Robin's First Class: Second Visit

August 28, 2009
First Class: Because of an accident & traffic, I didn’t get to Robin’s class until 1:30 pm. I gathered the media request forms & took as many pictures as I could before the students had to leave. During the time I was there, all the students were animated, talking to each other about what they were doing or asking a neighbor how they did something in their game. As dynamic as the students were they were also very focused on what they were doing, concentrating on making their agents behave the way they wanted. Some of the students had trouble selecting the agents when putting into worksheet. They would click on the correct agent, but another agent would be produced, or nothing would. Also, some students were frustrated because they thought they had done something wrong in the programming … making the frog move over different background agents … it turned out their programming was correct. But only exiting Agentsheets and then coming back to their game would make their programming work correctly. Agent gallery was coming in full screen on some computers and freezing the computer. Some students had trouble getting the behavior changes to stay (adding the correct key to the If key behavior would reset to the beginning default).

Second Class: After the students were settled, I gathered up their media forms, & asked them to raise their hands if they had brought back their media form. That way I could just take some pictures without asking like I did in the first class. During class Kyu came to help also. All of us (Kyu, Elisa, & myself) helped the students to try to keep up with the requirements that Robin stated. The students raised their hands to get help. At some point, most of the students were working well on their own. Several students had gotten ahead of the others. Kyu, Elisa & I helped some of them to get even further ahead. Robin asked us not to do this. She also reminded us that we should not be doing the work for the students. She said that at one point she had looked up & seen all of us using the student’s mouse! I know we shouldn’t do this on a regular basis, but I’ve found that showing the student once worked very well for those students that learn by doing, not from just hearing. Also, some students were frustrated because they thought they had done something wrong in the programming … making the frog move over different background agents … it turned out their programming was correct. But only exiting Agentsheets and then coming back to their game would make their programming work correctly. Some students had trouble getting the behavior changes to stay (adding the correct key to the If key behavior would reset to the beginning default). This seemed to happen in both classes, although much more in the second class because they were further along. There was also an incident with a couple hidden frogs, but this was a student error. Class ended with most of the students having programmed the frog, and gotten all the agents onto the worksheet. Robin, Kyu & I discussed the difference between the Boulder students & hers … the idea that possibly students without access to technology at home or on a regular basis might need to have up to a 2 week module to accomplish their first game.