Let the Games Begin!

The cardboard arcade has become a yearly fixture in the STEM lab calendar for 3rd grade. I place this in the third grading cycle because it usually has an extra week and few interruptions to the schedule.

We start with a brief overview of what exactly is an arcade. I always include both definitions (covered passageway lined with shops AND place to play games for a fee), because I see myself as a teacher of all subjects. Then we watch and discuss the Nirvan Mullick film Caine's Arcade which is the original inspiration for the whole cardboard arcade phenomenon. The movie documents the arcade built by a 10 year old boy who was spending the summer hanging around in his father's auto parts store.

Next students get together in teams, or elect to work independently, and brainstorm ideas. I place as few limitations on them as I am able. The games must be table top size and must be playable by first and second graders. I encourage the students be be as creative and not just make a replica of an arcade game they saw at Dave and Buster's. Once an idea is selected, students begin planning in their journals. These plan include a list of materials, steps for completion, and direction for how to play the game. I insist on a detailed plan because I find that it cuts down on the amount of materials that are wasted. During the planning phase I meet with each group to offer feedback on their design. Depending on what they are trying to make, I ask questions to get them thinking about the details that will need to be included. That may be "how will you build the ball return?", "how will you stop the ball from flying across the room?", or "how will player know they have won?".

The construction and testing phase lasts several days. While I do help with some of the tougher cutting tasks, I make the students do as much of the hard work as possible. Last year I banned the use of tape in construction because it is wasteful and fails to hold the game together anyway. I spend a lot of the building class periods teaching students to use white glue and structural elements like L-braces and flanges to attach pieces of cardboard to one another. There is much gnashing of teeth in the beginning when I refuse to produce a roll of tape for them to mummify their project with. However, once a few students get the hang of the glue techniques, they are eager to share their skills with others.

The final phase of the project is always the presentation. I invite a class from a lower grade to come and play the games. I never know who will be available from which grade level, so I prepare the 3rd graders for the fact that they may end up entertaining anyone from Kindergarten through 2nd grade. They are always so excited to show off what they have made and the only disappointment ever voiced is that I did not invite their former teacher or the class with their sibling to participate.

There have been some really great projects so far in this unit including a 3 story escape room game, a pinball machine, and a nicely done soccer/hockey mash-up game.

Digital Dioramas and Skype-a-Scientist

This rotation in the STEM lab has the second grade taking their first steps into combining physical elements with digital ones to create projects. In my almost entirely self-designed curriculum, this kind of fusion is the ultimate goal for the students I work with. 

The students began by selecting an animal to research using the National Geographic Kids page about different species of animals. I let them explore an bit before choosing and starting to take notes in their journals. They also selected partners for this project. I provided the students with a list of facts that they needed to read for and record in their notes, but also encouraged them to include any information that they found especially interesting. Required information included what their animal eats, where it is found, and what threats it faces. We discussed how threats may be natural (predators) or human-caused (habitat loss/ poaching). Finally, they drew a picture of their chosen animal and its habitat in their journals.

Next, the teams worked together to create detailed drawings of their subject animal, its food, and its habitats. They cut out their pictures and practiced animating how they would move around in a Scratch Jr. project. Students used the camera function to photograph the pictures they drew of the habitats as backgrounds. They also added photos of their animal drawings as well as drawings of what it eats and the threats it faces.

Finally, the students programmed their hand-drawn characters to move around and to share facts they gathered through their research. This process was a great opportunity for me to teach the students about a number of different computer science concepts. They are already familiar with the primary event block in the Scratch Jr language, the Green Flag. This event is a general purpose "go" to all of the characters students have added to their programs. However, most of the teams discovered that the Green Flag event has its limitations because it makes everything move at once. When they wanted different characters to move and speak at different times I showed them the messaging events. When they wanted a prey animal to disappear after being eaten, I was able to show them the uses of the "when characters touch" event which is the beginning of understanding conditionals. 

We finished the unit by having each student team share their work on the SMART Board so they could practice providing each other feedback.

