Tag Archives: Snap

March 25, 2017 · 4:04 am

Maneki Neko prototypes at #DesignDoDiscover @Chadwick_Int! #d3CI #cihosts #MakerEd #elemaker #STEAM

I’m having an awesome time collaborating with teachers here at Design Do Discover’s Songdo edition at Chadwick International School. The FABulous team of coaches includes: Jaymes Dec (FabLab Coordinator at The Marymount School), Sarah Barnum (Science Teacher/Bourn Fellow at The Castilleja School), Gary Donahue (Department Chair of Technology, Making, and Design at Chadwick International School), and Andrew Carle (Village School Maker and Atelierista at Chadwick International School).
Here are some links about the program:
Design Do Discover Chadwick School: https://sites.google.com/view/ddd-ci
Design Do Discover year-round: https://making.marymountnyc.org/page/events/design-do-discover
GoogleGroup of FabLab and Maker educators: http://bit.ly/fabmakegroup

My partners today were Alice Cha of Seoul International School and Landy Hwang & Ivy Choi of Yew Chung International School in Beijing, China. We decided to create interactive Maneki Neko sculptures — these could be powered using different platforms depending on what hardware or software you have at your disposal:

Hummingbird programmed in Scratch
Arduino programmed in Ardublocks or Snap for Arduino or mBlock
LEGO WeDo programmed in Scratch or Mindstorms
EV3 programmed in Scratch or Mindstorms
MakeBlock programmed in Scratch or mBlock
littleBits

Here are some photos of the process:

Here are our notes about the project:

Here are photos from the intro session with the whole group (pay attention to my new favorite caffeinated peppermint gum):

Fractals in 6th Math with @kkleinNYC, Geometer’s #Sketchpad, @Scratch, and pencils. @The_School #mathchat

I’ve had a deep love and respect for Geometer’s Sketchpad since I was first introduced to it in 1994 as an undergraduate Math major (and aspiring math teacher) at Bryn Mawr College.

Later, I used Geometer’s Sketchpad during my student teaching stint at Strath Haven High School and again as a pre-Algebra/pre-Geometry teacher at The Dalton School.

Today in 6th grade Math at The School at Columbia University, Katie Klein (@KKleinNYC) and her associate teacher, Jazmin Sherwood, facilitated a great lesson on Fractals blending direct instruction, video, and self-paced sketching with and without technology.

1. Homework from the previous night was to watch the first 20 minutes of Fractals, Exploring the Hidden Dimension.

2. Here’s a link to beautiful photos of fractals found in nature: http://io9.com/incredible-photographs-of-fractals-found-in-the-natural-480626285

3. Here are instructions for drawing Sierpinski Triangles with paper and pencil:

4. Here are instructions for drawing Sierpinksi Triangles using Geometer’s Sketchpad on their laptops:
http://referencecenter.dynamicgeometry.com/gsp-reference-center/index.html?howto_sierpinski.htm

5. Here’s another resource for making other fractals with Geometer’s Sketchpad: http://www.gwinnett.k12.ga.us/PhoenixHS/math/GSP-website/17_Fractals(51-61).pdf

6. With additional time, students could explore fractals with Scratch or Snap (both are web-based block-based programming environments). Here are some links I gathered:

Karen Blumberg’s hamburger fractal tree in Snap!
Koch Curve in Scratch
Koch Snowflake in Scratch
Dylan Ryder’s Sierpinski Fractal in Scratch
Scratch Fractal Gallery #1
Scratch Fractal Gallery #2
Scratch Fractal Collection

Check out @seanjustice’s awesome @Tagboard of tweets and photos from #ScratchTC on Saturday!

Michael Tempel and Sean Justice teamed up to organize the December 6, 2014 edition of Scratch Day to celebrate anyone doing creative computing projects using the Scratch programming environment. It was held at Teachers College, Columbia University. Check out the PDF of the program here: http://el.media.mit.edu/logo-foundation/calendar/pdf/program2014.pdf

There were awesome workshops offered throughout the day by many old and new friends. I led an afternoon session on using Snap! to create a digital kaleidoscope. I wrote about doing this activity with the 6th graders earlier this year.

Sean used Tagboard to aggregate any tweets or photos tagged with #ScratchTC (on Twitter and Instagram). You can view the collection (including some of my additions) here: http://tgb.io/scratchtc

There will be another Scratch Day at Greenwich Academy on January 24, 2015! The program for January 24’s event is here: http://www.greenwichacademy.org/page.cfm?p=808

Here’s a video of Steve Farnsworth and some people from his session demonstrating how to make musical sounds created by sensors attached to an Arduino and Scratch code…

6th graders programmed kaleidoscopes in Snap! Thank you, @paley2!

One awesome kiddo located images of me as costumes for her sprites…

In July, I took a week-long course about the Beauty and Joy of Computing curriculum co-sponsored by CSNYC and TEALS. They organized a week of learning for us led by Josh Paley (@paley2). Josh adapts the BJC curriculum to teach computer science to high schoolers and college students. Josh shared numerous projects and examples and teaching strategies. While Snap (out of Berkeley) is super similar to Scratch (out of MIT), I have not seen any evidence that there is any East Coast vs. West Coast turf war. Snap is a BYOB environment (build your own block), which is a pretty powerful modification of Scratch. Here’s a Google Doc full of awesome resources that Josh shared with us: http://tinyurl.com/nycbjcaug2014

I replicated the Kaleidoscope program with 6th graders today, as it was one of the easier projects I did with Josh that just entailed having multiple sprites on the screen. The students and I had a great conversation about sprites, costumes, and rules of reflection about the x-axis and y-axis. Here is a link to the program: http://tinyurl.com/krbkaleidoscope — use the space bar starts the action and the c key clears the screen.