Halloween hangouts

I wrote a few weeks ago about the #ccGlobal Global Celebrations and Festivities project – for more information check out here.  The plan was to connect my daughter’s class with Michael Thornton’s class in Virginia and Roy Mitchell’s class in Sligo to discuss traditions around how we celebrate Halloween, to see the similarities and the differences.  Unfortunately, due to graduations, presidential elections and babies the Google+ hangout did not happen last week – the dates that worked for us in Ireland didn’t work for the class in the US and vice versa.  While this was disappointing, we’re hopeful that we will have better luck next time – hopefully in the lead up to Christmas.

Due to the lack of an opportunity to connect the classes last week, I decided to connect directly with Michael’s class with my own family.  We normally have a trick or treat party on Halloween, with my nieces and nephews and my own children, so I thought it might be a nice idea to do a Google+ hangout with them and Michael’s class. We decided to connect at 5.30pm Irish time (which was 1.30 pm in the US – our clocks changed this weekend and theirs will change next weekend).  I timed it so that, on our end we would be dressed for trick or treating, so we could talk about costumes etc.   At about 5.25 we joined the hangout started by Michael and started chatting.  I think there were 16 children at his side and we had 7 on our end.  We started by chatting about the costumes and what they were dressed as or going to dress as.  We then chatted a bit about what the children would get when they went trick or treating.  Next we talked a little about the origins of the Halloween festival in Ireland (the festival of Samhan), which my daughter was learning about last week in school.  We finished off by showing each other the candies and sweets that we would be giving and receiving on each side of the Atlantic.

We were excitable on our end as the children ranged in age from 3 to 9 and the thoughts of trick or treating was a little distracting Despite this we really enjoyed the chat and it has made me even more anxious to facilitate the connect between the classes coming up to Christmas, so thank you Michael for taking the time to connect with us.

CESI conference 2012

The 2012 CESI conference has been announced – it will be on the 24th and 25th of February 2012 in Portlaoise, Ireland. I have been attending CESI conferences for the past 4 years and I have enjoyed them all. I love the fact that conferences such as the CESI one give me an opportunity to listen to inspiring keynote speakers, hear the way other educators are integrating technology into their teaching, and most importantly of all, catch up with people I’ve met at previous conferences or been in contact with on social networking sites such as Twitter. Since I’ve started using Twitter, prompted by the CESI MEET in 2010, I am in more regular contact with many educators across Ireland and beyond so I’m really looking forward to catching up face to face with many of these educators at the CESI conference next February. As someone who loves Twitter, which at times borders on addiction, I must admit that the opportunity to chat with people trumps all other forms of communication for me. For more information on the CESI conference check out here.

Update on New Year’s resolutions

Now that I’m six weeks into the first semester, and therefore half way through, I decided to give an update on where I’m at with my New Year’s resolutions.  If you haven’t read about my resolutions check them out here.  The main plan when I set out my resolutions was to change how I do what I do.  While I haven’t used the technologies that I set out at the start I think I have made some progress in changing what we do in class.  My three main resolutions were

1. start a blog
2. use a wiki, specifically a discussion forum
3. create podcasts to support my course notes

The blog has been started, and continues to be updated, and I must say I am really enjoying writing these blog posts.  I had hoped to have used a wiki and podcasts at this stage but unfortunately I can’t give an update on these technologies in this post.  Regarding using the wiki, I haven’t used a discussion forum yet but the plan is to get this started next week.  I had planned to use it from the start, but decided to let the students settle in before I brought this in to the mix.  Having taught Maths to 1st year computing students for the past 4 years and to 2nd year computing students for the past 8 years, I often find that the students ease with Maths ranges from being very comfortable with the topics, right across the spectrum to sheer terror at the mention of an ‘x’ or a ‘y’.  This year with my first years seems to be following the same pattern.  The challenge for me, is to move on with those who are comfortable, and show them where and how they might use the Maths topics as future Computer Science graduates, while building the confidence of those who are terrified at the very thought of Maths.  I think the time is now right, to bring in the discussion forum, so here’s hoping it gets the students thinking about how Maths might be useful to them in their chosen field of study.

