How can I use this in my class?

1. How can I use this in my class? Please complete evaluation at: http://findings.vtech.sgizmo.com  • Java for MS in IT students. Wrap GUI around doing some cool picture manipulations, to engage the students. • After AP exam, play with sounds for pre-calculus class, working with amplitude. • In my Alice class, last quarter is some Java. Could do MediaComp for the Java portion: More interesting and open-ended assignments. • Can I use this in AP class? Maybe for array manipulation? • Started doing chromakey with intro class. Tried different poster board colors, and had kids figure out which colors worked right. Really engaged students AND VISITORS. Focused on experimentation. • Been doing text with Python. Could use image to get different focus in Python. • In Middle School, could start with basic use of explore( ) on the caterpillar, to talk about how images are digitized, how pictures are represented on the computer.

2. More: How use this in my class? • With Alice class, use Python to fill in the end of the year. They want to add sounds, create more things for the catalog. • In AP course, after exam, maybe use data structures or possibly introduce Python MediaComp. • Starting a new course, breadth-first, rising 10th graders. Ways to get into how programming works and how digitizing works. Use it as a hook. Won’t know they’re learning programming unless I tell them, and I won’t. Want to do a lot with matrices, and can do that here. More fun than working through a 2-D array. • Get the pre-calc kids recruited early by playing with sounds! • Somehow link to CS Ed Week? Maybe make a contest? Art Gallery? • Python is great for being memory light and FREE. We’re budget constrained. • Doing things here that are hard to do with tools. Writing functions that will do things like fitting pictures into collage. • Doing things beyond simple, like removing background noise in a sound.

3. More: How to use in my class? • Use as a motivation in existing course. Using turtles to introduce objects. Using image manipulation to introduce loops. Will switch back and forth. Using MIDI to introduce linked lists. • Can’t really use this right now. Using an imperative scripting language, where we use mainline and subroutines, rather than objects. • Can change frequency of beep in VB, but not read import sounds and manipulate samples. Can definitely do pixels in pictures. • MediaComp support is language dependent. • Putting this in CS0. Now using Lego Mindstorms. Add some Python in?

4. More: How to use this in my class? • What are our computational goals in the different classes? • Are we going to run into a problem where students are seeing the exact same thing (decreaseRed?) over and over, in multiple classes at multiple levels? • It’s what we did before with prime numbers and fibonacci, just with something more engaging. • A big issue here is assessment: How do we assess, assess what we think is important, and assessing similar ways to how students learn. • Let’s not teach the way we learned in the 70’s! • Maybe we can improve our teaching, when we have good assessment that shows us what’s working and what’s not.

5. More: What can I use in my class? • Python lets us do functional, imperative, and object-oriented. • What about not learning more but excited? We should be focusing on getting kids to deal with abstraction.