March 21, 2024
Wednesday. It's the middle of the week already! So how did your Wednesday go?
Me? I had an exhausting day! Exhausting but in a way it is fullfilling!
Hello, once again my Hive friends!
Today, I had an exhausting day at work! I got so busy that I have put some articles I am writing on hold. I just want to write this to relax my mind a bit.
For those who don't know where I work, I teach computers in a private secondary school.
For this quarter, I am teaching Robotics from grades 8 to 10. We have Arduino starter kits including the 5 new kits the school purchased this year.
We started with basic electronics and I used TinkerCad as a medium of instruction. Everyone can learn the basics thru TinkerCad's virtual circuit simulation. This includes programming and simulating Arduino projects.
We had a lot of interruptions in our classes though. Thus, my timeline got derailed. We were not able to reach the topic that I was aiming for.
Frankly speaking, it's frustrating on my part. I had to adjust their performance task output to simpler ones.
This week, I tried another approach to speed things up. My goal is to have the learners experience how to build an actual circuit and write a simple program.
I was able to do so this week.
Today, I had to step into the Grade 7 class and delivered the lesson. Unfortunately, their computer teacher had just started learning Arduino this year. So I had to step in for this session.
So, I had an extra class today...
Satifaction
The 7th grader is known to be noisy in their classes. So I laid down one rule before I started. If they are not interested to listen they may step out and go to the library.
I'm glad they behaved during the discussion.
Although I run through the lesson rather quickly, they were able to build the circuit correctly. There were some mistakes, but they were common newbie mistakes and I expected them.
I was happy though that only a few made those mistakes.
Even in the programming. Since I rushed things, I forgot to explain the proper syntax.
What's more satifying is, when I saw their happy faces when they were able to achieve the goal for today. It was simply to make the LED blink. A simple task maybe for me. For the learners though, it was a huge accomplishment for them.
The 9th grade was a bit more fullfilling. We have a transferee this quarter who already have some experience in Arduino. I saw her help other students even those who don't belong to their group. It seemed like I had an assistant teacher in the class.
How I wish we have more contact time with the students each week.
This is it for now. I still to create some tutorials on this subject
Thansk For Reading
Post No. 2024-19
Date Posted: March 21, 2024.
All Images used are mine unless otherwise indicated
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