This past week I worked with high school students who aspire to work in a career field connected with education. As the keynote speaker on the first night, my focus was to emphasize the importance of constructing one's own knowledge via a variety of entry points. Additionally, I wanted to build upon the importance of collaboration and team work. AND I really wanted to keep them actively engaged. I kept my keynote speech to 5 minutes and spent the rest of the time doing an activity that would focus on collaboration and sharing of one's knowledge, and I did this collaboratively with the Med District Teacher of the Year, Krsiting Munoz. Ever heard of the Marshmallow challenge? Well that is the activity we did on the first night of the conference. Students learned the importance of prototyping, which was then embedded throughout the week. Check out the Marshmallow challenge here: http://marshmallowchallenge.com/Welcome.html
Over the next couple of days I got to work with my future colleagues in small groups using an activity I found at www.code.org. It was an “unplugged” activity that had them creating lines of code and running their program using a deck of playing cards to test out their prototypes, which ended up being a game. At the beginning of each session the group created norms for our time together. One of those group norms was that I would be seeking critical feedback from them at the end of the sessions. Nervous at first to be critiquing a teacher, their feedback was invaluable to me as I was able to instantly apply it and share it with all the future groups.
You can check out the unplugged activity here: http://studio.code.org/s/course2/stage/12/puzzle/1
You can check out the unplugged activity here: http://studio.code.org/s/course2/stage/12/puzzle/1