Rob's family

Curriculum matters. 4 classes over 8 weeks.  Two snow storms and two institute days in between.  It's difficult to have it all stick.  Today was the third week of doing loops  (important concept).  They're starting to get it, but it's also becoming a slog.  Not so much fun.  The curriculum is structured such that mostly there is A right answer.  It would be better if solving the problem counted for more.  Then we could give style points for better solutions. Really teaching kids coding concepts in after school space is not ideal.  They're mostly done and we've got a whole slew of new concepts.  Let's make it harder now!  Let's do nested loops.  Enough, we should take a week and do something fun.  I'm pretty sure next week is while loops instead of repeat loops.  My course designer is a sadist. I may nudge us to do something more fun next week.  Iterate geometric shapes across the screen.  Let the...

Inspired by the music for the next Symphonic Band rotation: Julie Giroux’s “Overture in Five Flat” begins with the rather ambiguous tempo marking of quarter note = “you have five minutes”. Like any good math nerd, I have to wonder - just how fast do you have to play this piece to finish in exactly five minutes? The simple average gives us 194 measures*4 beats per measure/5 minutes = 155.2 bpm. Fast, but not that fast. (Probably not “tempo di tear ass” fast) BUT at measure 140, we get quarter note = “a little faster here,” which we observe for the rest of the piece. I decided to call this 20% faster than the beginning. If we do a weighted average with x bpm for the first 139 measures and 1.2x bpm for the last 55 measures, we get x = 146.9 bpm for the beginning and 1.2x = 176.2 bpm for the end. Now we’re cooking with gas. However, playing “Overture in Five Flat” in exactly five minutes is rather uninspired. Professor Fisher told us that when they recorded this piece a few...

Last week, we introduced loops.  It's a tough concept and it was clear last week that we needed to work at it some more.  The curriculum has a paper "pattern" exercise to help learn how to see when to apply a loop solution to a problem.  The approach is look at each line of pictures and a notice the pattern in each of them.  See how they repeat? Alas, that sheet - not so good.  Each pattern had only 4 items in it.  There were simple repeats (A A A A) and two item repeats (A B A B) but there were not really enough examples to help you see the pattern.  Next time we should have page of 20 patterns with 8 or more in each to help see the pattern.  Plus we should have actually introduced the notion of "pattern" rather than loops first and then associating that patterns. That said, the kids got it more this week.  I'm focusing on the 1-2 graders - the older kids are doing the same thing, but  little harder. Writing code is a cerebral thin...

A teacher's institute day and a cold weather day with no classes and three weeks have passed.  It's probably a bit too much to expect kids to remember anything. So we started again. Boys are still squirrels and girls are quiet rule followers.  This is an after school activity; kids are a little wound up.  They still have to take turns, mind their business and be good classroom citizens.  Clearly, that's difficult.  Our class is 2nd graders to 6th graders.  We split into two groups.  I've got the little ones - 2nd and 3rd graders. They have trouble clicking in small spaces and finding letters on the keyboard. Today, the curriculum tried to introduce a looping construct (repeat a set of instructions over and over) and more debugging (here's a program; there's something wrong with it - fix it).  Tall order.  I can see some deficiencies with the program for little hands.  If they move some of the blocks too far out of the way, it behave...