With the podcasts, or more correctly the videocasts, I have made very little progress so far.  This is mainly due to not having the correct equipment and work generally getting in the way of work!!  I have used a Logitech webcam to make an initial videocast, but the results were far from ideal.  I have since been told that a Livescribe Pen is what I really need, to do what I want to do, so the order is in and I can’t wait to get started with that!!  As always, the update will be here at some stage in the future  While I haven’t created my own podcasts, I have provided Youtube clips to support the topics that I have been covering in class.  These seem to be proving popular with students, particularly those who are less confident with Maths.

Enough about what I haven’t done yet, and on to what I have done and what seems to be working.  One of the problems we often find with students who study on Computer Science courses, is that they have very little idea of what they are getting themselves into, and are often very disillusioned when they realise what is actually involved.  With the availability of so many applications and various technologies, the perception is often that a computing course will involve just using these applications and technologies.  What a lot of people don’t realise is that, on computing courses, students are creating content rather than consuming it.  Writing applications and testing them is a very important aspect for a lot of our courses so that’s what I have been focussing on in class.  We have coded in Java in Maths class, check out the blog post on how we got on here.  We’ve used Java again this week, coding loops to calculate the terms and the sum of the terms in an arithmetic sequence.  I’ve been able to stress the importance of being able to calculate test data to make sure that their programs are working as they should.  We’ve also discussed why it’s important that the students can work through the various calculations themselves, as this understanding is crucial if they want to be able to code applications which perform these calculations.  In previous years I have spoken about the importance of understanding calculations and being able to create test data but I haven’t taken the next step of actually coding.  This year, I decided to take that step and the feedback so far seems positive.

So, the plan for the next 6 weeks of the semester is to use the discussion forum and to create podcasts and make those available for students.  I’m also hoping to bring in guest lecturers from industry to speak to the students about where Maths is used, to give a context to what they are covering in class.

Scratch at Coder Dojo Limerick continued

Saturday October 8th saw us back at the Coder Dojo.  Again my 12 year old son, 8 year old daughter and 7 year old niece made the trip.  After the success of the Scratch session last week, I offered to take some of the group to learn some more about Scratch.  The plan was that I would take the younger group and go through some more of the basics with them.  I thought that, based on the numbers from last week, I would have maybe 6 or 7 for Scratch while Mark and Eugene took the rest of the group to learn about programming in Python.  We moved to a new location for the Coder Dojo this week as the numbers have been growing so this weeks Dojo was in the LIT’s Downtown Centre in George’s Quay in Limerick.  This worked really well for us as we had two rooms side by side which could accomodate both groups.

By the time we got everyone settled we had about 12 for Scratch, ranging in age from 7 to about 14, with a similar number for Python.  My plan for Scratch for this week was to work through the ‘Broadcast’ and ‘Receive’ blocks with the aim of getting the children to create a cartoon where two characters ‘talked’ to each other.  We started by creating our characters and background – for some people this involved drawing their own characters and backgrounds, and for others it involved taking existing characters and making some changes to them.  At this stage some of the kids were working on their own while others worked in pairs.  There was lots of chatting as they decided on what characters they wanted and how they might create them.  Some of the artwork created can be seen below:

Once we had the characters and backgrounds I showed how we might get characters to say something to each other using the ‘Say’ block but we saw that the characters were talking over each other.  So we next looked at the broadcast and receive blocks which allowed one character to broadcast a message and the other character to receive the message and do something based on the message.   This allowed us to get the characters to ‘talk’ to each other as you can see in the code below:

The remainder of the time was spent by the children getting their animations working.  What was great to see was that the older children incorporated the broadcast and receive into their animations but they also got the characters to move etc.  This is what I love most about Scratch – give a group of students the same tools and they all take it in different directions, based on their interests and understanding of the concepts involved.  It was also great to see the children moving around having a look at what the others were doing and helping each other out to get something working.  Finally, like last week, the groups had to show their animation and talk about how they did what they did.  Have a look at the Scratch Gallery I created for the games/animations created on Saturday:  http://scratch.mit.edu/galleries/view/140045.

A woman who inspired me to become who I am

Last Wednesday, 5th October 2011, was World Teachers Day and today, Friday 7th October 2011, is Ada Lovelace Day.  Ada Lovelace was a mathematician in the 19th century who is often referred to as the First Computer Programmer.  Both of these days, highlighting the contributions of teachers, in the case of World Teachers Day, and the contributions of women to the Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths areas, in the case of Ada Lovelace Day, have made me think about a teacher and a mathematician who has inspired me to become who I am.

