Month: November 2021

In this video there is a teacher that walks learners through making a jumping game in Scratch. The video requires the learners to follow along in their own instance of scratch and would likely have them respond by choosing different characters or modifying the game in some creative way.

After watching the video I could ask the learners to use the jumping game to be creative and add their own twist to it. This could help them express their creativity and further expand their basic understanding of programming. This activity would of course also be done using Scratch.

Students could get feedback through traditional submissions of their saved game or demonstration of their game. But I think a more exciting way for them to share their game would be through some kind of social media, such as twitter, where they can interact with peers and their games as well.

This activity could be scaled up or down depending on the environment by simply giving them more or less time to be creative and create some kind of game. I also don’t see why this couldn’t be done with a large number of students as long as there is enough tablets, chromebooks and computers available.

In our learning resource students are introduced to the basics and fundamental concepts of programming by creating a basic game using the Scratch’s [1] programming language. This resource is extremely flexible to diverse learners such as english language learners and hearing impaired students. However, scratch will not be a good resource for visually impaired students.

Another option for visually impaired students is Microsoft’s Code Jumper [2]. Code Jumper is very similar to scratch with the difference that it allows students to use physical pods and connect them together to create blocks of code. These pods make noises to signify certain errors or successful connections.

The combination of physical blocks and noises to code makes this a perfect alternative to Scratch that allows for inclusion of the visually impaired. This could be implemented alongside the Scratch resource when needed, making the resource be inclusive for hearing impaired, visually impaired, and english language learners.

In response to the final prompt, even though this isn’t a universal design I think it also be an inspiration that leads to a universal design. It would be a really amazing thing to see this Code Jumper product develop into something that can be integrated across many different development environments and even get to a point that could allow the visually impaired with complete loss of vision to become software engineers.

The overall presentation of this resource was done brilliantly and looked amazing as a wordpress website. All the parts were nicely split up in a way that each flowed into the next one, making it very easy to follow. The navigation bar combined with effective headers and bullet points made the resource very easy to read and follow along.

I found the interactivity of this resource to be very inclusive, it allows the students to guide the conversation rather than having a teacher direct everything. I really think this way of learning is important and much more effective then more directed learning. Letting the students guide the conversation and bounce ideas back and forth is a great way to include everyone into the plan. With a topic that is important and sensitive such as this one, I like that the plan emphasizes on correcting inappropriate comments but not on punishing as many students may have little to no knowledge on the topic.

I think it’s possible that the learning outcomes and activities could be more focused rather than having separate outcomes for each of the 5 parts. However, I do think it looks better how you’ve done it, I just question this since it becomes 15 learning outcomes in total when the assignment outline describes 2-4. I believe this will make the resource very tough to complete for a group of 15-20 students in 1-2 hours. I think it would be nice if the learning outcomes from part 1-5 were all the same and each part built further on the same learning outcomes that were introduced in the opening discussion or even could be in the resource overview.

There were very few corrections that I could find. One was a blank bullet point under teacher resources, which possibly was incomplete as this was just a draft. If not, I would suggest the section for teacher resources could simply be removed. Another possible suggestion for the website design could be instead of having the resource overview links routing to their own page, you could create anchors on each header. That way they don’t have to navigate back to the overview page to see the other headers.

It’s hard to emphasize how good I think this project is in a peer review as I’m mostly supposed to be finding critiques but I thinks it’s important I mention that this was done extremely well. The presentation of the site, the flow of each part and the thought that went into building this resource are all amazing. Nicely done!

Growing up you are always learning. Whether it was sports, school, hobbies or just general day to day life, I was always being exposed to behaviorism, cognitivism, and constructivism.

A lot of my early life revolved around sports. I was constantly at practice and games trying to learn how to be a better player. During this time coaches mostly used behaviorism to improve our skills. This involved a lot of repetition of the same drills and running the same plays. All the repetition definitely developed good habits and reinforced the correct decisions that should be made in game situations. However, when you think of the best players in any sport they don’t always stick to the normal routines, they are creative and do things others wouldn’t ever think of trying.

In school teachers implemented cognitive learning by having each learning topic in class built on a previously learned foundation. This allowed me to use the previous knowledge and learning strategies that I had gained to help make sense of the new topics and process new information efficiently. For me cognitive learning was always an effective strategy but lacked the freedom I desired when learning. Classes always felt too focused and discouraged me from being creative or doing something outside the box.

When I wasn’t in school or playing sports I was having fun with my hobbies. This could be anything from skiing, climbing, playing video games with friends or etc.. But this is where I felt that I learned best, just learning as I go with no need for instruction because I’m genuinely interested in learning about the things I’m doing.

Constructivism is the best and most important strategy I still implement into my life today. Even when it comes to school, which obviously needs to be very focused and can’t always use constructivism, I try to just focus on what I find interesting in my classes at the time and learn about those however I feel is right.