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This sweet Derek Sivers video from  provides a lovely little followup to my previous post, the ethical obligation of sharing.   I want to clarify that it is not that I think there are many educators who are ethically opposed to sharing (there are a few, and that few is far too many, but only a few).

I think rather that it is obstacles, not opposition, which limit sharing, and I suppose the obstacles to sharing are three-fold.

One is time/energy/initiative:  though sharing by publishing is now entirely free financially,  it probably just seems too great an expense of these other precious resources to bother.  That is understandable, but it is mistaken.  Developing a familiarity with web 2.0 tools for sharing will take an initial learning curve of a few hours, but at the other end you will be a far more valuable and more greatly contributing citizen of our digital age, and you will then easily and swiftly be better able to influence the improvement of the education of children and the future of our society– something which is the moral responsibility of us all.

The second obstacle is an inability to appreciate the value of our own accomplishments: how could what I have to share be of value to anyone else?  This second one is exactly the subject of the video above: don’t hold off sharing because you don’t know its value:  share and let others determine the value, because sometimes, more often than you might think, they will.  As the Sivers in the video says:

Everyone’s ideas seem obvious to them.  But maybe what is obvious to me is amazing to someone else.  We’re clearly a bad judge of our own creations.  We should just put it out and let the world decide.  Are you holding back something that seems too obvious to share?

The third obstacle might be fear of criticism (as Jacob Martens suggested on Twitter).  I understand this– I do, and I have felt the sting– but I think that we as educators should be willing to model for our students and others risk-taking, transparency, and a willingness to be challenged.

Let’s support each other in identifying, confronting, and overcoming these obstacles: Post and Share for education’s advancement.

(thanks to Jonathan Schmid’s Tech Savvy Teachers Blog for sharing the Sivers sharing video)

No.

Last month, NAIS President Pat Bassett emailed out a fascinating list of about a dozen schools which were leading the way in the use of “Backward Design” to advance the learning of 21st century skills for their students (I am proud to say that yes, our St. Gregory “Egg” was on the list).

As I scanned the list, my instinct was immediately to look for the links to where I could learn more.   There were only email addresses for the Heads of School.   I followed up by visiting some of those schools’ websites and searching for pages about the programs, and using google to search more widely, but with only a few exceptions, I found nothing.

In my presentation yesterday to the school heads of Virginia, I shared my 8 steps for leading learning forward; the list has grown by a step since my similar, (though shorter) presentation at NAIS last February.

The added 8th step is the shortest and perhaps simplest, but, I think, incredibly important: Documenting (Posting) and Sharing. 

We live in an incredibly exciting and valuable age of networked learning and connected educators, and we al
l have in common improving the education of students, all students everywhere, in every way we can.  We know this is best for kids, to whom we are all so dedicated, and to the future of our society, for which they will very soon be assuming important responsibility.

For those who share this common commitment (and really, who among us does not?), there is, I am arguing,  a moral responsibility, a strong one,  to share our educational initiatives and innovations: to summarize them, share their key elements, show examples of them in practice, and, at best, reflect upon their successes and lack thereof.

This is also an essential element of educational leadership.  Leadership is showing the way to others and making it easier for them to follow, it is empowering others to benefit from your example, take inspiration, and improve upon your advances– to stand on your shoulders.

Now, in fairness, until only a very few years ago, the obstacles to sharing widely made the practical possibility of sharing very small.   Resources for publishing and distributing newsletters, booklets or books, or heaven forbid films or movies were rarely available.

But that world and those limitations, are  behind us.  Sharing is free: it take zero dollars and not a great deal of time to share online in posts which are searchable by search engines and linkable to other sites.  The obstacles having been eliminated, there are no excuses: sharing should become the expectation of all who wish to advance and improve learning in our society and on our planet.

I’ll even go one step further, but perhaps it is a step too far.   Don’t ask for or expect recognition for your excellent or exciting educational innovations if you haven’t, or if you aren’t willing to, post them up and share them for the consideration, review, and inspiration of others.

I am sorry, but if you haven’t posted it, you haven’t earned ethically the admiration of others, because how can they really know what they are admiring or turn that admiration into useful activity on behalf of students and our society’s future? How can they effectively stand on your shoulders if you haven’t provided them a helpful foundation upon which to build?

Perhaps that is a step too far.