While in secondary school, I loved studying Maths.  During Transition Year we began studying the Leaving Cert Honours Maths syllabus and we were lucky enough to be assigned Mary Haugh as our teacher.  Over the next three years my love of Maths continued and if anything got stronger.  I loved Maths class and really enjoyed the problem solving aspect of the syllabus.  This is in no small part due to Mary Haugh.  Her guiding principle in class was that there was no such thing as a stupid question.  This allowed us, as a class, to tease out the many nuances of the various Maths topics.   When filling in my CAO choices in school I found it difficult to choose between an Applied Maths course and an Industrial Chemistry course.  I sought the advice of Mary and while she was careful not to influence me, the chat helped me to clarify what I wanted to study.   I followed my heart and put Applied Maths first, which I believe was the best decision of my life.

This gave me an opportunity to have careers as a computer analyst/programmer, a statistician and now as a lecturer.  Since starting to lecture I often find myself thinking of how enjoyable my Maths classes in school were and how comfortable we all felt being able to ask questions.  This is something I have tried to incorporate into my own classes – I do appreciate how difficult it can be for people to ask questions in a class of more than 70 people but I still encourage participation in lectures and also in my smaller tutorial sessions.  I’m not sure how successful I have been in this endeavour, but I do strive to put people at ease and try to help them to overcome the genuine terror and lack of understanding that a lot of people feel when faced with a Maths class.

So thank you Mary Haugh for inspiring me both while I was studying Honours Maths in school and also in my current career as a lecturer of Maths.

Scratch at Coderdojo Limerick

For the 5th Coder Dojo in Limerick we made it a family occasion.   Because I knew that we would be doing Scratch I decided to bring my 12 year old son, my 8 year old daughter and my 7 year old niece.  They had all seen a little Scratch but not as much as they should have (shame on me!!).  We arrived just at half 11 by which time there were more than 15 kids and about 10 adults getting themselves set up to learn Scratch.   Scratch is a programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art — and share your creations on the web. (ref: http://info.scratch.mit.edu/About_Scratch).

Clare McInerney from Lero was on hand to get everyone started so we began by downloading Scratch (http://scratch.mit.edu/download).  Once everyone had Scratch downloaded Clare showed us one of the projects that won the National Scratch competition last year.  This was a game which connected a dance mat to Scratch and was ably demonstrated by a couple of the teenagers at the Dojo.  We also had a look at a project which used a picoboard (this allows interactions with sensors such as light, sound, button and slider).  Once we had a taste of what was possible with Scratch we made a start with creating our own projects. Over the course of the next few hours we worked on three different projects as follows:

The first project involved drawing a pentagon – Clare outlined the code involved and then got us all to put in the code and check to see that it did produce a pentagon.  Code for the pentagon is as follows

Next we had to try to figure out how to draw a circle beside the pentagon.  Once everyone managed to draw the pentagon and circle we were encouraged to have a play with changing colours, pen size etc.  For this project we used the Scratch workbooks which have been produced by Lero (details can be found at http://www.scratch.ie/).

The second project involved getting 2 sprites (characters) and a background.  We then programmed one of the characters to move when the up, down, left and right arrow keys were pressed.  The second character was programmed to just continually move over and back across the screen.  The next task was to detect when the characters collided and to do something when they did.

By this stage it was time for lunch and it was great to see that a lot of the kids went back early after lunch to continue playing with Scratch.  Our final project was entirely our choice as to what we did.  People were put in teams of 2 – 4 to work on a project idea.  Clare asked us all to put details in Project Notes which was to describe what our project was about.  It was great to see this emphasis on thinking about what you wanted to do before you started.  Over the next hour the groups worked on their projects with Clare, Mark and Eugene moving though the groups making sure that everyone was OK and giving a helping hand when needed.

The finale for the day involved a member from each team presenting their project and explaining what they did and how they did it.  The variety of projects presented, and the very obvious team work that went into getting working games and animations within an hour was refreshing to see.  It was also lovely to see how children as young as 7 were proud to present their projects to the group.  You can check out the games and animations that were created at http://scratch.mit.edu/galleries/view/139405.

I’m looking forward to the next few weeks of Coder Dojo, where it’s hoped that we can connect Picoboards and the xBox Kinect to Scratch.  The possibilities are endless!!