Mark's First Class: Third Visit

September 11, 2009
First Class: I arrived about a bit late to Mark’s class due to heavy traffic. Mark was not happy with the progress of his students. He was dedicated to his timetable and was annoyed that it had been obliterated. Mark said everything had been fine until the students started learning the behavior programming. I shared Sandy’s limited version with him. He perked up a bit, thinking that the limited version might really help for the next cycle of classes.

During both classes Mark used the smart screen to show examples of what the correct programming should look like. The Agentsheets programming windows were put up on the screen during the lesson. After teaching several of the behaviors, Mark put up all the behavior examples that he had just taught on the screen. But more than that, he wrote the behavioral action word represented by that programming right underneath the programming windows, so the students were very clear about how to accurately program the agent behavior. The behavioral examples Mark was teaching were: Move, Generate, Absorb, & Collision. The students could use the examples to program correctly or to check their programming. Today, only Dave & I were there to help Mark. With programming lesson being more complicated than creating the agents, we didn’t have enough time for all the students. Many didn’t get helped throughout the entire class. This is not an acceptable outcome.

Second Class: The second class went a bit smoother (just like Mark always says). However the students were still having difficulties with the programming. Again, there were too many students that needed help for Mark, Dave & I to get to during the allotted class time. The main reason for this was the time it took to help each student individually. At the end of the 45 minute class, there were still some students who had not been helped, just like in the first class. This was frustrating for all of us. Frustrating for the students, because they couldn’t make any progress. Frustrating for us because we couldn’t get to everybody. At the end of class, some of the students were still having issues with saving their folders to the district network, mostly because the process was unfamiliar from their normal protocol. This was probably especially true to manage this new protocol at the same time they were learning to use Agentsheets.