Last Day with the Virtual Bead Loom

Today was the last day with the students from the ACCS for the semester.  I am really sad to not see them for a month.  Today was just a wrap up of the semester and the students go to finish their artistic designs or make a new one.  They seemed to have extra energy today (I blame it on the holidays season fast approaching)! As they slowly found out that we will not be there next weekend they started to get disappoint that they had to go a whole month without a Wednesday after school activity. The post-test was given out and I was surprised by the scores.  The students that tended to stick out in my mind had improved and made me very excited.  However, as a whole the test scores did not improve as much as I expected them to.  I knew that the students had learned a lot but it didn't show.  I feel that the disconnect came from the test format itself.  I did not teach the students any vocabulary so they were confused when they saw words that they had never seen before on the test and got frustrated.  I feel that there needs to be a section about vocabulary on the tool itself or as part of the lesson plan.  I struggled with idea of teaching the students traditionally or whether to purely test the tool and see if it is really improving their understanding.  This brings me to the point of whether the these CSDT are teaching tools or reinforcement tools. I feel that they do teach the students but there is a frustrating learning curve if the students have not learned to plot points.  The best part for me since I am a visual designer at a technical university and appreciate the pairing of math and art is that it provides a way of teaching math to students who may think that it is boring and are turned off by it traditionally, by providing a creative outlet to use the math skills such as pointing points and where thinks are located on a graph, plane, etc. These students see that math is a tool to help them create their artistic designs. Instead of a written test or evaluation, I feel that it might be insightful to interview the students themselves and see what they liked, didn't like or learned form the activity.  Similarly to a previous entry, the beauty is when the student realizes that what they are doing on the Virtual Bead Loom is the same as a activity in the classroom and because of that basic understanding the classwork becomes easier. It has been said that there are different types of learners: visual, auditory, kinestic and read-write and each classroom has a mixture of these types of learns and students may be a mixture of a few, therefore it is felt that the CDSTs are a way to hit a different type of learn that may help some of the students in a subject that they were struggling because it just didn't click.

Turning Computer Images into Physical Art

Lindsay printed the students computer images created with the Virtual Bead Loom and I went to the store to buy pony beads and fusible beads for the second to last day with the students for the semester.  Today each student was told to find their design and choose to use either the pony beads or the fusible beads to try to recreate their design.  It was only Lindsay and I today, so Lindsay was leading the fusible bead table while I was leading the pony beads table.  I felt that I was well organized with all the supplies but I never imaged how hard it would be to teach ten children how to string pony beads together to create a design.  At first I tried to demonstrate it and some of them got it. Those students kept going while I tried to help the others.  The disconnect seemed to be that the didn't understand that they were recreating their designs from the bottom up and that they had to choose their beads that made up the bottom row of their piece.  Another disconnect seemed to be that the students who did not have rectangular designs to begin with did not understand that they should add colored beads to the areas around the design to fill it into a rectangular shape.  Looking back I think that I would either have the students only create rectangular designs or draw a rectangle around their current design so that they understand that beads need to be added around it to create the rectangular shape.  I had a lot of frustrated students who didn't know how to recreate their design and were getting bored, so I decided to have them make up a design and place all the beads the way that they wanted them in a rectangular shape on the table.  This turned out to successful and kept them busy for awhile so I could help the other students that started earlier and had some knots to untangle.   Once each student created their design on the table I told them to take the bottom row and put it on one side of the string and then thread the other string through the beads.  Then they continued to take from the bottom row of the design.  TIme ran out quickly and we had to cleanup.  I kept all of the unfinished designs for the students to work on next week and I picked up all the beads on the ground.  While I was picking up the beads one of the students from my group came over to show me a math worksheet that had a very high grade on it.  She was very excited and "I did well because I realized that it was like the bead loom and the points were just beads".