Scratching the Surface

I have always liked the idea of using scratch with students

• to help them think
• make them doers 
• instant feedback.

I have been looking at an inquiry to find out

Is the use of scratch a way to increase student understanding of geometry?

Here was the First Project Challenge I gave students. 1. Create a Scratch script which tells a sprite to draw each of the following shapes in succession. triangle square pentagon hexagon octagon So how did things turn out Well with just a few basic introductions like pen down Movement and turning they got cracking The group almost all were able to complete the challenge though it was interesting to see  how they achieved it. Quite a few of them had really repetitive code to achieve it which  presented a great opportunity to look for patterns and optimise it. Here is a solution that  works and underneath it working.

Learn more about this project

The inquiry is showing some promise for scratch. In my next post I want to discuss with students some of their thinking around Maths.

Credible Self Direction 1

One of the students at my school has just bought his own computer. He wanted a little bit of advice as to how to get it going. The computer was old and incompatible with even the most basic keyboard we had. What impressed me was the effort that Callum has put into finding out about what he need to do to get this going. I offered to give him a slightly newer computer in return for a couple of articles and received the following first installment by the end of the day.

My favorite quotes are

I acquired a desktop computer tower for $1 at a garage sale in Tauranga it looked in perfect condition. 

It was a pretty bad pc i discovered

I ask my friends in the ICT lab for help, they point out how useless it is (because before i didn’t realise), but I’m still going to use it.




There are couple of discoveries here.

• Students will persist when they are motivated by possible achievement.

• Students are learning independently of us in areas that we can either choose or choose not to support and encourage.

• Give students a chance to work and control real technologies let them show where they are at.

On Saturday 28th July I acquired a desktop computer tower for $1 at a garage sale in Tauranga it looked in perfect condition. Everyone asked me if I was going to take it home and open it up, I said I don't know. The next day I wired it up with the cables, power check, VGA check, sound check, usb for keyboard and mouse... there was none! So I opened it and saw a pretty empty case, but everything was perfect except no hidden usbs. I re-arranged all the ports so I could fit in an usb pci card and plug it into the motherboard.  However when I turned it on it gave a beep and loaded up the BIOS (basic input output system).  It was a pretty bad pc i discovered, no usbs because it is a Pentium 2, it has a quantum fireball hard drive, an Intel Celeron processor and 65536k of memory. I ask my friends in the ICT lab for help, they point out how useless it is (because before i didn’t realise), but I’m still going to use it.

System BIOS (Compaq screen is of another pc)

PCI card slot on motherboard

Pc turned on