Educator Roundtable A
Part 1 Themes: Low-Tech & Accessibility
Part 2 Theme: Classroom Integration
When: Saturday, October 15, 1:45 – 3:25pm
Where: Room 513 – CERAS Building, Stanford
What:
PART 1 (45min)
- Equity, Access and Voice through Art and Design Camp
Corinne Takara, Okada Design
Alba Cardenas, Alum Rock Educational Foundation
Kim Mesa, Alum Rock Educational Foundation
We are sharing our experiences in developing the Art and Design Thinking summer camp in Alum Rock, San Jose, California: http://artanddesigncamp.weebly.com/. The camp is designed for youth entering sixth grade to youth exiting eighth grade. In an area of San Jose that often feels separated from the rest of Silicon Valley, how might we create a learning environment that inspires youth to view themselves as problem solvers, innovators and confident explorers of technology? How might we design a program that invites students in underserved areas to see themselves as creative makers with valuable voices to add to innovation conversations? We have learned that campers will seriously delve into open ended journeys that draw upon their imagination and expertise in their communities and cultures. We have learned that when we foster teamwork in a non-competitive atmosphere, a sense of belonging and friendship builds. Campers then feel that the makerspace belongs to them and they are more willing to take risks and explore. When process is the focus campers learn that mistakes are neither to be celebrated nor ignored, but instead are important moments to document and to pivot from.
PART 2 (45min)
- Integrating and Assessment of Making in Schools
Mark Schreiber, DesignCase
Making and innovation can seem hard to integrate into traditional subjects in schools and can be very difficult to properly assess. The American School in Japan worked hard to integrate these experiences into the K-12 classroom and this session will share the methods that were successful in integrating hands-on learning into the classroom as well as what worked for assessing the outcomes of these lessons in a way that values the process as much as the final product. In this session participants will learn various assessment and integration techniques for hands-on maker style activities. Participants will also leave this session with practical resources, knowledge, and tools that will allow them to effectively lead the integration of making fully into their schools.
- The Plant Physiology and Digital Systems, an interaction that worked!
Macia Nobue Sacay, Escola Granja Viana (Brazil)
Elio Molisani, Gedutec Tecnologia Educacional (Brazil)
Efforts to implement technological resources in the teaching-learning process are increasingly higher. However, most educational proposals concerning physical computing, especially for elementary to high-school, focus either on programming courses for children, robotics, or courses related to the discipline of physics. Although many articles refer to the possibilities of integrating physical computing into other disciplines such as biology and chemistry, or through projects integrating various disciplines, in fact, few real examples of application are found. We present a methodology based on the development of projects for the implementation of the physical computing related to the biology curriculum. For this, the Arduino was used – a hardware platform and free software that allows interaction between the environment and the computer through electronic components such as sensors, motors, transmitters and receivers – and a simplified programming process using Scratch for Arduino (S4A). Various user-friendly projects of high technological, environmental and social impact which have been developed by students of the 11th grade during the course of the proposal are presented here.