A particularly interesting technology moment occurred during my second year of teaching. I had petitioned to create a programming class. Being my first technology based course, I selected the Python programming language as it seemed relatively straight forward. Then I saw the class list\u2026. It was perhaps the biggest group of hooligans in the senior classes I had ever seen put together at one time! There was only one quiet\/calm\/focused student in the group. On the first day, we sat down and went over some basics of how to get the language to produce sections of text and how to ask the user for inputs. The vice-principal walked into the class half-way through and, rather than the pandemonium we both expected,\u00a0 joined me in slack-jawed amazement at what we were witnessing. The students were, without prompting, writing stories using the new tricks they had learned. Every single student was glued to the task. And the quiet, reserved kid in the back of the class… turns out he is the son of an IT professional. Students who had largely ignored him were lining up for his advice and assistance. This continued through out the course, regardless of the technique of the day. The students wove all of their new techniques back into interactive stories.<\/p>\n
For me this situation raises several questions about teaching with technology such as: What is it about technology is so profoundly attractive to middle school students? How can story telling scaffold technology learning? and how can social-constructivist approaches be applied to STEM topics?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A particularly interesting technology moment occurred during my second year of teaching. I had petitioned to create a programming class. Being my first technology based course, I selected the Python programming language as it seemed relatively straight forward. Then I saw the class list\u2026. It was perhaps the biggest group of hooligans in the senior […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32430,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1669384],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-785","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-a-auto-e-graphy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/stem2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/785","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/stem2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/stem2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/stem2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32430"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/stem2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=785"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/stem2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/785\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":786,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/stem2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/785\/revisions\/786"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/stem2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=785"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/stem2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=785"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/stem2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=785"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}