Perhaps there are times or places where schools use trade secrets or transact in propriety information, and you might not want to share every detail or every element of your program.  Perhaps you want to share only a summary, because you are saving the more thorough articulation for a book or article.   OK.   Use some discretion, make some choices, protect as absolutely necessary.

But please, let  your bias be, as strong as it possibly can be, toward sharing by posting, posting as sharing, your educational advances.   All our boats, and all of our students’ boats,  will lift so much higher in the rising tide of educators sharing their practices and successes.

For a very similar take on the same topic, one that certainly inspired me in the preparation of this post and the addition of Step 8 in Leading Learning Forward, be sure to see the K12 online conference keynote by Dean Shareski available here (or the edited version embedded below).

As Dean says, wonderfully:

Given the technology and our ability to connect, I say that sharing, and sharing online, is no longer an option.

I’m asking you to think deeply on your new obligation to share you need to be sharing online and sharing regularly, and helping others to do likewise.

Not as a cool thing to do, but because you owe it to others to teach students beyond your classroom and your district.

It is an ethical responsibility.

Post and Share.

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I greatly enjoyed presenting and sharing this conversation with the very fine educators of the Virginia Independent School Association.  This post has only the slides and the videos associated with the slides (Most of which I didn’t have time to share– watch them now!).

It is my aim to add a new post within the week with a transcription of my spoken remarks to go with these slides.

My thanks and appreciation go to the fine VAIS staff and educators for welcoming me so warmly, especially Kim Failon and Simon Owen-Williams.

Here are the 8 steps themselves, if you wish to view them only, loosely modeled on Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. .

Here, and after the “more” are the associated videos.

Alexandria Country Day School Assistant Head Nishan Mehta on their iPad pilot:

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the Edleader21 video on the importance of 21st century learning leadership. 

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St. Gregory students discuss the CWRA

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Example of PBL product, a student video from a 9th grader

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Example of a Reverse Instruction video lecture by a Calculus teacher

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Example of a student Design-build class project, a Trebuchet

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Below these four presentation Prezis and video (two prezis after the jump (more), which I am so happy to be sharing, is more detailed information about the assignment, including a rubric and the project “pitch” requirements. (You may need to click on “more.”) I thank the St. Gregory students whose fine work this is for giving me permission to share.

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Here is a link to the test for understanding quiz which was prepared to accompany this presentation, designed by the students as part of their project. (it is amusing to me to read question 4, multiple choice option b).

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The assignment:
Eurolle Consultants
Bioethics 101 Forum

Your team has conducted its preliminary background research, and now it is time to pool your expertise and resources to plan and produce your 15-20 minute webinar for your assigned grade level. Each webinar must include the following:
Content: You are educating your age group on this topic–including science, relevant
history, ethical pros, and ethical cons.

Written information
Visual Aid–You must have at least one original visual aid that you as a group create. Powerpoint and youtube are the most compatible with googlesites, but you may also explore other technology. You may use files that already exist, but you must also create one of your own.
Audio: You may decide to podcast audio as a supplement to the written text.
Assessment: You must have some sort of assessment of the content of the project. Did the student learn the information by studying this webinar? How do you know?

The St. Gregory students will be evaluating the websites as test subjects to see if the project is strong enough to distribute to the various school districts in Arizona. Students will also have a chance to assess the webinar itself as a tool for learning, but you don’t have to worry about that assessment just yet. Worry instead on creating a good “product”

Your team has been assigned a link on EUROLLE GOOGLESITES. This site will serve as your planning as well as your production site.

Project Proposal–content only, due March 4:

Join forces to determine the necessary content for your paper. What does your audience need to know? After creating your page and posting your body paragraphs with citations and works c cited, read all of your team members’ body paragraphs to determine the most significant content and the order in which it should be presented. Bold that which needs to be emphasized the most.

March 11: End of 3rd Quarter

Project Proposal–complete, due March 14:
1. Create a storyboard with EQUAL designated roles for each group member. This can be a digital or a print storyboard. Designate what you plan to do for each of the different components (written, visual, audio, assessment) of the project. Be sure to include the following:
who will be responsible for each part
what teaching goal(s) you want to accomplish with each part
whether and how you can actually produce and publish this work in reality rather than just a cool concept, etc.

