I battled with the exact same question this year until about January when I was switching from teaching Movie Making to Digital Art. The final Movie Making projects were phenomenal and I realized why. I had not taught it explicitly but had given students the tools to uncover, expose and express their own creativity. I continued providing students with projects where they CHOSE their topics, COLLABORATED with others and CREATED their visions but not without the digital art tool box.
Fast forward to my current online professional development (which I am enjoying so much, I don't want it to end), Creative Computing Design* run by Harvard/Scratch team. Weeks 1 - 3 are over and my toolbox runneth over! Week 4 has arrived, time to plan the big project and I'm blank. BLANK. BLANK!
I know I want it to do with CCSS and 9th grade math. But I don't want to be predictable and I really want to challenge myself using some of the Scratch 2.0 advanced features like video sensing and cloud data. I thought about what I would say to one of my students who emailed me the night before an idea pitch to say they were BLANK! What I learned from my Flat Classroom Teacher Certification kicked in here and I focused on the Cs and not the skills. And I made myself a bowl of popcorn. I call it my thinking food and it didn't let me down today. Check out my project that uses some of the fantastic advanced features:
- video sensing
- broadcast
- ask
- cloud data storage
I am having a problem that the sensing is too sensitive and the score goes up more than it should. Hopefully over the next few weeks I can tweek it to work. This does bring up a question for another post: When is a project over, I mean, really over?
And as my students would say, LOL like I did playing, this is fun.
*Thank you for providing us with a quality experience. It is not always the case that those who educate educators "walk the talk" but you really are and I appreciate it. More importantly, my students will benefit from it this coming school year.
I loved reading this. One idea that particularly resonated with me was the idea of the completed state -- "When is a project over, I mean, really over?"
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