Understanding Children’s Work

Posted on October 6, 2011 by JohnHeffernan

 

What do you see in the image above?  When I do a “free explore” exercise with students, I walk around and see what they are drawing.  Sometimes, it is apparent what they are drawing, whether it be a more abstract pattern or a specific object.  But, in many cases, I assume they are “just” messing around.

I happened to have my son Aidan sitting on my lap when I was teaching him how to use the shapes program.  He is in Kindergarten and I also do the Shapes free explore lesson in Kindergarten.  Looking at his work, I am not sure I would have known the intent of the above drawing without being there.  The object on the left is a caribou.  We have been listening to a Joan Henry recording of Native American stories and Aidan has become interested in caribou.  The rightmost third of the drawing is a maze and I find the 3 dimensional aspect of the maze interesting.

My point in all of this is that you learn a lot when you take the time to either work with children one on one or ask them about their experiences, which I did in the robotics interviews (see earlier posts).  We miss a lot when we don’t.

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Case Study Starts in Earnest

Posted on September 30, 2011 by JohnHeffernan

It rained yesterday so I had indoor recess duty with the kindergarten students.  The current K class will be my case study class.  I have 2 students, who are twins, as case study kids and will be looking for some others.  One thing I am noticing right away is the the K classes are full of engineering opportunities for kids. See the gallery below for some of the examples I saw at yesterday’s recess.

Why do we stop in K?  We must think that this is only play and that it is only for little kids at school.  I was thinking of doing  a survey of elementary classroom teachers in our district to see what engineering materials they have available.  I know when I taught third grade, I usually had a take apart center with old typewriters and electronic devices for the students to take apart.  My theory is that we need to support and continue children’s natural interest in engineering and building throughout school.

I noticed right away that Reid, one of the twins, was making some sophisticated Lego creations, in this case a vehicle.  When I asked him about the vehicle, he clearly had a story narrative to go along with the truck.  See the video below.  This supports the idea that kid’s engineering is frequently closed tried to creative or fantasy play.  An interesting question is what comes first:  do they build to support the fantasy they have in mind, or do they build first and create a narrative around that, or is it simultaneous and co-evolving?

Explanation of Vehicle from John Heffernan on Vimeo.

 

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Cool Example of Spontaneous Engineering

Posted on September 28, 2011 by JohnHeffernan

A first grade girl showed me a computer she had made out of paper yesterday.  I am trying to keep an eye out for examples of spontaneous engineering that young children engage in.  I asked her if I could copy her computer.  The computer consisted of a large sheet of paper folded in half just like a laptop folds with a keyboard on the bottom and the screen on top.

I heard that this girl was looking for me today so when I went to see her, she gave me her second computer that she specifically made for me last night!  I was very happy and gave her a hug.  It is interesting to me how children really love it when we really notice the cool things they are doing.  The model she made for me (see below) appears to be more of a copy of an iBook than her first model, which did not have a QWERTY keyboard.  This one was very accurate. (Note that the screen is not completely scanned in.)  I am very interested in these examples of kid engineering and how they are encouraged or discouraged over time by teachers and other adults.

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Grade 5 Curriculum Map Added to Resources Page

Posted on September 20, 2011 by JohnHeffernan

I added the curriculum map for our grade 5 NXT robotics unit to the Resources page. Any auxiliary files can be found in the zip file at the end of the page

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Case Study Begins

Posted on September 16, 2011 by JohnHeffernan

I happened to have indoor recess duty and was up with my planned case study kindergarten classes.  I have not had much time to observe them yet and have only had them once so far for computer lab.  But I observed one student, Jack, who made a really cool Lego cell phone with a volume button made from a wheel.  I will get a picture of it.  If I am really going to do deep with this case study, I will have to spend time with the 2 classes outside of technology time.  After time, it was clear that I should document what I can spontaneous engineering.  I am thinking that K classes are set up to support this but that it fades over time.  By the way, my plan is to observe some students in this class for 7 years to watch how their engineering skills develop.

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Idea for Yearly Case Study Project

Posted on September 8, 2011 by JohnHeffernan

I thought of the idea of building a bridge as a way to see progress in K-6 engineering (and beyond) over time. A bridge could be static or dynamic (drawbridge). So I am planning to give a choice of wooden blocks, WeDo, and Mindstorms kits each year to my case study students and capture both the end product and some of the process with video taping.  I was having trouble thinking of a project that would work all the way from K to Grade 6.

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Learning a New Task

Posted on September 5, 2011 by JohnHeffernan

My 5 year old son Aidan just learned to ride a bike.

We noticed that there were 5 or so dimensions to learning to ride a bike:  steering, balance, braking, pedaling, and staying balanced when bragging to strangers on how great you were doing.  We also noticed that it is difficult to attend to all 5 when first learning because none of them are automatic.  I have observed the exact same thing with learning to dance and dog agility.

It got me thinking about my own teaching and observing the teaching of others.  How many times have teachers asked you to attend to many different things at once?  It does seem better, if you can, to work more sequentially through different aspects of a new skill.  This is possible even in biking through the use of a balance bike or just coasting down a hill without pedaling, which works on balance.  That’s why I also recommend, in my robotics courses to teachers, that you don’t have to have students, especially young students, do all the tasks in a WeDo lesson, for example.  You can choose to focus on building, programming, or the experiment parts of the Lego WeDo curriculum.

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Another Example of Natural Kid Engineering

Posted on August 26, 2011 by JohnHeffernan

I posted previously on ways that kids are natural engineers at school with their fairy houses and gnome homes.  On vacation at the beach, another one became apparent, sand castles.  Such a great way to explore materials and building!  You can definitely see the natural interest and enthusiasm for it at the beach!

Here’s some photos from today.

 

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Tracking Engineering Skills Over Time

Posted on August 25, 2011 by JohnHeffernan

I am trying to think of a good way to track engineering skills over time.  I will be tracking this year’s K class as they progress to sixth grade.  Is there a task I can give them that will work over all these years?  I thought making a chair (from the Tufts CEEO first grade lesson) but could it involve robots later?  Ideally, it was be the same or similar so we could easily see the changes but what would work over such a long time and such a change in development?

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BeeBot Class

Posted on August 13, 2011 by JohnHeffernan

I taught my first BeeBot class for teachers and it went great! BeeBots are small premade robots meant for early elementary students.  I used them in PK and K.  I was not sure there was enough for a whole day but we spent most of the day on BeeBots. The teachers were very motivated to try it. Hope they can find some funds to purchase the BeeBots. I also gave my new general robotics talk at the start and that was great practice. I think it’s really good and I found a few mistakes this time that I have corrected. The quotes and videos and photos seem to make it!

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