2. Create a more engaging and persuasive 5-minute pitch than your first one! That means planning out who is saying what parts and practicing your content and persuasiveness ahead of time!
Schedule:
March 14 late start 8-9
March 14 lunch
March 15 lunch

3. Complete your first peer and self assessment (in English on 3/16-3/17).

Wednesday, March 23: All content must be uploaded on your site. That means it should be approximately ⅔ of the way done, and ALL of your technological components must be WORKING. Peer editing session #1

Monday, March 28: Final due date for online project
Webinar online classes will be “field tested” in late March, based on other curricular requirements for those individual teachers and classes.

Rubric concepts
written content: accuracy, thorough explanation, logical organization, appropriateness for audience, proper documentation
visual (audio optional) presentation of difficult concepts: accuracy, lay-out, functionality, thorough explanation, appropriateness for audience
Overall “page”: Aesthetics, lay-out, functionality, effectiveness, appropriate use of and “working” technology
Audience (student) assessment:
Peer and teacher assessment of collaborative work environment: specific roles for each person; each person follows through, etc.

Evaluation:
25% individual paper (done)
50%video/presentation teaching effectiveness (including 10% self and peer evaluation)
25% benchmarks
Overall Project grade is worth approximately 1/3 of quarter 3 and semester 2 grades in both English and biology.
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Project Pitch Advice and Instruction
Logistics:
Sign up for your 2nd project pitch Mr. Rolle.
Plan your 5-minute explanation of how you plan to teach this information to this particular group of people.
Each member of the team needs to speak this time, and you need to know what you will say and when. Practice ahead of time!

Project Requirements
Audience: What do you know about your audience? What can you expect your audience to know? How do you think they best learn?
For your project pitch, you have two audiences (how wicked!): the student population you are assigned to teach as well as teachers/administrators who must approve your initial idea before the module can be presented in their school classrooms.

Content: Is there new content you need to add?

Organization: The storyboard should have a logical flow to it. In what order does the information need to be presented? Why?

Written information: What should be presented AS TEXT, and why do you feel this information needs to be presented in narrative form?

Visual Aid–What content needs to be reinforced through visual aids, and why? What media format should be included to best teach/emphasize that content? Be creative, but also be practical in what you can accomplish.

Remember, you must have at least one original visual aid that you as a group create. Powerpoint and youtube are the most compatible with googlesites, but you may also explore other technology.

You may use videos, images, and graphs that already exist, but you must document them properly, so keep the link attached to the files when you download and upload them.

Audio: You may decide to podcast audio as a supplement to the written text.

Assessment: You must have some sort of assessment of the content of the project. Did the student learn the information by studying this webinar? How do you know? What format will your assessment take? Be as creative as possible while making sure that you can

Storyboard Description and Samples

Your storyboard is your visual representation of the “flow” of your project, from introduction to conclusion. You have already done one storyboard this year with Ms. Bodden for your English story video, so you should have some sense of how to get started, but here are some weblinks. They are mainly for stories, but you can easily imagine how your lesson needs to be a story in itself. You are trying to show not only what components you will include but also how they will work together to create a great lesson.

While most published storyboards are created by visual artists, these tools are very useful for non-artists as well to help yourself and your audience get a sense of where you are going, in what order, and how the pieces fit together. In a sense, it is your working outline of your webinar.

Resources

The following links provide some sample ideas of things you might want to include in your project. You will need to determine if you have and can use the technology required to reproduce this type of media, and if you don’t, how you might adapt it for your purposes. Since we found them and published them for you, you must have permission from use to use these in your own presentations. We have provided them here in order to help you open your creative neural pathways to create your original visual aid.

Khan Academy, lecture on Stem Cells
Youtube has some great (and not so great) videos on topics in genetic engineering.
The University of Utah has a really cool interactive “cloning lesson” and some cool animations.

This is a very worthwhile 15 minutes for those interested in the question of how curriculum should be changing, and also, for those attending ISAS Teacher Conference in a few weeks, this offers a nice sneak preview to one of the event’s most exciting presenters.

What Year are you preparing your students for?  Tests from the 70s and 80s are just the same as they are now; Most schools are preparing students for 1991.

Instead of the oral report, one of the low points of civilization, let’s do video podcasts.

Media Literacy, Global Literacy, Digital Literacy: What are these things, really?  Let’s think more carefully about these terms and how to teach them.

Let’s ask students to do assessments:  What does a quality blog look like? Have students define the standard and ask students meet it.

What is a quality podcast?   Don’t just make a wiki, determine what is a quality wiki.

I think every student should design an app: I can’t think of a better thing for them to do.

My new mantra: Get time out of the way, move aside, think about all the connections that are possible, and what I am looking for is Future Schools Now!

