interesting to see them trying to cut wire at the base of a pair of pliers that has no wire cutters there. like... they got the idea that the wire goes in and that you squeeze, but they missed the fact that it needs to have the cutting part there. so... in terms of introducing kids to building things, it's amazing just how basic you have to be. and something i would've taken for granted at their age is something that i need to remember to explain.

and they really enjoy being trusted to work with the tools. which is good, i think, for building a sense of confidence. this confidence is an important part of me wanting to do this.

that's all for now. a more in-depth look later on.

Lionel Academy pt. 1

Out on the Outer Hebrides. Two groups... only an hour and a half for each, believe it or not. Much less than ideal, but the students did well, all things considered. I'm especially impressed with the bunny being chased, by the car crash, and by the giraffe eating a tree. More discussion on this to come in the following post.

Group !
(bird flapping)

Group @
(pink panther dancing)

Group #
(bunny chased by poacher)

Group $
(dancers... failed)

Group %
(dog wagging its tail)

Group ^'s plan
Group ^
(giraffe eating)

Group &
(man drinking tea)

Group *
(man hit on head with boxing glove)

Teacher Meeting

So the night after Nairn, I went to a meeting of ten or so teachers discussing a possible activity to go along with the new curriculum for excellence. Their idea is to have schools take 6-8 weeks and study wind power (a topic that's quite relevant, because a lot of debates are going on locally about where wind turbines should be and whether or not in the ocean or on the land, etc.). The meeting was interesting because it wasn't just math or science teachers... there was an english teacher, too... and maybe others?

Maybe I should introduce the curriculum for excellence before I go any further. I guess the main goal is curricular change. But focused around a multi-disciplinary approach... a project-based one.... redefining what "evaluation" is. Hm. I guess the webpage has that on there. But it's all rather vague still, and it seems that even the teachers themselves are trying to get their heads around it. There's also glow, which is meant to be a way for all the schools to be connected together.

Aaaanyway. So this group of teachers was focusing on one of the examples for the new curriculum. They're trying to put forward a guide rather than an instruction set... something that can allow for the teachers to have flexibility for their schools and local strengths. They don't want it to be something that is the same everywhere. They want the teachers to communicate what they're doing... what worked and what didn't.

The english teacher was really excited about getting kids to write about things related to project. The math teachers are interested in working with science teachers. Everyone at that table seemed really excited about this.

And I'm not getting it across well here, but I think they all had a good mindset about things. They're interested in process instead of goal-oriented learning. And not only process, but repeating the process and trying to get things growing and changing.

Yeah. I'm not sure where I'm going with this, other than just being happy that after the meeting in Nairn, it was refreshing to be with a group of teachers who seemed to really care about what they did and also a group that was really trying to push new things forward. I think that they're maybe a group that could really benefit from contact with our group/seeing what our group has done in the past. And it made me really wish that we had a better system for showing/talking about what we've done.

nairn part 2

Okay. More thoughts from the Nairn trip.

As far as the workshop went, only one team tried a more complex mechanism. The rest just tried to mount the motor and get direct rotational motion out of it. And the team that tried a mechanism didn't really finish. So. Hm. I blame this on myself. Because even with the same amount of time (or less), other schools managed to build something off of a mechanism... and could actually explain the mechanisms to me.

In addition to the workshop with the kids, I also met with a group of teachers after lunch. It was amazing how different this group was compared with Jamie in Plockton. I guess, first off, the room we were meeting in was very dark and an old nurse's office.... a little creepy, actually. The teachers seemed downtrodden, tired. It was quite a lot of work to get them to talk with me. There were two chemistry teachers, a math teacher, and a technology teacher. Out of the four, the technology teacher was the most talkative. And after a while, the math teacher opened up and started talking more. One of the chemistry teachers never raised his head from staring at the ground. The other chemistry teacher had seen the workshop and had good thoughts, but was overall still very quiet. All in all, the teachers at Nairn seemed interested, but reserved. The teachers who were around the room while the kids were building things all just observed things and then would come over and quietly ask me questions. I did my best to give them a feel for what I was about and what was going on.

