Gesture table

Our gesture table required a touch of design work.  Similar interactive tables from commercial vendors run anywhere from $7000 to $9000.  Our interest in the gesture table was curiosity into other options for interactive whiteboards.

We designed our own table to accommodate the launch of Kick Start’s – Leap Motion controller (https://www.leapmotion.com/), recognizing we needed something functional and affordable.  We were also eager to explore what appeared to be the next, best human / computer interface – gesture.  Input has evolved from typed in DOS commands, to the mouse / GUI interface, to now a motion controller (http://www.sensomatic.com/chz/gui/history.html)

We designed and built the table before we actually saw / had the Leap Motion controller – so, it was a leap of faith, so to speak.

Working with our industry friend, Total Office Solutions, Ian, Roy and I were designed a table to support a 52″ LED TV and mount a Mac Mini.

The mounting bracket was order through Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/Maccuff-Mini-Vesa-Mounting-Models/dp/B0043IA6J0/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1366730624&sr=8-3&keywords=mac+mini+mounting+bracket).

 

 

Once designed and delivered to EME 1123, our IT Services techs assisted up while putting the pieces together.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Computer inputs are controlled conventionally by a keyboard and mouse or more interestingly by the Leap Motion Controller (https://www.leapmotion.com/).

Gesture table now resides in EME 1123 — the classroom / learning lab of the ILC.

Over the past term, we have explored the basics of the Leap Motion Controller (LMC) and gesture table using some basic apps – a combination of free and commercial apps. Through blogs and colleagues’ suggestions, we have increased our personal library, and we have discussed the possibility working with computer science students to create apps using the development tools.
In addition to our observation of users within the learning lab, participants in our ongoing research of the EME 1123 of learning environment design have provided us with valuable feedback as to how they have used the gesture table during their time in the classroom / learning lab.

Based on their feedback and our commitment to ongoing development of the gesture table, we have added a sound bar to boost both the audio volume and sound quality.

Another suggestion was that we move the table to the middle of the learning lab rather than keeping it against a wall where we had originally placed it.  Participants suggested moving it away from the wall would  encourage group interaction and foster larger group collaboration by using the Air Play option to project gesture table content.

Further, one participant has this to say:

The gesture table gave our student with special needs the chance to participate in a game using the leap motion controller. With headphones and apps designed for the Leap Motion Controller, this student would be able to work independently at the gesture table or with a group of students while others in the class worked on tablets or laptops. ~ Participant ILC_D473638_1

We look forward to further adaptations and discussions as we explore the how, what and why of our gesture table.

Next steps for us include

  • encouraging our Music instructor to try the range of conducting, instrument, sound apps with  Bachelor of Education students and
  • continuing to explore appropriate uses of the gesture table with English for Professional Purposes students.

Gagne’s Events …

Robert Gagné’s seminal work is his conditions of learning theory. It includes five categories of learning outcomes and the nine events of instruction. Together, these two themes of Gagné’s learning theory provide a framework for learning conditions.

Design Thinking – Instructional Design

Design Thinking is Human-centered

Design thinking acquires and synthesizes information in order to generate creative, human-centered solutions. It places a great value on empathy for your users. The practice of design thinking seems to be sorely missing from instructional design university programs, professional training and workplace practices.

If design thinking has the potential to help us come up with better design solutions, then let’s make room for it as we design and promote learning experiences.

http://theelearningcoach.com/elearning_design/design-thinking-for-instructional-desig/

Liberating Large Lectures

How a Stanford Professor Liberates Large Lectures

Economics Professor Timothy Bresnahan gave his first teaching tip at the start of his talk, “Large Classes: Keeping the Energy in 220 Relationships at Once,” by saying he would be sitting down during his presentation.

“This is my first trick for you,” he told a noontime audience assembled around a conference table in the Mitchell Earth Sciences Building. “You want your students to be active; you’ve got to be a little passive.”

Speaking last week at a the brown bag lunch series, Award-Winning Teachers on Teaching, Bresnahan said one way he practices passivity in his statistics class is to simply “shut up” after giving students a fun problem – such as testing the theory that storks bring babies, using data about the number of human births and the number of stork nests in English towns.

After discussing the data, which suggested that storks bring babies, Bresnahan said he stops talking, a technique he called “the most important tool of wiliness.”

“After three minutes, I’ll say, the reason I got this job is I’m paid by the hour, I’m perfectly happy to sit here until somebody has something intelligent to say,” he said.

“At minute six, I’ll say, you guys do know the correct theory, right? We deliberately picked an incorrect theory. At eight minutes, I’ll say, OK, maybe there are some people that don’t know the true theory here. You engineering students, you can ask after class and I’ll tell you the true theory. And eventually, even among 21st century students, somebody will say, could it be that this is a correlation that’s not causal?”

Bresnahan said he doesn’t let them stop talking until they arrive at an explanation.

“It’s easy to say this statistical model is false,” he said. “It must be correlation, not causation, when you know the right answer. But in a live example, you don’t know the right answer. So I will push the students, once they start talking, to tell me why this one came out that way. I’ll ask them, ‘Why do we get this correlation?’ And eventually someone really, really smart will say there are probably more storks and moms in the bigger towns and that’s why you get this correlation. Which is a very, very good answer for a sophomore.”

