Anna's First Class

October 8, 2009
Anna teaches technology classes at Overland Trails Middle School in Brighton (Brighton 27J School District). She started teaching Agentsheets in two classes on 10/5/2009. When I observed her class, her students had been learning the software for several days (this was the 4th day). Her students were totally excited about designing their own games. You could tell their excitement by the animated tone of voice and when they spoke to other students, it was about the lesson. Anna used a smart board to visually demonstrate the programming process, as well as the results in her own game. She left the current lesson on the screen while helping the students with any difficulties. When her students accomplished a difficult task, they would want Anna to see and tell them what a good job they’d done!

As I helped Anna’s students, they soaked up anything I showed them. One student was disappointed about his game. In fact he was playing an internet-game when I started to talk to him. But he readily brought up his game when I asked to see it. He had all the current programming correct, but was still unhappy with the way his design looked. I noticed that he had not masked any of his agents, so the game appeared as a collection of white squares moving across the worksheet. I showed him how to mask the white on his agents. As soon as he saw the difference, he became very excited, and elbowed his neighbor to look at his game. She asked him how to do it. As I moved onto watch other students, he was showing her how to mask her agents. At the end of class, one of the students wanted to talk to Dave Kuttler & myself about ways to finance college. Dave had been helping him to catch up as he had missed a day of instruction. Dave told me after he left, that he had made up most of the missed work, as well as progressing to almost the level of the rest of the class. I was very impressed not only at this student’s progress but also at how engaged Anna’s students had been for the entire class period. When I commented on the dedication of her class, she observed that she was fortunate that these students had fairly consistent levels of technology experience, so they all understood the lessons. She went on to tell me that some of her classes were much more difficult to create accurate lessons for, because they had extremely disparate levels of technology experience. She believed that the rural nature of the surrounding locale caused many students to be deprived of any technological experience until they entered school. Although our conversation was informative, Anna needed to get lunch before her next class, so I left.