I also got a chance to talk with the ICT youth challenge teams. Two of them. That was nice. The kids were really talkative and happy to give me their impressions/ideas. Neither group had gotten through to the next round. I was amazed, though, at the fact that they were still adamant that their ideas were good ideas. The team that had proposed the idea for an electromagnetic sphere that could levitate you and get you to move around in response to video games... well... a good sci-fi holodeck idea... but not something that was really feasible. But the one boy was convinced that it would work because he had "done the equations." Which I'd be happy to see, but I doubt that they were quite right. Nor do I think it would be as cheap as 1000 pounds (sterling), like he seemed convinced it would be. I mean... I guess my thoughts on that would be that he would probably learn quickly after starting to try to prototype this just how hard and expensive it would be... as well as just how little his equations probably helped.

But despite the students' enthusiasm, I left the school with a feeling of heaviness. The slightly oppressive architecture wasn't helping, either.

nairn part 1

I have the documentation of this workshop (2.5 hours) mostly on the school video camera... so I'm waiting on the footage from them. Since there was only one of me, it was hard to get photos as well as try to video the kids explaining their ideas. So for now, I'll just put up what I have and try to explain until I can get stills from the videos (as well as the videos themselves).

Group *
Group *'s finished product
This group was a group of three mixed boy/girl... two boys, one girl. Twelve years old. Their idea was an ice skating penguin. They really had trouble trying to get it to stand upright, and in the end, it just collapsed. When asked what they would do differently next time they replied "focus more on getting it to work and then work on getting it to look nice." They worked well together as a group, trying to split up tasks between them. Penguin was attached to the motor, and the motor was on top of this plastic cup with a hole in it. In the end, it was just too much weight for the strength of the plastic cup.

Group &
Group & (pt 2)
This was a group of four mixed boy/girl... two and two. Again, age twelve. I don't have a proper photo of this finished as of yet. But it's a cow leaping over a moon with a shooting star chasing it. There's the star and the cow there. They were quite clever in how to get this to stand up ... kind of like a tri-fold poster presentation thing. they attached the moon directly to the motor to make it spin. Complete with stars and a background. They finished right on time, but I feel they didn't really push themselves as far as the mecahnism went. But they came up with good structural solutions for the shooting star (they had problems with it spinning around the wrong way) as well as the motor mount.


Group ^
This was a group of four boys who made a hero/villain fighting while flying over Hollywood. That's a palm tree there. Again, this group attached the people directly to the motor. Instead of mechanism problems (i.e. not using a mechanism other than the motor spinning), they had really hard structural problems. As in, they had trouble figuring out how to hold things in place. So, although maybe not as mechanically sophisticated as one might've hoped, they figured out a bit of structures. And they came up with a particularly quick/clever solution (thought not a good long-term one) of holding the motor in place with a rubber band.

Group %
This was a group of four girls who made a boat with a baby and a shark swimming around the boat with a person who had fallen in the water. Quite a complex story, there. Shark directly attached to motor. They had trouble with the stand for the boat (that you see there), but after asking them a few questions, they came up with the idea to give it some supports coming down from the top to the corners (making triangles to help keep it upright). This group worked exceptionally well as a team, dividing up tasks so that everyone was working all the time and it all came together at the end.

And then there's one more team that I don't have any photo of. Nor do I really remember right off hand what they worked on (this is what I get for waiting a few days to write this up... but I haven't had any spare time to do so and now I'm just staying up way too late to get this done before I forget). But this team of four boys had so much trouble. They wanted to do everything! And in the end, they really didn't have anything that worked. They were the only team, though, that tried to make a mechanism, of sorts. But they got distracted by the super hero/villain team. And they got discouraged by not knowing the answers right off hand, though I did my best to encourage them and talk them through questions.

plockton part 3

i also got a chance to meet with jamie's senior product design class where the kids were working on their portfolios... models and drawings and design concepts. i was pretty impressed with the kids' ideas and ability to make models... but, still, the idea is a product. and they don't really get a chance to actually build the thing they design (short of models). but unlike other teachers who teach this subject, jamie doesn't confine them to "chairs" or something along those lines. he lets the students come up with their own ideas to work on. the students seemed really engaged and excited about what they were doing, which was nice to see.

hm. i don't know what other thoughts i have about this.

i guess i could expand on jamie as a teacher. he has a lot of skills in being creative and building things. and he's a really engaging teacher... passionate about what he gets across.

plockton part 2

ok. so. a more thorough discussion of plockton.