Jacob has a strong and ambitious vision, and she wants to support teachers: one step at a time.  Revamp just one curricular unit or area each year, and before too long, we will alll be well underway.   Focus on the new critical literacies, elevate consistently students’ consciousness about what is quality and how we know it, and engage students and strengthen their skills by use of powerful Web 2.0 communication and creation tools.

I love the message that students should design apps: we have a few doing that at St. Gregory, but not every student– not yet.   It is something we, like so many other schools, are moving toward and ought to be moving toward more swiftly.

There are so many great things students can be doing and creating in this day and age, and let’s take inspirational figures like Jacobs to keep asking ourselves: how can we make learning more engaging, more meaningful, more connected, and more preparatory for our times?

I cite Steven Johnson’s writing most often, as when he explains in Where Good Ideas Come From: A Natural History of Innovation that the most innovative spaces are situated at the scientific laboratory conference table and innovation occurs most often in the densest of networks: first in cities (and his research is compelling that the densest and largest cities are the most innovative) and now in online networks, most exemplified by Twitter.   Clayton Christensen too, in the Innovators’ DNA, elevates five traits as essential to the “Innovator’s DNA,” and networking is number 4.

At first glance, the New York Times piece by Susan Cain, The Rise of the New Groupthink, with its subtitle “Collaboration is in. But it may not be conducive to creativity” appears to be a major assault of sorts on my belief and argument.    But a closer reading of the piece leads me to believe that the headline distorts: to my eyes,  this piece is a nuanced and balanced essay which argues for the value of both solitude and collaborative/networks as offering value for innovative work, except when it goes off its own rails to strike an unfairly strident and wrong-headed note.

Cain opens with an admiration for the introverts who are often highly creative and for the value of solitude in creative endeavors, and speaking for myself as an introvert, I appreciate the endorsement:

The most spectacularly creative people in many fields are often introverted, according to studies by the psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Gregory Feist. They’re extroverted enough to exchange and advance ideas, but see themselves as independent and individualistic. They’re not joiners by nature.

One explanation for these findings is that introverts are comfortable working alone — and solitude is a catalyst to innovation. As the influential psychologist Hans Eysenck observed, introversion fosters creativity by “concentrating the mind on the tasks in hand, and preventing the dissipation of energy on social and sexual matters unrelated to work.” In other words, a person sitting quietly under a tree in the backyard, while everyone else is clinking glasses on the patio, is more likely to have an apple land on his head.

But even in these opening lines, Cain undercuts any extreme positioning for her argument in acknowledging that these creative minds are “ extroverted enough to exchange and advance ideas.”

The example then offered next, Steve Wozniak,  brilliantly exposes the way creativity and innovation thrive when introverts immerse themselves in collaborative networks, withdraw to contemplate, tinker, and ideate in solitude, and then return to the public sphere to share.

Most focus on Mr. Jobs’s supernatural magnetism and tend to ignore the other crucial figure in Apple’s creation: a kindly, introverted engineering wizard, Steve Wozniak, who toiled alone on a beloved invention, the personal computer.

Rewind to March 1975: Mr. Wozniak believes the world would be a better place if everyone had a user-friendly computer. This seems a distant dream — most computers are still the size of minivans, and many times as pricey. But Mr. Wozniak meets a simpatico band of engineers that call themselves the Homebrew Computer Club. The Homebrewers are excited about a primitive new machine called the Altair 8800.

Mr. Wozniak is inspired, and immediately begins work on his own magical version of a computer. Three months later, he unveils his amazing creation for his friend, Steve Jobs. Mr. Wozniak wants to give his invention away free, but Mr. Jobs persuades him to co-found Apple Computer.

The story of Apple’s origin speaks to the power of collaboration. Mr. Wozniak wouldn’t have been catalyzed by the Altair but for the kindred spirits of Homebrew. And he’d never have started Apple without Mr. Jobs.

Disturbingly, Cain writes with a wish to have it both ways.   She wants us to understand that innovation is “catalyzed” by collaborative networks as Steven Johnson and Clayton Christensen so compellingly explain, and then she contradicts her own balanced position to try to make a contradictory more extreme argument, in this next paragraph:

 If you look at how Mr. Wozniak got the work done — the sheer hard work of creating something from nothing — he did it alone. Late at night, all by himself.Intentionally so. In his memoir, Mr. Wozniak offers this guidance to aspiring inventors:

“Most inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me … they live in their heads. They’re almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone …. I’m going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone… Not on a committee. Not on a team.”

