Communication Challenge 2 – Post Mortem

I’m glad I posted in the nadir.

On Friday, both classes took to the field and tried to make a go with their half formed plans for the Communication Challenge.

Short summary: Teams have to pass a message over/around/through a barn, then across a large section of open field, without revealing it to observing students.

I need to remember that despite my overwhelming teacher-concern, leaving the building is almost always a good move. Opening those doors spikes the students’ perceived “realness” of the moment., and their nebulous plans (like “use Morse code”) had to turn into real action (like…stopping by the printer to grab some Morse code cheat sheet).

Let me poke at that one group for a bit. First, after they asked if “Morse code was legal,” their immediate response was … to do nothing. They had found a cowbell in the room (I planted it on the parts shelves earlier in the week) and determined that you could probably hear it across the long distance. Since Morse code was legal, then they all knew they could just “use Morse code.” That idea, that named thing, sat in their brains and filled up all the space, a perfect response to a short-answer quiz question. “We’ll use Morse code” sat contentedly in their middle of their plans and lied to them.

It’s not until they’re running down the stairs that they think to print up a Morse alphabet list. Because “Morse code” was so beguiling, so obviously RIGHT, they didn’t give any thought to implementation. So it wasn’t until they were in the midst of their 3 minute section, that the reality of banging out one of these messages letter by letter.

In the end,  “Dr. X arrives at Asgard at dawn” reached the recipient as “U G B Q D  wait, start over! Oh my god, Was that a dash? I have no idea what you’re saying!”

<sniff>  Sorry, just got something in my eye.

That’s an extreme example of what I saw throughout both classes. Every ideas, the strong and the harebrained, smashed hard up against the real world.

Shouting a color name seems easy, but three story barns play funny games with sound waves. People halfway across the field could hear the coded message, but the poor guy at station B was in a sonic dead zone.

It takes a surprisingly long time to make sizable squares out of masking tape.

Even if you’re a pretty good middle school football player, 120 yards is a really, really long throw.

 

One major goal for this year’s class is to make active & public reflection an obvious and expected part of the learning process, without relying on graded notebooks or points-for-blogging. This exercise made clear how important that reflection step will be throughout the year.

In their basic school-aligned state, middle school students are impatient. They consistently overestimate their ability and heroically underestimate complexity. Those two traits combined mean that I should expect a > 80% failure rate for any one-shot challenge. I’m convinced that a day spent testing horrible ideas is 10x more productive than a week asking them to “think through” their first thoughts. But something needs to happen after that, some enzymatic trigger that processes frustration into grit and new ideas.

“I think that my group should’ve thought of more than just one ideas so if one didn’t work then we would have another.”

Yeah! Focused on the design process instead of the specifics of the challenge, here’s a piece student reflection that gives me hope!

“I think we need to make a mortar to fire the football across the field.”

… but they’re still 7th graders.

Making Makers Better

When I described my last post as bittersweet, some feedback wondered where I found *any* note of positivity.  On reflection, I left out the hugely important bedrock truths that, for me, leavened my litany of failure.
First, “Hey, I got to teach a Maker’s class this year!  Ungraded! Kids using soldering irons, drills and Dremels for the first time!”

Second, “Hey, I get to run it again next year!  Twice!”
The reaction from kids and the school has been overwhelmingly positive. Most of this year’s 7th graders signed up to try again next fall. An even larger group of rising 7th graders signed up for spring. This is awesome.

I needed to plunge through all the glaring problems because, in most cases, they were aspects that were only visible to me.  If I don’t document them now, when they still hurt, then they’d easily slip away.

After a long weekend of reflection, I’ve managed to build a positive framework for ways I can prepare for and improve next year’s Makers.
First and foremost, I need to take ownership over fundamental aspects of classroom structure.  I need to recognize the distinction between establishing practices that form culture and compelling students to follow “because I said so” rules.
I need to build a class structure where students feeling frustrated or uninspired can do something to help out a peer on their own task. Our group needs a big board that tracks everyone’s current and back-up project, along with a tweet-length log-line of what the next step should be.  Ideally, this would mean that frustrated kid who “can’t do *anything*” would have their two “next steps”, along with 5 or 6 others, to choose from.

I think that’s viable, but it’s also a lot of metacognition for 7th and 8th graders.

A “next steps” project chart that depends on students from day one doesn’t work. I need to not only build the document, but also I need to establish the practice.  When we start working on separate projects, there will already be “next-steps” from one or two whole-class projects*.  This doesn’t force anyone to abandon their interests in favor of mine. Instead it allows students to walk into an environment where both the collaborative projects and metacognition are being modeled, and they can gradually step up to assume ownership of those aspects.
Everyone codes. We’ll start using Scratch 4 Arduino, since they’re already familiar with the Scratch environment and it builds the basic intuition about we can use numeric values to perform actions in software. This was a major hurdle for students using Arduino’s this year, even for those who felt comfortable working with LEDs and modifying sample code.

I need to model and create a culture of active reflection and planning. Maybe a “tweet to reserve” tool system that rewards planning and consistent engagement, rather than coercive social pressure (aka, whining).

Buy 3 of every kit, two for simultaneous use and a third for reference/parts. No one builds alone.

No new project starts until we’ve identified an expert source and I’ve helped students make contact.  Rather than pointing out an email address and saying “go for it”, I need to build a clear support system for how this happens. These are kids who have, as a rule, never cold-emailed anyone, ever. In the first week, I’ll present a basic contact letter template, with a boiler-plate description of our school and our class. In that same time period, we’ll choose one forum/support community so that everyone in class will have their own account and be able to reach out as an individual. If we find that we need to post on other forums, I’ll make class-accounts and maintain a page of login credentials.

