ALA September 28, Tuesday

The plan for yesterday at ALA was to review the techniques and programming code for Digital Spirograph, as well as inform the students of how they could save any of their work now on the FTP site for the Design It Studio Website. The tuesday group proved to be small, about 7 or 8 students (Bill took the names down), but the small group worked well on the Spirograph programs. Melanie and Cody, who were a part of the summer institute where spirographs were introduced, were able to help the other students if they had some trouble. I was able to walk the students through the creation of a simple spirograph program through Microworlds EX first. After that, i asked the students if any of them remembered how to make shapes, like a circle, a square, or a triangle. It quickly became evident that most of these students had not done spirogrpahs before, so i tried to walk through the programming process in Microworlds slowly. Bill handed each student the prepared handout for the spirograph programs involving the aforementioned shapes, and we were able to help each student write their own spirographs. We talked about the programming language, and there were questions asked during the instruction time that i remembered asking during the summer - like do spaces matter in the programming, and how to change colors, etc. Allison and Kim were having a little trouble following the directions, but they came along well by the end of the session. I think a few of them probably need to practice this more. Mark and Raffy did very well, as well as Cody and Melanie. Cody and Melanie and Mark were able to improve amazingly on the spirograph programs and make some very interesting projects. I'm hoping that some of the others in the thursday group will do the same so that we can have a wealth of innovation to pull from for Mindfest. We had to teach the students (or remind them) how to create turtles and buttons within the Microworlds program, as well as review the commands for turning the turtles and making them move. I should have done a better job of that, thinking back on it. I could have done the exercise from the institute where we talked about 360 degrees of turning and had the kids actually stand up and turn their bodies. I will make that up for thursday. I do think the students did a good job and i believe with a little more practice all of the students will be able to make innovative spirograph creations.

After i had them save their work, i then put up on the screen the instructions for uploading their work onto the FTP site. A few of the kids seemed to have a bit of trouble at first getting the address typed just right, but we all got there. We had some weird problems with the uploading and downloading process. THe machines at ALA were having issues getting online, and then when we went to copy files from the site onto the computers the students were working on, the machines would not get back onto the FTP site. Eventually we were able to do that, but then we could not copy and paste the files onto the machines from the site. I was able to make it work by using the COPY TO FOLDER command, but it should have pasted the copied files and i don't know why it didn't work. I'll be trying that again today in the Studio with the laptops. All the machines in the ALA classroom then refused to get back online, and that ended our day. A few of the kids went back to play with spirographs for a few minutes, but then they left.

Joyce, Saafir, Bill, Gabe, and I talked on the phone for a little while after this to try and figure out just how the cycles are going to work, how they might be staffed, the curriculum involved, and the spaces to be used. We seemed to be on three different pages on this, so another meeting is necessary to get everyone on the same page. Joyce and I then went and talked for a little while longer on the idea of cycle work, the returning vs. the new kids, and trying to work out a time so that 8th graders from ALA could get involved with us without missing a class that they are not allowed to miss. we worked out a few interesting ideas, but they need to be run by Saafir first. Thursday before the afternoon session i have a chance to go to ALA and recruit some 8th graders into the program that do not have scheduling conflicts. I'll be working on that later today.

QUESTIONS - 1. THere is no security on the FTP site whatsoever. Anyone from any site can go on and open any folder and change or remove programs. This is a security risk. We need to find a way to lock down the folders from each site and only the people from each site have a password for their folder, and then they need a folder with their name on it that can also only be opened with their own password. There was a concern voiced that as the site stands, anyone could go in and delete or change anyone else's programs, or copy and rename them to use as their own.
2. How are we going to run workshop times for both returning and new students? if the cycles are going to encompass everyone, we run the risk of not being challenging enough for the returning students because they are already familiar with the technology and it would seem that new students would be on equal footing with them inside a cycle. This might be a problem, and we could lose the returning students. How are we going to teach the new students the technology separate from the returning students? Need to talk about this and nail this down.