No.   Cain can’t have it both ways.   Woz is welcome to argue that inventors work alone– god knows he has earned the right to voice an opinion on such matters– but Cain can’t tell us with a straight face that Woz was inspired by his computer club and then that he accomplished what he did “all by himself.”

I have no intention of arguing for the opposite extreme.  She is perfectly right to point out that collaboration can be too much, that some workplaces don’t allow for the privacy or concentration that many of us benefit from.  It is absurd to me also that

In one fourth-grade classroom I visited in New York City, students engaged in group work were forbidden to ask a question unless every member of the group had the very same question.

Her discussion of the value of brainstorming is more complex than she makes it.   Simply put, there is brainstorming and there is brainstorming: the term covers a wide terrain, and some of it offers enormous value and some of it doesn’t.   Johnson’s book shares a myriad of studies and examples, most notably by Dunbar, of the way in which innovation emerges in the interactions of people working on projects, but that doesn’t mean that every “brainstorming” session is productive.

She is right of course that the following dynamics can inihibit:

People in groups tend to sit back and let others do the work; they instinctively mimic others’ opinions and lose sight of their own; and, often succumb to peer pressure.

But these are far from the only behavioral patterns that happen when organizations and networks facilitate sharing, idea cross fertilizing, and collaboration.

Steven Johnson inspired me most in his book when he touted the value of Twitter, and other social media/online communication networks, as being enormously enhancing of innovation– and he did so because I have had such a profound personal experience of this very phenomenon.

So it is gratifying to read Cain write that:

The one important exception to this dismal record is electronic brainstorming, where large groups outperform individuals; and the larger the group the better. The protection of the screen mitigates many problems of group work. This is why the Internet has yielded such wondrous collective creations. Marcel Proust called reading a “miracle of communication in the midst of solitude,” and that’s what the Internet is, too. It’s a place where we can be alone together — and this is precisely what gives it power.

I believe this so profoundly, and am enormously appreciative of this: the internet is an incredibly empowering place “where we can be alone together.”

Happily, Cain wraps up her fascinating essay by advocating the centrist position that I so strongly embrace and endorse, (a centrist position that she, in her headline, subtitle, and at certain points in her essay sought to rebut).

To harness the energy that fuels both these drives, we need to move beyond the New Groupthink and embrace a more nuanced approach to creativity and learning. Our offices should encourage casual, cafe-style interactions, but allow people to disappear into personalized, private spaces when they want to be alone. Our schools should teach children to work with others, but also to work on their own for sustained periods of time. And we must recognize that introverts like Steve Wozniak need extra quiet and privacy to do their best work.

Sadly, she feels the need to undercut this balanced and centrist philosophy by what I think is just a nasty aside in her very last words.  Returning to Woz, she tells us of how he enjoyed sharing donuts twice a day with his HP colleagues, and benefiting from (yes, greatly so) this kind of generative collaborative network, without which, we know from so much evidence and so much research (Johnson, Dunbar, Christensen), innovation simply doesn’t occur, after which “he disappeared into his cubicle to get the real work done.”

No, no, no.   The accomplishments were not the result of only the isolated concentration: the real work was situated in the dialectic of both networked collaboration AND focused solitude.

I’m busy this winter preparing several talks in the spring on the topic of “innovative schools, innovative students,” and so have the pleasure of diving in again into the best thinking I can find about the rich, complex, and often enormously gratifying nature of innovation.

In the TED talk above, author Matt Ridley makes clear with wonderful historical references that “through crowd sourcing,through the bottom-up world that we’ve created, where not just the elites but everybody is able to have their ideas and make them meet and mate,we are surely accelerating the rate of innovation.”

Collaboration and sharing are qualities of character and skills of cooperation which we often teach and advocate for their own sake, but what is so rewarding to come to understand better is how essential they are for innovation.   When we strive to have our students work in groups, and when we encourage them to research best practices and seek out innovative practices online, and when we assist them and assist ourselves in developing their own networks of connection with others around the world who share their passions, we are empowering them (and us) to be better innovators and better problem-solvers.

And innovation isn’t itself the end-goal, it still always the means: the means toward the end of making a better world:

Awful things will happen in this century, I’m absolutely sure. But I’m also sure that, because of the connections people are making,and the ability of ideas to meet and to mate as never before, I’m also sure that technology will advance, and therefore living standards will advance.