as i mentioned, the students didn't quite manage to finish. but despite this, they all were excited to take their machines and work on them to get them to work, even without me around. jamie kean has a great area and is a good teacher... i think he has the right mindset about what works for the kids. it was the first workshop, so i was a bit nervous.

the kids were mostly first year (12 years old). i was a bit nervous at the start. taking charge in front of a group of kids is something i definitely need practice at. the kids seemed to have good ideas as to what to do, and definitely things that were feasible, but they seemed to have trouble figuring out how to make things move. also, kids seem to be on the whole more concerned with making things look nice before trying to get it to work. i don't know if that's because it's easier or because they want it to look good before trying to get it to work... something along the lines of make the parts right before putting them all together.

the laptops didn't work with the gogo boards. we had USB to serial converters, but still the computers wouldn't communicate with the board. and with only two hours for the workshop, i didn't really have time to figure that out (i hadn't recieved the laptops until that day). so... i gave them a basic program to run the motor with a touch sensor to turn the motor on. not ideal in the least... but... triage?

plockton part 1

Wednesday the 31st, I ran my first workshop of the year in Plockton High School. Jamie Kean is the head teacher of technology/technological studies there, and it was his classroom and his space that I used for the workshop. I met Jamie when he came to MIT last September with one of the winning teams from the ICT Youth Challenge. I only had two hours to run the workshop, much like the workshops back in May, and this wasn't quite enough time for the kids to finish. But there were some good ideas and some good thoughts that went into things. I guess I'll go into more detail now.

Group !
This was a group of four girls age 12. As they didn't think they were really good at drawing, they ended up just writing a few words down and then starting to build. This group wanted to make a bird whose wings flapped to begin with, but after they tried to make a bird out of wire, they decided that the bird looked more like bumble bees. As a result, they changed their original idea, and went with multiple bees. They thought that if they put the bees on a spiral, then the bees would look like they were constantly flying up.


Group @'s preliminary design
Group @
This was a group of three boyx age 12. One of them played the guitar. They tossed around a few ideas at first, but because they were working in a group, they decided that a band would best work. They wanted the drummer's head to bob up and down (the motor was hooked up to the head via a wire/straw that you can see here. In the end, it sort of worked, but things weren't all held down in their places.

Group #'s preliminary design
Group #
This was a group of three girls age 12. They wanted to make a ladybug that flapped its wings. They thought of this because they liked ladybugs. While I was asking them how they thought they could get the wings to flap, and asking them if they'd seen anything like it around, one of them said that they had a wooden duck whose wings flapped at home (similar to the butterfly I made in Costa Rica, actually). So they went about trying to make it. They made a stand for the motor out of straws and wire and plastic strips and were going to put the ladybug on top. The cotton balls were to make the ladybug's body... they were going to wrap yarn around the balls to make the right shape.

Group $'s preliminary design
Group $
This was a group of three girls age 12. As you can see in their preliminary brainstorm, they went through several ideas before settling on this one: a man who has a hoop in his hand to blow bubbles. They managed to get his arm moving, but didn't have time to attach everything to the base.

Group %'s preliminary design
Group %
This was a group of three boys age 12. They wanted to make a football player kicking a football (i.e. soccer, for us Americans). They got the leg moving, but didn't manage to make the thing stable enough to stand.

Ok. Now for some more in-depth thinking on my part after just getting past what it was that the kids did. Coming soon (i.e. after dinner... maybe in two hours or three)...

thoughts

quines and loons.

anyway. \\\\\\\\

two workshops so far. plockton and nairn. plockton was 2 hours. nairn 3 hours. less than ideal, no doubt, and not quite what i had wanted. at least in the sense that i had wanted (and asked for) longer workshops and workshops where i could have the same group of kids for a repeated time. tomorrow is stornoway, and will certainly be a long day. i'll go into more depth on things in the posts to follow.

so, yeah. not as long as i had wanted, but as i've been explained, this is because of two reasons. 1) it's hard negotiating within the schools, because even though one of the teachers might be really keen on this, they have to convince the teachers before and after them to give up their class periods. 2) this is a way to find new schools/teachers to work with, introduce myself to them, win them over, and then ask for more time/more intensity from them in march. so this visit, i'll see who i work well with and who is willing to carry the ball farther.

more thoughts to follow.

from Nairn today