As an educator and school IT director, I’ve been inundated lately with AI triumphalism. Every morning, my inbox is full of emails from start-ups and legacy tech companies urging me to check out their AI EdTech products. Social media is full of EdTech ‘thought leaders’ talking about AI. The various […]
EdTech
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About a year ago, I decided to teach myself how to use the Godot game engine. It’s a powerful, open source engine that’s good for making 2D games like side scrollers, top-down adventure, visual novels, etc. It can do 3D too but, from what I’ve read, is no match for […]
My Fall CUE presentation is titled ‘Robotics + Cardboard + Hot Glue = Catapults’. Below are links to the materials. Main presentation Teaching slides
There are a lot of reasons to dislike ‘AI’ (I put quotes around it because it is artificial but it’s not intelligent). Environmental impact of pouring gasoline on the fire of global warming False claims regarding what it can do/hype bubble Deeply embedded racism Copyright infringement and theft of copyrighted […]
One of my favorite books growing up was A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula LeGuin. The original edition was illustrated with wood cuts by Ruth Robbins. I loved those illustrations. My favorite was the hawk in flight, circling above a tower keep. It’s a great scene in the book, masterfully […]
“Unions are a better invention than chatGPT” -Joan Westenberg I ran across this hand-wringing WSJ article recently which bemoans the European proclivity to enact regulations that protect people’s privacy, their health, and their way of life at the expense of being able to compete with China and the U.S. in […]
At my school, we have four pillars that represent our values and philosophy: Character, Community, DEIJ, and Academic Excellence. We also have four actual pillars in our gym/multi-purpose room/theater. A few years ago, I was teaching our 7th grade Design + Code + Make class, running a project where the […]
I was invited to present at the Make: Education Forum 2022 this last fall. I talked about my 5th grade board game project (more details in this blog post). It was a lot of fun and the attendees asked great questions. Here are my slides from the presentation.
There is a bird family nesting in a potted palm hanging from a beam in one of the outdoor atriums at our early childhood center. The teachers asked me to set up a web cam so the students could see inside the nest and follow the progress from eggs to […]
My 5th grade robotics students are having trouble engineering their catapults so I made this prototype to inspire them.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, board game sales have skyrocketed. I thought it would be fun to have 5th graders design and build their own board games. It’s a great project for teaching the basics of the design thinking process and it pulls in a lot of skills we […]
For our last project in 5th grade Design + Code + Make this year we did an integrated unit with Science. The students learned about the wetlands biome (our school is located near the Ballona Wetlands). Each student was assigned an animal that is found in the wetlands. They researched […]