Some favorite quotes from the talk:

The computer mouse is made from a confection of different substances, from silicon and metal and plastic and so on. And more than that, it’s a confection of different ideas, the idea of plastic, the idea of a laser, the idea of transistors. They’ve all been combined together in this technology.

And it’s this combination, this cumulative technology, that intrigues me, because I think it’s the secret to understanding what’s happening in the world. 

You can have culture without exchange. You can have, as it were, asexual culture. Chimpanzees, killer whales, these kinds of creatures, they have culture. They teach each other traditions which are handed down from parent to offspring. In this case, chimpanzees teaching each other how to crack nuts with rocks.But the difference is that these cultures never expand, never grow, never accumulate, never become combinatorial, and the reason is becausethere is no sex, as it were, there is no exchange of ideas.

When the sea level rose and Tasmania became an island 10,000 years ago, the people on it not only experienced slower progress than people on the mainland, they actually experienced regress. They gave up the ability to make stone tools and fishing equipment and clothing because the population of about 4,000 people was simply not large enough to maintain the specialized skills necessary to keep the technology they had

But who knows how to make a computer mouse? Nobody, literally nobody. There is nobody on the planet who knows how to make a computer mouse. I mean this quite seriously. The president of the computer mouse company doesn’t know. He just knows how to run a company. The person on the assembly line doesn’t know because he doesn’t know how to drill an oil well to get oil out to make plastic, and so on. We all know little bits, but none of us knows the whole.

What’s relevant to a society is how well people are communicating their ideas, and how well they’re cooperating, not how clever the individuals are. So we’ve created something called the collective brain. We’re just the nodes in the network. We’re the neurons in this brain. It’s the interchange of ideas, the meeting and mating of ideas between them, that is causing technological progress, incrementally, bit by bit.

Awful things will happen in this century, I’m absolutely sure. But I’m also sure that, because of the connections people are making,and the ability of ideas to meet and to mateas never before, I’m also sure that technology will advance,and therefore living standards will advance.  Because through the cloud, through crowd sourcing,through the bottom-up world that we’ve created,where not just the elites but everybodyis able to have their ideas and make them meet and mate,we are surely accelerating the rate of innovation.

(This is the third post in a series; be sure to read the first for context).

This Class project was a year in the making: It began last spring, and I posted then about the class plans and my conversations with the working group as they “pitched it” to me and sought my approval and sponsorship. It is worth checking out this previous post to show the sequence, beginning with designing and planning and now culminating in completion:

• Design Build Class Project Proposal: Green Energy Ramada

Below are the student overview of the project’s purpose and procedure, and after the jump (more)  is the Solar Oven Project.

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Purpose:  The purpose of this project was to provide the school’s students with an environmentally friendly way to charge their laptops.

Procedure 1. Screw wooden beams onto the preexisting structure. 2. Cut L-shaped metal to the correct length to fit the desired mounting angle of the panels and cut L-shaped metal to fit the length of the panel. 3. Attach the metal to the panel. 4. Attach the panel supports to the metal running the length of the panel. 5. Put the panel on the roof. 6. Attach the panel by screwing it to the structure. 7. Run conduit from the panels to the wall. 8. Drill a hole through the wall. 9. Run the wires from the panels through the hole. 10. Attach the panel wires to the charge controller. 11. Attach the charge controller to a car battery. 12. Attach the car battery to a power inverter. 13. Run a power cord from the inverter to a wall outlet outside.

Diana’s Solar Oven

Alex,  Nik and Michael: An LED matrix. 

This project started with a 7 by 5 L.E.D Matrix found in the physics room. I then had the urge to get it working, so I started to test connections on the Matrix too see how the wiring was done.

I figured out that the Matrix worked in a row column fashion which made it impossible to make any other letter than I or l. Then I told myself that if I switched rows and individual dots every millisecond, I could then make any letter, picture, shape, etc. I then started looking for the most practical programming chip, an Arduino.

After the large amount of wiring I started programming. My first program consisted of turning on and of lights very quickly, which is simply but requires about 150 line of code. After completing one letter, “N”, everybody realized that this thing was freaking awsome! So everybody started to get involved (mostly Alex).

The main improve of this project was Alex who spent more than five hours editing and perfecting his python program that would, with a GUI, write out the code for the arduino. As Alex was continuing to perfect his code our Physics teacher Mr. Connor brought in an 8 by 8 LED Matrix.