Another element of this unit that I personally find super exciting is our video chat with a scientist. This is facilitated by Skype-a-Scientist, a program that matches classrooms with scientists working in a variety of fields. Skype-a-Scientist connects teachers and scientists and they coordinate the scheduling of a video call. This program lets students see and engage with "actual living scientists" who were once sitting in a classroom as they are now. Each class gets to speak to a different scientist with a different area of study, so each conversation is unique. The first group spoke with a conservation biologist in Seattle, and the second group will be speaking with a geologist from the UK. Skype-a-Scientist is a non-profit run by Dr. Sarah McAnulty. I am proud to support this program with a monthly donation, and I would encourage our Sinclair Elementary families, and anyone else who cares about supporting science education to do the same at patreon.com. 

I, Robo-Mouse

It's a new year and the beginning of a new rotation in the STEM Lab. The third grading cycle finds our Kindergarten and first grade students discovering the joys of programming robots with our old friend, Robo-Mouse.

This is Kindergarten's first robotics experience in the lab. It builds on the introduction they had earlier in the year to computer programming via Code.org and Scratch Jr. The first day involves an overview of the proper care and handling of the robots. The Robo-Mouse is quite affordable, but it is not terribly robust and the axles can be stripped a little too easily if students are too rough. Over the years I glad to say we have only lost a few robots to this kind of abuse. Following a brief introduction, students break into groups of 2 or 3 and build mazes and practice programming.

After an exploration day, the students spend a day working with the challenge cards. These two-sided card have a drawing of a maze showing the position of the mouse and the cheese as well as the walls and tunnels. Part of the challenge for students is cooperatively building the maze according to the picture on the card. Once the maze is assembled, the teams work on the programming. The biggest stumbling block I have found in the transition from the Code.org puzzles to Robo-Mouse is that with the robot a turn and a move requires two commands. In the Code.org puzzles, at the Kindergarten and 1st grade levels, students only program movements. Turns as separate commands are not introduced until the 2nd grade.

Once students are comfortable with programming the Robo-Mouse, I introduce them to the algorithm cards. These cards have arrows corresponding to the buttons on the robot that are used for writing programs. Continuing to use the challenge cards, students have the added task of creating their algorithm using the those cards and then programming it into the robot. This helps the teams debug their programs as them can follow along step-by-step and identify where they went wrong.

For 1st grade, the unit begins in a similar fashion, with an introduction to the proper handling and a review of the programming. This is partly because it has been about a year since most of the students used Robo-Mouse, and partly because there are inevitably a few students in each class who are new to Sinclair and have no prior experience with robotics.

They too get a few days to explore and then to practice with the more complex challenge cards. First grade also reviews the use of the algorithm cards. As the students become more comfortable with programming the robot, they seem to become less interested in using the algorithm cards to show their work. I keep on them about it though as it forces them to check and recheck their programs. Otherwise their programming successes look more like trial and error rather than a result of deliberate choices.

The 1st grade only spends a couple of days on the challenge cards. Their real project for this unit is to use the Robo-Mouse as part of a story retell. Students create a story map of a tale of a familiar tale. They then illustrate the important points in the story and place these along a path that they build for the robot. The robot gets programmed to move along the path and as it passes each illustration, the students recount that moment in the story. I model every part of this process using a book that I read to them at the beginning of this phase of the unit. This year I have been using I Want My Hat Back by John Klassen. The story the students have been retelling this year is The 3 Billy Goats Gruff. In most things I give the students choices about this kind of thing, but I have found that for this kind of project, with 1st graders, a choice of stories leads to overly ambitious choices and students do not have enough time to complete the story they want to tell.

So far this rotation, the best thing I have overheard is a couple of first graders struggling with a particularly complex maze of their own design. The student whose turn it was to program groaned, "Ugh! This is so hard!". Their partner agreed, "Yeah, it is," and then added, "but it's fun too." The first student replied, "Yeah, I know" and then they both went back to work debugging their program.