Beth's Class: First Day

November 17, 2009
Alex, Kyu & I visited Beth’s morning class in Trinidad. We arrived at 9:15 am. The school building houses grades 1 through 12. The school is set off by itself, surrounded by fields. Beth has the computers set up on one side of the room in twos, with the others facing the other wall. The room is a bit cramped … long but only about 9 or 10 feet wide, with classroom on one side of what looked like a temporary barrier (wall) & Beth’s office on the other. Beth had a version of Sandy Rea’s power point presentation that she had modified to introduce “Frogger” to her class up on the far wall when we arrived. The students were sitting at their desks.

First the students were allowed to play the Frogger games on the Scalable Game Design Arcade. Once they had the idea of what a finished game should look like, Beth introduced them to Agentsheets. After a brief introduction to the basics of agent creation, the students started to design their frogs. The frogs evolved in multiple colors & all kinds of shapes. Alex, Kyu & I interacted with all the students while they were making their frogs. Next the class designed their roads. By now they were getting the hang of designing agents, so the roads went quicker than the frog, plus roads are usually less complicated than frogs. With two agents made, Beth had the students open a worksheet & place their two agents onto it. Since Hoehne has primary grades through high school, & as a more rural school, Beth has taught most of the students in her class for several semesters at least & sometimes years. Her own daughter was in this class. This school structure also allowed Beth to know of a high school senior who was capable of assisting her, & fortunately had this school period free. His name was Brandon Tortorelli & he helped out with the class demonstrations as well as individual students. He also expressed an interest in attending the 2010 Summer Institute.

The last task of class period was to program the frog to move on their worksheets. At first the students were mystified with the programming process, but Beth went through the first rule on the front screen & slowly the students finished the first frog movement on their own. When a student finished the first rule, I would explain to them how the other three directions could be made exactly the same way by just dragging the conditions & actions down to the next rule,& then changing the directions of the arrows. Once they realized how simple it was, they finished the four rules for moving the frog very quickly. Class was almost out of time, so the students needed to save their games & leave. Most of them wanted to work longer on their games, but were excited to continue the following class.

I had initially been skeptical about Beth’s class finishing by the end of the week, but this was a very good beginning for only one class period. As I talked more with Beth I realized that her afternoon class is another class period for the same students. Since Hoehne is on a four-day weekly schedule, the students are in school each day until 4pm. So Beth has these same students twice a day. Obviously if her students keep the pace they have set for themselves, they will be uploading games by Friday. Beth also added that their school district only has the traditional Thursday, Friday of for Thanksgiving, so she can add additional time for the games, if needed.

There were a majority of girls in Beth’s class. Of the 24 students, 16 were girls. The girls were just as excited as the boys about learning to make their own games. Beth’s students did not seem to be as influenced by traditional female stereotypes of technology, as a male-oriented domain, as some of the other classes I’ve observed. The boys didn’t feel the need to talk down to them when helping with difficult tasks. In fact for the most part, the boys & girls treated each other pretty much equally. So observationally, there did not appear to be any striking differences between the boys & girls as far as understanding & accomplishment of the learning tasks went. The only marked difference was in the artwork, which evolved along more gender-typical lines. As far as helping each other, he distinguishing feature appeared to be whether the student you were asking, knew the answer to the question. Consequently, there was no real difference in how the students helped each other according to gender. This was markedly different from most of the other classrooms, so far. Alex queried Beth on her thoughts about this phenomenon. She attributed this difference to the fact that as a rural community, the students were more influenced by their parents & local community, rather than outside sources. And also in a rural community, who does the work is not as important as whether the work gets done. This attitude usually transcends gender, age & economic concerns.

Later, while waiting to meet with the principal, one of her students (Arik) was in the office, also waiting. I took the opportunity to ask him what he thought ... I hoped he would be straight-forward, as I had talked with a bit during class. He said he enjoyed the class, “… that it was real fun!”