Saturday, March 30, 2013

ISTE 2013 - Augmented Reality Game Post #2


Trying to figure out the waypoints...landmarks!

Got up early this morning to head to the Convention Center. There is a rather large parking structure that cost $11 for the day...right across the street from the center. Just an FYI - we parked at about 8am and the lot was full by 9:30.

Went in search of photos and learning the "lay of the land..." In order to create the Aris game for everyone, I will be dividing the game into QUESTS that teams can participate in.

I thought Henry B. Gonzalez should be a part of one of the QUESTS, as the convention center is named after him. I took a pic and then used iPhoto to make it black and white and "older..." Thought this might bring authenticity to the video clip I am planning on bringing into the game.


Lots of walking around to find the Map points and the images I would need. I then headed back to the convention center to play around with ARIS. Finding the convention center on the map was not too difficult; however, figuring out if I needed a character, plaque, or an object was a bit tricky.


Luckily my husband was a good sport, because I would create some of the programming pieces and then send him out to test and see if it showed up on his ARIS app. We spent a total of six hours gathering our resources and testing and trying the various ARIS programming options.


Headed back to hotel and will pick up again tomorrow!



Friday, March 29, 2013

ISTE 2013 - Augmented Reality Game

On my way to San Antonio to set up the Aris - Augmented Reality Game for the ISTE 2013 conference. Sitting at the Baltimore airport...waiting for the connecting flight :-(






Follow along as I blog about the process involved in setting up one of the first Augmented Reality games for ISTE members to play while at the conference!  It will involve learning about computational thinking skills in a "Gamification" format for adults.

Then...it will involve thinking about how educators and incorporate these skills into their teaching.




Sunday, March 17, 2013

Lessons aligned to CCSS in math

Hi all...long weekend. I just wanted to post some of the lessons I have been working on. I have now created two CCSS math lessons aligned to 4th grade curriculum. It is quite time consuming to create the lessons, as each comes with a game that they play, download and then customize to make their own.

https://sites.google.com/a/stretchinstructor.com/k-8-programming-playground/lessons/ccss-math-in-action

Scratch Project

Stay tuned for more lessons and debugging exercises!

Sunday, March 3, 2013

Creating a BASIC digital story-telling project with only 3 programming blocks!

Worked on the first lesson today and finally have it ready for you to use. I will continue adding lessons/worksheets/ rubrics/ instructional videos through the remainder of the year. Please keep checking the Blog, for updates.

Here is the video:



and the worksheets (including a teacher resource page, student worksheet AND rubric) can be found on the following website page:

https://sites.google.com/a/stretchinstructor.com/k-8-programming-playground/lessons/digital-storytelling/grades-K-2



If you decide to try this, please feel free to let us know how it goes by providing a comment to this post.



What Most Schools Don't Teach...

So...how do we take the intimidation of coding (computer programming) out of the equation? "In the next ten years, there will be about 1.4 million jobs in computer science and only 400,000 qualified graduates to fill those jobs."

Please see the following video that stresses the importance of computational thinking and learning how to code (program). If you attended my classroom 2.0 live webinar yesterday, this video is a more detailed version of the one we previewed at the beginning before the session started. It REALLY is a powerful message and includes Bill Gates and a quote from Steve Jobs.



Stay tuned for my first instructional video geared toward my vision of K-8 computational thinking (programming) for all! I will be posting a video for the "newbies" that uses only three of the programming blocks and is easy enough for even the K-2'ers!