While educational robotics is more frequently utilized in teaching students about engineering principles. In this presentation, Ting Zhang, a 3rd year EDCP PhD student shared his robotics teaching experience in the field of mathematics. He introduced the LEGO WEDO kit to demonstrate how students as young as grade 2/3 use the kit to build different models that feature working motors and sensors and how the mathematical thinking is visible during the class.

Presenter: Ting Zhang (3rd-Year PhD student, mathematics Education, EDCP)

Please find below some excerpts from Ting’s presentation

Is my greatest pleasure to welcome each of you to 2016. Happy New Year!

I humbly invite you to our first SyMETRI meeting of the term. We plan to open this term’s meetings with a mock PhD defense presentation from Jeff Beaker (PhD Candidate, UBC) as we have usually used our SyMETRI platform to share thoughts or provide feedback on research ideas, impending conference presentations, and thesis or dissertation defense practice of our members.

Date/Time: Jan 26, 4:30pm-6:30pm

Venue: Scarfe Room 310

Please kindly find below an abstract of Jeff Baker’s research:

This dissertation shares the story of my research exploring the transformative possibilities of Indigenous Science Education for catalyzing the emergence of more equitable and sustainable ways of living. It is an educational response to humanitarian and ecological crises, and draws on the holistic frames of complexity and Indigenous knowledges to balance the dominance of the mechanistic worldview in which these crises are rooted, and that also permeates school science. Weaving participatory action research and Indigenous research methodologies into a form of Indigenous Métissage, my research sought to decolonize and Indigenize school science, and eventually came to focus on sharing my own story of change and transformation. The research was conducted through four years of participation and relationship building in the local Indigenous education community in my hometown of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, largely through ceremony, and employed conversation and anecdotal narrative as primary methods. These experiences led me to suggest miskasowin, a Plains Cree term meaning “to find one’s centre” or “true sense of self” as a goal of Indigenous Science Education, which I interpret as a process of “learning to relate,” fostering more relational worldviews and identities that connect us in multiple ways with the dynamic, living, patterns of nature. I describe my own process of miskasowin as shaped by complexity and Indigenous knowledges and occurring through a “slow pedagogy of relations” that involved ceremony, story, land, and language, and that fostered a deeper sense of humility and reverence for life.

On October 20, 2015 SyMETRI meeting, we discussed an interesting article posted by Dr. Milner-Bolotin. The article explores “whether knowledge of physics guides attention differently for experts and novices when they inspect physics-relevant changes or physics-irrelevant changes” (Morphew, Mestre, Ross & Strand, 2015). Prime highlights of the discussion focused on the following questions:

who is an expert or novice ?

How will educators positionality as experts or novice influence their teaching strategies and relationship with students? Interesting in the discussion was the need for educators to take humbling stance in their approach to teaching rather than positioning themselves as people who “know it all” (Milner-Bolotin).

We also did an interesting visual cognition exercise (led by Dr. Nicol)

The diagram below is one of many diagrams from the article we discussed. Participants in the study where asked to identify “physics relevant” changes in the diagrams.

Thanks to everyone who made it to this week’s meeting. We are looking forward to meeting you all on Tuesday, Nov. 3, 2015: 1:00 – 2:30 pm.