The Fall of Indiana

Yesterday, the State of Indiana School Board decided that they knew better than the voters of the State of Indiana.  They have overturned all procedural decisions by our elected Superintendent of Public Instruction, Glenda Ritz.  Now, Glenda (yes, we all call her Glenda, because she's one of us) is a former teacher, highly educated, and until this past year, a practicing teacher.  She knows what it is like to work as a teacher.  That means that she has been under appreciated and overworked for years.  She has spent the last year trying to make teachers more relevant and give them the chance to teach and care for their students.

Over the years, I have read a lot of dystopian stories.  These are stories, but behind them there is a lesson.  They teach us to watch our leaders.  They teach us that power is corrupting.  I am currently reading Animal Farm, by George Orwell.  In Animal Farm, Napoleon uses propaganda to convince the other animals on the farm that he is smarter than them, and therefore they should do what he wants them to.  He changes the rules to benefit him, but he does it slowly.  This allows him to make the animals comfortable with really awful ideas.  He educated the animals in the topics and in the way he wanted.  He told them what to think, and how to think.  That is exactly what our governor is doing through the legislature.  He has demonstrated that he feels that he is the only person who know what is best for education. I'm not going to lie, I don't know how long he spend in an education program, or what university he went to so he could learn how to be an educator.  He may know what he's doing.  He may know more than our elected education officials, but it feels more like Animal Farm to me.

I’ve spent my Christmas break playing computer games!

A little over a year ago, I started researching and planning the best way to bring coding into a

project. I have always felt that my experience with code has helped me to be a more thoughtful and

methodical person. Recently, studies have proven my opinions right. I am also confident that my

programming experience has opened a lot of doors for me in my career. While I don’t program well, and I don’t really want to program well, my knowledge allows me to communicate with people who can.

I am currently teaching in a project-based, duel-credit classroom combining English 10 and Digital Media.  My co-teacher, Val Hoover, and I discussed it, and decided the best project we had to

incorporate coding was our Mythology project. This project teaches about archetypes and the different stages of the Hero’s Journey. As a final activity, the students are put into groups of three and asked to write their own myth that includes common archetypes and all stages of the hero’s journey.

Historically, we have used a variety of digital media components to complement the myth using such programs as Vegas, Flash, and Adobe.  This year we thought it would be fun to have the students create a video game based on their myth.  In order for them to do this, they had to understand the basics of coding. There are a multitude of options when teaching tenth graders how to code. During my research, I found Code Academy, Code.org, and Udacity, as well as a multitude of other options for pure coding. These are wonderful organizations and tools, however, because I didn’t have an entire semester, they were not the tools I needed. I started remembering back to when I started using computers and was introduced to Logo. This program was very visual and allowed you to type simple commands and get instant results. You typed a command and the “turtle” would move across the screen. As it turns out, “there is an app for that”. It’s called Find the Turtle and can be installed on your iPad. We tested it out the last week of school last year, and found it to be very intuitive for the students. It is a great introduction to the world of visual programming. I kept looking, however, as I wanted a little more than just an introduction.

I found two FREE and well-made visual programming languages that were perfect for our needs. The first is Alice.org; it was created by Carnegie Mellon University specifically for teaching young people the basics of coding. It tends to be reminiscent of its namesake, Alice in Wonderland. The other is Scratch.mit.org, which was created by MIT University. Scratch tends to be a little more flexible graphically, and it is very easy to import or draw your own sprites, (characters) but that isn’t the main reason I decided to go with Scratch. The main reason is that I found a fantastic resource that helped me learn the program, which made teaching it possible.

Each group of three had to write a myth as a group which had at least three tasks. (If you’ve never written a creative story as a group, you should try it sometime. It‘s quite difficult) Once

the myth was written, we started with the Find the Turtle app, and then moved right into Scratch. Students went through a Scratch tutorial, written by Scratch, as well as creating a very detailed graphic organizer so they can start to think through the steps they need to take for their game. Most students had a great time. They worked together to think through solutions and we spent a full day playing games in class. It just so happened that all this took place during Computer Science Education week. Therefore we not only had our students participate in the “Hour of Code” they actually participated in at least 8 hours of code. Some students really enjoyed this, and came up with amazing, creative games. A couple students even borrowed my instruction book and developed an amazing game over the weekend.

I’m not going to lie, this was an incredibly stressful experience for me. I learned a lot about how to teach coding. I’ve already started creating my own tutorials, which should make it easier for students to solve some of the problems they ran into. I also am going to add more instruction to the graphic organizer we used. On the other hand, it was also an incredibly fun experience. It was so exciting to watch these students create amazing games. They determined what their problem was, and decided how to solve it. They created their code methodically, and came up with some solutions that I never would have thought of. It was awesome and I won’t hesitate to take this project on again.