I’m teaching a robotics challenge elective this spring over Zoom. I meet with the students once/week and give them a new challenge. The challenge this week is to make a robot that can ‘floss’. This is my attempt:
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One of our 5th Grade teachers is going out on maternity leave. The other 5th grade faculty wanted to have the students make a present for her in my DCM class and asked for my suggestion. I remembered an amazing mobile my son had when he was a baby and […]
I’m teaching an intro to Python elective this trimester. The students are learning the basics via the Codecademy intro course and then they get to try programming a robot arm. I used an ArmUno 2.0 kit from Microbot Labs, a Hummingbird Bit from Birdbrain Tech, and the bitPython library. This […]
I have been working as a technologist and teacher in independent schools for twelve years. I respected teachers before I started working in education but I really respect them now. I teach a maximum of about 3.5 hours per day. Most days are less than that. Teachers who are in […]
Back in 2015 I wrote about the Economist magazine’s ‘skills of the future’ supplement. Just this morning I got an email from Google about their new ‘future of the classroom’ global report. It seems like little has changed in the past four years. The skills needed to prepare students for […]
I ran across a fascinating article by Andy Matuschak about how hard it is to learn much of anything from a non-fiction book. The basic premise is that the cognitive model of the non-fiction book is busted. People don’t learn well by simply reading words. They have to actively engage […]
I recently did an LED circuit project with a group of first graders. It was challenging to figure out a way to make it easy enough for their limited fine motor skills and attention spans but also engaging and fun. I experimented with my own first grader and came up […]
My son is in a bit of a Trolls phase. Favorite movie. Favorite song (I got this feelin’ inside my bones…). Troll figurines. Etc. He wanted to make troll pods like the trolls live in in the movie. We decided to make them via a papier maché process. Step 1: […]
“…life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be experienced.” This quote is often attributed to Kierkegaard but was actually written by Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan. The full quotation is: “Spiritual life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be experienced. It is new birth […]
I love this essay by Syambra Moitozo about what it was like to have Steve Wozniak teach her computer class in 1995. Some great quotes from Woz: “It was less important to me what you teach, and more important to motivate people by making things as fun as you can,” […]
This is an interesting article. If Daniel Kahneman’s ‘dual-process’ theory is correct, it could be a useful way to think about technology education (and maybe even education in general). Maybe what teachers should be consciously focusing on is helping students develop their ability to access and use ‘system 2’ vs. […]
On the Wildness of Children. I’m not sure ‘unschooling’ is the answer but the more time I spend working in schools the more I am convinced that a greater proportion of the school day should be devoted to free play and exploration. I can imagine a school that would strike […]