I had my Intro to Engineering students turn in an “up to now” version of what will become their final presentation for the project we are currently working on. I wanted to write a bit about it because it is shaping up to be a very important assignment and I’m learning a lot about project based learning through it. First, I love that the assignment requires them to think through what they’ve done so far because it is open ended. I didn’t include a rubric like I would for other assignments. So they didn’t have a checklist of what to include, they had to come up with it on their own (although th ..read more

Introduction to Engineering Design: We are attempting to complete the entire Automaton project in the first semester, so we’re in full swing now! It has been an amazing learning experience for me on project based learning. Some skills get front loaded and others wait until they are needed. And we can make some plans but we also have to be flexible as new difficulties come up. So the first big skills push was for Autodesk Inventor. I did the usual set of tutorials and let them have a decent amount of time to explore and learn on their own. Some students took it upon themselves to ..read more

That blog title sounds ridiculous! But if you’re reading this you probably see what I’m getting at here. I’ve got lots of thoughts on TpT, but nothing revolutionary that hasn’t already been said more eloquently by countless others. Make stuff because it makes you better, share the stuff so others can get better too. Seems obvious. But whatever. This Twitter thread really got me thinking today, thanks to Val Brown for starting the conversation. The article she’s linking to is about teachers making money on Instagram by selling their stuff, mainly on TpT.  If you hadn’t seen the article or ..read more

An exchange with a few students today got me really upset and so I wanted to write about it to get my thoughts out. The students were questioning their grade on a project. They both had gotten a C but *wanted* a B. The project has a rubric but the translation to a grade is subjective, so I told them that they could explain to me why they thought they should have a higher grade. It wasn’t the fact that they wanted to argue for a better grade that bothered me, it was the way they went about it. They were basically arguing that since they felt like they had worked hard on it that they should get ..read more

So I’ll just start this post with my big revelation: Asking students to figure out where to turn something in and then also asking them to explain their learning was too many things all at once and they didn’t have time for it. Ok what does that mean?! Here we go! So my Google Classroom setup looked like this up to this point in the year. Students would complete activities and then instead of turning them in to an assignment named after that activity, they would find a learning target that matched the activity and turn the activity in there. Then I would give feedback and return the assignmen ..read more

Been awhile since I wrote here. If you follow me and wanna check in on my classes this year, I’ve now got 180 blogs here and here for Engineering and Comp Sci respectively. But I wanna make this blog a place where I write about the big ideas, so here goes. I haven’t put a grade or score on a paper in over a year now and I’m never going back! It’s awesome. My students and I focus on learning much more and I never get questions like “how much is this worth?” or “can I get some extra credit?”. Well I can’t say I never get those, but when someone asks one, they pretty much already know my ans ..read more

Computer Science: It is really hard to let some students fall behind, but I don’t really see much of a solution right now that’s not going to slow other students down. Like I could make everyone follow along with an activity at a set pace and I think this would be helpful to some students, but then it means that I am not available for individual attention at all. The flip side being what I am doing now which is mostly giving individual attention to students who are working though the activity at a reasonable pace, but other students are really taking their time, not focusing as much as they co ..read more

Computer Science: The struggle between collaboration and focus is real. We started out ok with just a little talking but it was not enough to mess up someone who was flowing with the activity.  But after about 15 minutes I noticed that the noise level had increased to the point where it was impossible to ignore. How did I notice this? Because it was impossible to ignore! Maybe the lesson is that 10-15 minutes is a magic number and we need to stay within that time frame for activities in here. Or we might try 10 minutes silence, 2 minutes talking or some other time strategy like that. We ..read more

Computer Science:  We started learning python today. As expected, it would have been totally impossible to lead the class through the first activity. Everyone was at a different pace and there were a lot of technical difficulties. So it was a good thing that the activity is well written so that they could follow at their own pace. Mini lessons included: using the up arrow to retrieve the previous command variable types (python assigns them for you) .py files are text files Intro to Engineering: I realized today that there is a big skills gap between students who took the Gateway classes ..read more

Introduction to Engineering: This class is really high energy and we discussed this again today. Strategies we discussed included taking a break when you need one. I think this may be an opportunity to work with breathing techniques with a few students. Because I think that they need a redirect more than once or twice per class, so taking a break by leaving the room might take too long. I also think the Automaton project is going really well. We are using the “manufacturing a box” activity to learn assembly constraints in Inventor. They are making box joints like the one below, so they’re maki ..read more