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Home Kami Mentor Research Journal STEP Distributed Mentor Project Final Presentation Final Paper |
Week 1: The first week was mainly orientation and getting to know everyone. Though I am doing a fairly small project there are lots of people in the lab that are working on similar projects, using similar equipment. I was very fortunate to have had some minor experience with the robots and their programming environment. This made getting familiar with the new environment easier. It also meant that on my second day I was able to accompany the other DMP student, Rachel, who had been working on the project for several weeks before I arrived, to the class she was teaching. I got to assist her in teaching the middle school children how to program their robots to go forward, backwards and turn. I also accompanied her on Thursday to the same class to continue teaching the same material. The rest of the week I spent getting familiar with the robots and creating a preliminary lesson plan for the STEP program that I will be teaching. Week 2: The second week I completed a lesson plan for the STEP program. I also created sample solutions for the all the challenges I proposed for the students. So I know that the difficulty level of each challenge and what skills the student will have to have to create a program to complete the challenge. I am also working with a grad student from the teachers college and another DMP student. Together we looked over the lesson plan and developed pre and post tests we can give the students to determine how much they have learned and if they have developed any new problem solving skills. Week 3: This week I started teaching classes for the STEP program with the other DMP student. Together we are teaching two groups ranging from 9th to 11th grades. This week we focused on the construction of the robot. We had the students separate into groups and build a Lego Robot that contained the programmable brick and two motors. The bricks were pre-programmed so that students could test their newly designed robots. Virtually all the robots broke the first time a program was run. So students were force to redesign the robots stronger and better. This way students learned about design principles and how to build a robot that were structurally sound. Week 4: This week the competition called RoboCup happened in Italy. My mentor and most of the lab here are heavily involved in RoboCup. Since they were so busy with the competition I was given some time off this week to go and explore New York City. My main responsibilities were to plan and teach this weeks STEP classes. I also got to train another student who will be using the curriculum I am developing to teach another group of kids. The STEP classes for this week covered basic programming and touch sensors. As a side note teaching is allot harder than it looks. Developing a good lesson plan is not easy and developing a lesson plan that actually works is even harder. If i have learned anything this summer it is sympathy for my professors. Week 5: This week another group will begin using the lesson plans Rachel and I have been developing. We discussed the best ways to teach the material and helped them get all the materials they needed. After spending a while explaining the lesson plan to them it occurred to me it would be a lot better if it were written down online for easy access. So I started creating html pages for each lesson. (I went back to last week.s journal entry and inserted the lessons plan links there but I didn.t start making the pages till this week) A list of the lessons can now be found at my home page under the STEP link. I created a very simple template for these pages and organized each page into sections. After each class I write down in detail exactly how the class was taught and some of the problems we ran into along with suggestions of how to avoid these problems. For this week we spent two days on if/else and loops. Both of these topics are difficult for the students to understand. As a programmer of several years I consider these to be basic topics. It was quite a learning experience for me to see just how difficult of concepts they really are. The hardest topic seemed to be test conditions. They didn.t seem to understand that a loop tested against a condition it was given. Or they seemed to think that if the test condition was true the loop would end. Week 6: This week my group decided that our project needed a web site so that other teachers can use the lesson plans we are developing. The web site is to be designed to be used by both teachers and students. The teachers will have lesson plans, handouts, answers to handouts and common student problems. The students will be given access to handouts, help files, tutorials and plenty of example programs. In short we wanted to create a complete .packaged deal. for any teacher that wanted to teach this curriculum. We worked out the basic structure of the site and assigned some beginning tasks to the group members. For teaching this week we started on light sensors and line following. Both topics are fairly difficult. The value of the light sensor is heavily dependent on the light in the room. So we had to introduce the concept of a gray scale. The students had some trouble selecting boundary numbers. Week 7: This was the last week of the STEP program. As a finishing project we gave the students several final challenges they could show to their parents. The students had to have their robot follow a line around a circular track. To complete this challenge the students had to have a firm grasp of complex structures. They also had to be able to take a complex problem and break it down into it’s component pieces. The last thing the students did was complete a post-test, so that we could determine how they had learned. We spent the rest of the week reading the post-tests and doing analysis of what we had learned. Week 8: As part of the curriculum development process, two other undergraduates used the lesson plans and resources we had developed to teach a class at Playing to Win. Playing to Win (p2w) is a community center in Harlem where high school students can take classes during the summer. The two undergrads teaching the classes were not directly involved in the research. At this point they have been teach at p2w for the last 3 weeks. This week one of them cannot teach so I substituted. This actually worked very well because it let me get a better feel of how a class worked when someone else taught using the lesson plans and resources I had developed. The students at p2w were much more difficult to teach than STEP. In STEP all the students were aspiring to college and wanted to learn. At p2w most students were there because their parents made them go. The students didn’t want to be there and, in some cases, made an active effort not to learn as a way of acting out. Week 9: The capstone of this summers work is the GK12 workshop held next week. GK12 is a NSF funded program to help teachers integrate technology into the classroom. This specific workshop is how to integrate Robots into the classroom. This workshop is where we get to show off all we did this summer, to teachers who will actually use it in their classrooms. Needless to say this is an important workshop to us. I spent this week preparing for the workshop and assisting with the final classes at Playing To Win. We developed multiple handouts on the do’s and don’ts of teaching Robotics. We were actually working along quite nicely when ALL the lights went out. The most exciting thing that has happened to me all summer was living through the largest blackout the United States has ever experienced. Everything stopped subways, streetlights, normal lights, and elevators. Even the cell phone towers stopped working. My mentor was extremely nice and concerned about me; she even let me weather the blackout at her house. And since Columbia University’s campus closed the next day, we couldn’t work on the workshop materials then either. Week 10: Due to the blackout last week, and the fact that we were unable to get all our materials finished for the workshop, this week was a bit frantic. We (myself and the other DMP student) taught the GK12 workshop from 9am to 4pm, and occasionally worked as late as 7pm to get all the materials ready for the next day. We basically taught the same material to the teachers as we had to the students. We showed them how we would run this type of class and answered any "how would you teach this" questions when asked. The workshop went extremely well. I received several complements from past participants who were very impressed at the improvement from last year. As an obvious side note, teachers are allot nicer to teach than inner-city students. All the teachers had my name memorized by the end of the first class. Unlike the students I taught they were quite willing to experiment on their own and see how the robot would react to different designs and programs. |