Know them. Challenge them. Liberate them.

Bresnahan said large lecture classes present three challenges: keeping students energized; drawing them into the intellectual community associated with their majors and into the Stanford intellectual community; and teaching them the tools they will use in advanced economics classes.

He presented a three-part strategy: Know them. Challenge them. Liberate them.

Bresnahan said he memorizes the names of all 220 students enrolled in his large lecture classes, after reviewing photographs – taken by teaching assistants – of each student holding a sheet of paper with his or her name written in large letters.

“This is me being an overachiever,” he said of his memorization routine. “I don’t think I’m a particularly charismatic lecturer; I don’t think I can carry the room. I do think that I can reach out to people and induce them to think by calling their name.”

At a minimum, he said, learn the names of 15 to 20 students by taking them to lunch.

“This is a terrific investment,” Bresnahan said. “First off, you’ll know if what you’re doing is playing. And second, you’ll have people to call on when you want somebody to say something other than you, which is really, really important.”

Bresnahan said he tries to create “challenges to active thinking everywhere,” such as posing an interesting question about a problem students have just solved.

After a class of sophomores had solved a problem set about two groups of people and wages, testing the difference between two means, he asked: Which group do you think came from East Palo Alto and which group came from Atherton?

“This is a significantly easier question than all the technical stuff they’ve just done, but a very substantial fraction of Stanford sophomores, almost all men, will say, ‘Wait a minute, you didn’t teach us that,'” he said.

Asking questions about material not covered is a “really good trick, very reliable,” Bresnahan said.

“Someone will pop up in class during question time and say, ‘How are we supposed to know that?'” he said. “You say, ‘You’re supposed to be a capable, working person.'”

Bresnahan suggested picking advanced undergraduates as teaching assistants – students who took the course last year and had a lot of fun – as a way to reduce the “social distance” between the people who teach and the people who learn.

“To go back to my original theme, it’s easy to get a large body of knowledge – or tools – across to these highly motivated, hard-working students,” he said. “To get them to feel you really want them to take up these tools and use them, you’ve got to go a little out of the box.”

As for liberating students, Bresnahan said it’s important to “turn them loose” to make discoveries on their own. “I let them show off,” he said.

Bresnahan said he gives students the chance to shine with a weekly “submit-a-slide contest,” in which a student gets seven minutes to present a slide illustrating the best or worst statistical analysis found in that week’s Wall Street Journal or San Francisco Chronicle. He said the exercise is “incredibly empowering” for students, and since it’s not counted toward their grades, it’s not threatening.

The prize for winning Bresnahan’s “build-a-data-set contest,” which requires students to form teams of at least three people, is permission to be a day late on the following week’s data set.

“I want to give them a toolkit and encourage them to put it to use on stuff they think is exciting and where they think they have knowledge, because that’s a really, really difficult problem for beginning students, to have enough knowledge on top of all your tools to do a serious empirical study,” he said. “It’s just amazing what they do.”

Stanford’s Center for Teaching and Learning sponsors the Award-Winning Teachers on Teaching series.  A video of Bresnahan’s 45-minute presentation, and the question-and-answer session that followed, will be available in January on the center’s website.

PBL Instructional design

A seven phase model for PBL instructional design

Phase 1: Introducing the Driving Question

  • compelling
  • open-ended
  • meaningful
  • higher-level question requiring students to think deeply
  • has no right or wrong answer
  • provides instructor an opportunity to ascertain differing levels of prior knowledge and plan appropriately for instruction

Phase 2: Introducing the Culminating Challenge

  • needs to be some type of authentic assessment or performance in which students clearly demonstrate learning
  • examples might include a moot court, election simulation, authoring a children’s book, developing a web site, a town hall meeting, etc.
  • students are provided with guided choice concerning the options for authentic role(s).

Phase 3: Developing Subject Matter Expertise

  • creation of individual and team tasks to lead students to success on both the culminating challenge and summative assessment
  • students embody authentic roles and thus have a “need to know” more about the concepts and skills
  • utilizes inquiry methods to help students explore new concepts, but provide enough background information on the new vocabulary and concepts that students can figure out how to move forward.

Phase 4: Doing the Culminating Challenge

  • chance for students to demonstrate their learning in a performance assessment
  • if possible, bring in subject matter experts to help assess the quality of student work
  • an outside perspective will “up the stakes” for students who are used to presenting just to the teachers or classmates

Phase 5: Debriefing the Culminating Challenge (Ideally with Subject-Matter Experts)

  • debriefing is easy to overlook or breeze past due to never-ending time constraints
  • reflective practice of debriefing is extremely valuable for students and teachers alike.

Phase 6: Responding to the Driving Question

  • ask students to respond to the driving question once again
  • students should have new vocabulary and a deep, conceptual understanding of the material covered during the cycle.
  • as students complete this exercise, hand back their initial responses
  • allow time to examine the differences between the two writing samples and acknowledge the learning.

Phase 7: Summative Assessment

  • summative measure is an important way to assess student learning.
  • common summative assessment include district benchmark assessment, practice Advanced Placement exam or other unit test
  • should measure student proficiency on those concepts and skills deemed important.

http://www.edutopia.org/blog/practical-pbl-design-amber-graeber