Elementary

2nd Grade Design Challenges

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Brown Bag Challenge

A couple of weeks ago on Twitter, I saw a tweet that encompassed some of my favorite concepts of a maker mindset. In the tweet, Angie O’ Malley, a STEAM educator in Washington(and a FABLearn Fellow), challenged her #elemakers to make robots with super powers ON THE FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL. (High five, Angie!) By handing kids a simple bag of random materials, students were challenged to create a robot with the everyday materials in front of them.  I loved how she added the context of super powers, because it gave the students just enough direction (and constraint) to all make completely different and amazing robots.

I knew that I had to see what our Mason students would make with this fun challenge, but I also wanted to do this with FIVE different 2nd grade classes. So and I decided to add teaching the importance of recycling and re-use, and told students up front that they would build robots, snap a picture, and then dis-assemble after building so the next group could re-use the same materials.

The robots they made were super adorable. I took pictures and stored them in a Googledoc for each teacher with the intent that students could write about their robots in the future. (I’m also thinking if time allowed, it would be fun to have students make a Chatterpix of their robot describing its super powers.)

Here are some of their amazing creations!

Mrs. Denny’s sweet students wrote me thank you notes for “letting” them make robots in the library.

Designing an Accessible Playground

After seeing Angie’s great tweet about robots, I delved further into her work and discovered her amazing blog: Elementary Innovators.  She has so many great ideas posted, but one that really stuck out was a post about designing accessible playground equipment. Since we might be getting new playground equipment at Mason, I thought it would be great for our 2nd graders to design a new playground that is accessible for ALL of our students.

Using the design thinking process, we discussed user needs and the concept of accessibility. We asked students to brainstorm ideas out loud and on paper, and then sketch out accessible playground ideas.

Ideas included:

  • Lower Monkey bars so a student in a wheelchair could use them
  • Lower Monkey bars with a platform underneath that would move the wheelchair as the user “swung” across the bars
  • Zip line swings
  • An elevator to the slide
  • A moving sidewalk to the Playscape
  • A computer talker – A student wanted a computer so that one of our nonverbal students could tap on the computer to have it speak and tell others where he wants to play.
  • A Wheelchair zipline that lifts the chair safely
  • A lift to put a child in a swing
  • An accessible trampoline- a platform for a wheelchair that bounces the rider while they are safely in their chair.
  • And some students had super complicated ideas that were just plain awesome like this dinosaur with a slide coming out of it’s mouth!

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Listen to this student talk about her design:

Little people have pretty amazing ideas! I can’t wait to see what they come up with next!

Adapting #Scratch + #MakeyMakey poetry for Elementary Makers

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Colleengraves.org (1).pngIf you’ve been following my blog, you know I’m a bit over the moon for Makey Makey Poetry. (See initial post, follow up post, and resource page.) So when 4th grade teacher, Mrs. Harvey, asked me about ideas I had for poetry in the same breath as mentioning that circuits were coming up, well… I couldn’t help but share one of my favorite activities of creating interactive poetry with Scratch and Makey Makey. My 4th grade teachers were unsure it would work, but they were willing to take a risk! Thanks, 4th grade team!

I knew I needed to hack this poetry project for our elemakers so the class would still flow in our short time frame. Plus, our wonderful and awesome QUEST teachers Mrs. Stewart and Mrs. Koller volunteered to come assist during each class. Before the classes came to the library, the 4th grade teachers read “Yesterday I had the Blues” by Jeron Frame. Using the poem as inspiration, students created their own poem by focusing on colors and mood. Students sketched drawings in class to accompany poetry, then came to the library with poems and drawings in hand.

Upon arrival, I shared a simple pencil drawing of arrows, and touched each arrow to show students it was just normal paper. Then I slowly hooked up alligator clips to my drawings  magician style so that the drawings could become interactive.

The awesome of Makey Makey wowed the students.

However, I wanted students to see that it isn’t magic, and that a simple program controlled the drawing. I hooked up the wrong clips to the wrong drawings of arrows so that I could tap the up arrow and the computer would say “down.” I did this to explain that computers aren’t that smart without people telling them what to do! This shared the importance of understanding how to write really simple programs in Scratch.

Since my students did not have previous Scratch or Makey Makey experience, I also wanted to frontload the concept of block-based programming with some hand made manipulatives. You can adjust and print your own thanks to the awesome Scratch educator community!

Luckily for me, my QUEST (GT teacher) Mrs. Stewart was equally excited and offered to help cut and laminate these blocks AND come assist with 4th grade classes in the library all week!

Once students were logged into the computers and signed into Scratch, (I made a Scratch teacher account and created links for each teacher on the library homepage), I showed students the basic layout of Scratch and how to access the “Event” palette and the “Sound” palette. I demonstrated how to drag the big blocks together and asked them to use expo marks to change the setting on the blocks and then drag them together on the table until they “clicked.”

Before going too much further, I shared how to access the “Sounds” tab for recording their own poetry.  Since they already had a simple program at that point, the library was taken over by Scratch cat meows! I let them get the meows out of their system, and then asked them all to click the “black x” on the sound. (They didn’t know it would delete the cat noise! HA!) I quickly shared how to record and edit sounds, but at that point they were eager to get started. We told students to spread out and find quiet spaces around the library to record their poetry.  (Telling them they were free to tuck into library shelves.) I did make a point of telling students not to “audio-bomb” each other and keep their voices low. Most classes agreed with this common courtesy!

Once recording was finished, students were told to meet back at the “pink” tables in the library to begin the MAKEY MAKEY MAGIC! (If you don’t have them meet back at a central location, Makey Makeys end up on the floor and alligator clips end up EVERYWHERE.)

Now, the best part about the big printed Scratch blocks….. When students came back to the tables, they quickly figured out how to make their program in Scratch and how to control it with Makey Makey! Plus, if someone was confused, I was able to remind them about the big blocks on the table. Students that got it quickly, LOVED being able to help their peers with Scratch and Makey Makey. By the end of the week, we were able to get every student in class playing their poetry with Makey Makey.

As with previous iterations of this lesson, one of my FAVORITE things was hearing students use emotion and tone in their poetry readings. There is just something about creating poetry in Scratch that engages kids with emotive readings of text. (It is not often that students engage with reading poetry with strong emotions!) Plus, it was exciting to see how stoked kids became about poetry by adding this technological piece.

If you’d like to witness a live demo of teaching students how to create this interactive poetry, I’ll be sharing my Makey Makey madness as part of the SLJ Maker Workshop  on Oct. 12th!

Until then, please share your own #MakeyMakeypoetry with the hashtag on Twitter!

P.s. If you want to see and hear your students poetry, make sure they hit “share” before they leave for the day! Otherwise, their Scratch games will not be shared in the teacher account.