Michael left Alex with his 7 by 5 Matrix and immediately started to work on the 8 by 8 Matrix. This matrix was a little harder to figure out. It took twice as long but we eventually figured it out. It was the same kind of system but the pins were very different. We then noticed that there weren’t enough outputs on the Arduino Decimilia. We then decided to order some Arduino Megas which have around thirty two output ports (we only needed twenty five for the matrix).Once we got our Megas we each attached our Matrices and Michael (based off of Alexe’s program) started to program, in python to write out code for the 8 by 8 Matrix.

It took a little longer but Michael eventually figured it out, but only for the Red LED’s on the Matrix. Once Michael made another program for the green LED’s we ran into some power distribution problems. The Green LED’s were much fainter than the red ones. After some heavy arguing and some explaining Michael finally understood that the Matrix was not automatically shading the LED’s and came up with the bright idea of removing the Green LEDs’ resistors since they draw more power.

Michael then continued on to program the python to also be able to output code for the color Yellow (when both LED’s are on). When this was done the project was shown off work was done, but people became tired of the Awsomeness and decided to move on to cooler things like Plasma Speakers, Tesla Coils and a big Floating Arm (Trebuchet).

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Alex M’s project: a personalized music program.

One day, when I was listening to my iPod, I came up with the idea of making a music site on my website to be able to stream my library anywhere I went (that had internet of course). This single project was probably the largest project I have worked on (in terms of time I spent on it). I wrote the code for the entire page from scratch, and its features include dynamic selection list of the artists, albums, and songs, and there is playlist support as well as selection of a random song. I also added the option to download songs, but only for allowed users. Guest users (username “guest” password “guest”) only can stream the songs. I spent more than 50 hours total on this page.

(Be sure to see the two other posts sharing class work also: here and here).

At St. Gregory, where we aspire to “create innovators,” one of our most important and most exciting initiatives over the past two years has been the steady advance of our “Design Build”  Tech Innovations class,  taught by the amazing and awesome Mr. Dennis Conner.   It is an entirely PBL formatted class, with no set curriculum other than having students investigate “problems” and choose one to design and build solutions for.

The class continues to be a great success, and the difficult question looming for us at St. Gregory is whether to decide to move it from an optional elective (it is taught pass-fail, students can take it as many times as they wish, and it has received great enthusiasm from its participants) to a required freshman or sophomore class, formatted as an “introduction to and foundations of innovation” class.     The jury is still out on this one.

Suzie Boss, an edutopia blogger and author of Reinventing Project Based Learning with Technology, and  who visited St. Gregory last spring for two days, wrote this recently, in a piece entitled “How Design Build Curriculum Can Transform a Community.”

Where does a project like this fit into current discussions of 21st-century skills?

Our students are learning skills like welding and carpentry, 2D and 3D modeling. But those are the vehicles to do something else. We blog as much as we’re on the table saw. We’re giving them tools for entrepreneurship, for innovation, for local citizenship and engagement. We’re giving them a way to think through problems in their own lives. Design is all about possibility. For a student, that’s the best gift you can give them.

With the fall semester now completed, I want to share, in this post and in two following posts, examples of student work completed in the past few months by their own reports.  You can find the whole set on the class website here.

Spencer B’s project: a HEXAPOD

This is a hexapod. A hexapod is a robot with 6 ‘legs’, in this case with 3dof per leg. And before I bore you, I want to tell you that this is quite possibly the greatest project I have ever worked on. It has cost me, so far, just below 1k. Bit expensive, no? But the experience and result has been worth it. Intrigued?

This has been a labor of love. It’s been frustrating. It still won’t walk, this is because I had no idea about its power consumption. 8 amps? Despite that ridiculous number for a rather small robot, the control program (which consists of a virtual cube you can rotate with arrow keys and change with a few keystrokes) is nearly there! I’ll post it later on.

The robot was constructed primarily out of anodized aluminum parts and 18 servos. It includes a high amp regulator, as well as a microcontroller and a radio module. It looks like something out of a Sci-Fi movie. Here’s a link to where I got the parts:   WWW.LYNXMOTION.COM

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Clayton M’s project: Rockets!

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Michael and others: the Trebuchet 2:

Filmed at our soccer field just behind our Science Laboratories, and also at a Trebuchet competition held in October on the campus of the University of Arizona, in which our students competed.