Well, our NSF National Robotics Initiative (NRI) grant is pretty much done as well as my class in Research in Science, Math, and Learning Technologies so I can get back to some blogging.
I am teaching in a second school now (robotics only) and they have intelligent whiteboards in each class. Yesterday, I was back at my main school. I did not leave enough time to get ready so I had to go get printouts, get a projector, hook up the projector, etc. Another class had some of our laptops too. Of course, the projector took some fiddling to get it working. They are also a very energetic class. I also neglected to charge the robots and a few of them were out of power. I also did not have the kids inventory before the project and some kits were missing pieces. They also have a sub that day. We got through it without too much difficulty but I was very busy getting stuff, helping kids, helping with missing cords and pieces. One good thing I did do was assign some of the work to kids (getting laptops, missing pieces, and making shapes on the floor that their robots had to trace). So what happens in this case it that your energy goes to just getting everyone working and you don’t have time to really observe what is going on at a deeper level.
I have been doing robotics for a long time and I guess I have been been getting a little complacent about being able to walk in and go. Lesson learned.
