Learning

Stop Motion Animation

This is something that Mason has been doing for quite some time now and we've started to publish some of the works at Mason Anomation.

It has been a good tool to orchestrate "teachable moments" (i.e. "not too much violence", "less LEGO blood"). We've also used it as a bit of a philosophical discussion about the rights film makers give up to see their work published.

Programming

Mason and I have been working on building out some slides that teach programming concepts using the Scratch programming language.

This effort was more me with Mason being the guinea pig. The slides are hosted on learncode.ca and under "Programming from Scratch". The mini-class was put on at his school and what we accomplished was to give kids a sample of what programming is like and have some reflection on whether they might enjoy it.

This was also a chance for me to see if the blank stare that comes from programmers when you present a powerpoint presentation is a biological or learned behavior. I need to run more studies there but the preliminary results seem to indicate biology may play a factor. This flushed out a few programmers in the room.

Robots

We have spent some time looking at various programmable robots (huge thanks for our friend for letting us preview their robots)

  • Programming Robots: An overview of a number of programmable robots on the market.
  • Musical Robots: Using a scratch-like language we converted a song Mason wrote for guitar called "Don't be Scared" into code and then transferred to our micro:bit which we wired to a sound board.

I've also been working to introduce Ozobots into my son's school. I donated a class set of the little ozobot critters and am working with staff from my son's school and colleagues from my work to help facilitate this, fun times!

Language

My son and I have been using Duolingo for awhile. He was studying Japanese and roped me in, now he's change to French so we both are exploring that. There is a huge opportunity I think to use tools such as Duolingo Schools in the classroom.