EDU 642 Week 7: Computational Thinking and Artifacts Reflection

Design Principle Application

When I was creating my QR code artifacts, I was thinking about a few specific design principles including Mayer’s spatial contiguity principle and the coherence principle. I felt that it was essential to make these posters with the QR codes easy to read to and to access the right QR code. I added in arrows that pointed to the corresponding code to make it obvious to students which code matched with each topic. When I was creating my AR lesson and my computational thinking coding lesson, I didn’t have many products that I created so I didn’t get to apply many principles to those artifacts. However while teaching both of these principles, I would like to consider the pre-training principle because students are given vocabulary words needed in the lesson. Also, the use of personalization in these lessons will be crucial, because both rely on deep, meaningful discussions with students, so having an informal conversation will help out with this.

When thinking about the use of technology in the classroom, I think about all the programs available for students, especially for coding. I think it's crucial for teachers to make sure they are exploring all of the options and finding what would work best for your students. I would like to start regularly using code.org more often with my students, however, I have a few hesitations because I myself still struggle with coding and I also am not sure where I can find the time to purposefully give time for students to practice these skills.

Artifact Creation

I struggled a bit with my creation of my artifacts for this week, I had a hard time coming up with ideas because these concepts would be so new for my students and I wanted to make sure that the artifacts I create would be useful for my students. Once I brainstormed ideas from looking at the resources on code.org and other coding websites, I found an idea for my computational thinking artifact. For the computational thinking lesson, students are going to learn about algorithms and create specific steps to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, then students trade papers with a partner to have their steps acted out. Students will then debug their steps after watching how it played out and then apply their learning to a coding computer game. The augmented reality lesson involved students creating a space in CoSpaces EDU and then trading their space with a partner and write a narrative piece based on their partners CoSpace. Lastly, my QR code artifact were posters that had QR codes linked to research websites for my students in their informational writing.

When thinking about my computational thinking lesson overall, I was pretty happy with how it turned out. I think this lesson would be a great opener to computational thinking and algorithms. I like how the lesson involved students interacting with algorithms in an unplugged activity, and then students applying their knowledge in a fun game on the computer. I am not sure when I would implement this lesson into my classroom because this particular lesson does not directly correlate to content aligned in our curriculum. However, I do think it would be good to start setting time aside each month for STEM activities like the one I created. Also, with the current pandemic, this lesson would be tricky to do right now, but maybe next year I would be able to try this out with my students.

I was pretty happy with how my augmented reality lesson turned out as well. I just think that this lesson would be harder to implement to my students right away because it would involve students working with the website CoSpacesEDU a little more before completing this lesson. However, I do think that this lesson combines the AR technology with the content curriculum well. The CoSpacesEDU website helps students with their writing skills and I think that this would be impactful to students. My only worry for this lesson is that some students might get frustrated with the program and not have much in their space for their partner to write from. This is why I think it would be beneficial for students to explore this website a little more before implementing this lesson to my students or after students have had more time working with coding and computational thinking. This lesson would be implemented during our writing time to help improve students’ writing skills on details and showing not telling. This would work with our narrative unit, but it also could work with any writing lesson because the skills practiced are important to any piece of writing.

Lastly, I was proud of how my QR code posters turned out. I think that they are clear and will help my students find websites for their research. This will save a lot of time and stress when starting our informational writing pieces. Therefore these posters would be implemented in our informational writing unit. I think the best way to share these posters with my students would be to share these posters on my board and have students scan them. Or I thought about printing them as mini cards and giving them to students individually so they could just scan the QR codes right at their desks.

Tools

Out of the tools that I used this week, I used AdobeSpark to create the QR posters and I have found that program to be easier and easier the more that I work with it. It was easy to make it simple and clean for my students. The other tool that I used was CoSpacesEDU. This program was easy to add characters and items into the space, but there was a lot that you could do and change to these pieces like changing the color, size, animating them, coding them to move and so much more. It is great if you know how to do all of these things, but I am worried that one of the drawbacks might be that there are too many options for my students. I also wasn’t sure how to code the characters, but I did figure it out after working with it a bit and thought that it was cool that you could do that. The biggest disappointment with this program was that many of the items were locked unless you paid for a subscription. However, I do think that there was enough material for my students to create a unique space. The last tool that I used and explored was a game on PBS Kids called Code Quest. This was the first coding game that I found that walks students through the steps in a very simple way and then gradually adds in more steps to code and complete. I thought that this game worked perfectly with my computational thinking lesson because it started off very easy and slow and worked its way into harder skills.

Ultimately after reading all about computational thinking, augmented reality, and QR codes from last week and then creating these products this week, I feel that I have expanded my knowledge in these areas and have created some great lessons for my students to practice these skills as well. I am excited to eventually implement these artifacts and lessons into my classroom and see how my students respond.