We need a clear distinction between project parts and puttering parts. Bins with lids and labels big enough to store 60-row breadboards would be a good start.

I need to figure out a system where students have more control over purchasing new materials. I spent a few hundred dollars out of pocket this semester, but those purchases were too sporadic and often didn’t completely cover what the project needed.  Maybe making purchases on a fixed schedule will help with that ($50 a week from Jameco/DigiKey/Adafruit). For new projects that aren’t kit-based, students will need to have their outside expert check over their parts list before ordering.  That alone could have saved the EL-Wire glasses.
* I think this clearly mandates my favorite summer imperative ever:  “Acquire beat-up pinball machine.”

Makers – Post Mortem

It took me until the fourth classroom covered in frosting stains to realize that it was the last day of classes.  Huh.

I knew that the year was ending, mind you.  I knew that yesterday was my last Makers class for the year, but I hadn’t made the logical connection to the adolescent bacchanalia that is the first of many “last day(s) of school!”

I’m normally not opposed to cake, but today it really didn’t fit my mood.  I’m upset and frustrated about the end of Makers, and that raincloud of shame and doubt casts a pretty convincing shadow over everything else.

When Makers started, I put a half dozen mini-posters up, mainly so that I would remember when the class met on our wacky schedule. I decorated the sheets with a few highlights from Bre Pettis’ Cult of Done and James Provost’s amazing Rubik art remix poster.

We’re done now, and there’s a lot of failure spread all around. My hands aren’t clean, but you’ll notice that the phrase isn’t “people with dirty hands are *right*.”

I need to own my feeling that, on the whole, the Makers class was a failure.

In terms of exposure Maker culture, of student passion and engagement, of creativity sparked, for skills and knowledge gained, in the simple number of things that got done…

FAIL.

We rolled, literally dismembered, across the finish line with more abandoned projects than active students.

Let me be clear – all of those failures are mine, first and foremost.  They’re failures of culture, a painful absence composed of several specific omissions and errors along the way.

Makers need to draw support and resources from the web.  We didn’t.

Everyone started on a slightly different project, working from kits or schematics that they kinda understood. During the first few weeks, I didn’t even think about how much damage I was doing every time I directly answered a question.  Instead of curating a resource library that fit their reading level and experience, I pointed them to a page of datasheets and forum threads. Even when I tried to show where to find information they needed, the lesson learned was “don’t bother with the complicated stuff. Get the nerd to show you.” Instead of using adafruit/sparkfun/stackexchange as an opportunity for the class to engage with as community of learners, we googled.  Worse yet, they googled and then waited for me to interpret the secret knowledge.

Makers need to fail quickly and productively.  We didn’t.

Left without tools to gather their own information, or a consistent knowledge base to build upon, failure became inevitable, tedious and interminable. Fresh from initial success with a MintyBoost, J– assembled a MiniPOV3 in just two class periods. He then lost almost two weeks to a mess of AVRDude/OSX/USB-Serial weirdness.  In the end, he had a device that may or may not be soldered correctly, that we were unable to program and unable to test. That failure ate away at the heart of the group, all because J– didn’t have the experience to discern an obstruction from a dead end and I didn’t have the wisdom.

Makers need to plan and reflect.  We didn’t.

This was made incredibly clear as our already irregular class started losing periods to end of the year events.  The Xbox motherboard waited for assembly for over a week for want of a 1mm washer … which was hiding at the bottom of the xbox parts bag all along.  I’ve always struggled with adding “thou shalt” requirements to a course like this, but without some measure of journaling and planning, 45-minute periods can’t be productive.

Makers need to make connections.  We didn’t.

This one is the most cringe inducing for me. It’s not like we lack opportunities!  During the semester, I started visiting two great local hackerspaces; @hacdc and Nova-Labs. We’re within field trip distance of the National Pinball Museum. We’re practically down the block from Thinkgeek of all places! Our community is bursting with people making, dreaming, designing and building.  Instead of hitting send or speaking up, instead of reaching out on behalf of kids, the class, the culture, I caved and fell back. Fear. Shame. Insecurity.  So many opportunities left fallow over my fear that real nerds will arrive with their righteous judgment .Here’s the counter weight to everything that makes me feel strong, unique and effective as a teacher.  Here’s the place where the uniquely broken core of me holds my students back, yanking new opportunities right off their plate.

This isn’t the first time I’ve had a crazy ambitious class collapse under me like this.  The easiest way to deflect the responsibility, the guilt, is to close the book and write off the central premise as flawed.

I can’t do that with Makers.  For starters, I’ve got many of these same kids and more signed up for another run next year. If I’m going to build something better, then I have to start by being honest (which, for me, means public) about my mistakes and my failures.

As a classroom teacher, I built a whole skillset around how to convince and cajole a bunch of kids slog together through the same marginally dull material at roughly the same pace. Helping students find and pursue their own orthogonal interests is a radically different challenge. That style of teaching requires a radically new skillset and a level of craft that I don’t have yet. I’m hoping that Constructing Modern Knowledge will help me develop and hone those skills, the same way that I developed new ways to identify and support student’s math explorations at Dana Hall.

Tomorrow I’ll start planning for the next run, looking for the thousand tiny lessons that might help build and sustain a community of learners in the next class.

Tonight, I just need to face the ways I failed a class I loved, and know that the next iteration of Makers will fail in the same places if I don’t remake myself.