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Student interviewed for her STEM project

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Learning through REAL Projects - REAL Projects

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REAL Projects are designs for learning that connect deep subject content with real world problem solving. They enable all students ...

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Inquiry, PBL

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Resources for gifted and talented students

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Resources for gifted and talented students

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Term 2 2018 Lesson planning Year 8 STEM Fix IT - Engineering a Greener Future With the world population predicted to reach nine billion by 2050, solutions are needed around affordability, sustainability and energy efficiency. This unit promotes future skills, spatial skills and new careers directions in STEM fields, including Energy Engineering, Resource Management, and 3D printing.

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Blog

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Kids construct a fish out of a circle, using a protractor to create its mouth (make sure each kid creates a different angle). They cut out the angle and the chunk of paper becomes the caudal fin (or tail fin). Game: All of the fish get magnets put on them. For a fishing pole, use a stick with yarn and a magnet attached to the end. Kids go fishing for angles! When they catch a fish, they use a protractor and figure out the angle of its mouth. They write down the type of fish they caught (ex: 30 degree angle). They keep their fish. If they can't figure out the angle, they throw their fish back! Whoever has the most fish wins!

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Kids construct a fish out of a circle, using a protractor to create its mouth (make sure each kid creates a different angle). They cut out the angle and the chunk of paper becomes the caudal fin (or tail fin). Game: All of the fish get magnets put on them.

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My students in local newspaper article.

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Grade five and six pupils at Invermay Primary School believe they can make Australia a better place with an app that turns picking up rubbish into an immersive game.

The budding entrepreneurs entered the dragons' den on Tuesday to pitch their bright idea to a panel of expert judges for the NBN Co's STEM+X initiative.

The competition pitted eight schools around the country against each other to come up with a piece of technology they believed would make their community a better place.

The presentations took place in their respective classrooms, but were beamed to the company's Sydney headquarters via video conferencing.

"Our idea is circling around pollution and a recycle dash app is what we've chosen," grade five pupil Edie Burns said.

The school's STEM teacher Kristy Tidey described the app as a bit like Pokemon Go, but for picking up rubbish.

"They see rubbish on the ground, they pick it up and they scan it and it gives little rewards," she said. "If they take the rubbish to a recycling centre they will get cash back as well, so there's two incentives for people to look after the environment."

The program is a part of NBN Co's efforts to increase students' enthusiasm for STEM subjects, according to its Tasmanian corporate affairs manager Russell Kelly.

I think what's happening is that all businesses and jobs are digital, so having the skills to work through computer-based skills in science is very common.
NBN Co Tasmanian corporate affairs manager Russell Kelly

He said it was vital for future generations of students to feel that STEM opportunities were available to them.

"The whole point of it is to try and encourage interest in STEM subjects and to try and show schools and students that STEM is a very big part of future jobs and future education," he said.

"I think what's happening is that all businesses and jobs are digital, so having the skills to work through computer-based skills in science is very common."

Ms Tidey said the Australian curriculum had grown to ensure pupils had greater access to technology.

"They're learning things that feel relevant to them and important, so it increases the engagement of the students," she said.

"They take it places I wouldn't even think of, so its amazing."

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Invermay Primary School pupils enter the dragons' den

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Grade five and six pupils at Invermay Primary School believe they can make Australia a better place with an app that turns picking up rubbish into an immersive game. The budding entrepreneurs entered the dragons' den on Tuesday to pitch their bright idea to a panel of expert judges for the NBN Co's STEM+X initiative.

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Teacher blog

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Previously I've blogged about a picture book called Hello Ruby: Adventures in Computational Thinking. Well, recently I purchased another Hello...

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My students in local newspaper article!

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What does a zucchini have in common with a computer?

According to grade 6 pupils at Invermay Primary School, they can both make music.

The school is one of eight Australian schools taking part in a new STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) program encouraging pupils to find out how technology impacts the 'real world'.

Using a zucchini, two oranges, some wires and a computer application, the pupils were able to play bongo drums by tapping the plugged-in fresh produce to trigger a reaction on the app.

After a day of discovering how such smart apps can create real-world experiences, the pupils now face a six-week challenge to develop an app that will have an impact on their own school or community.

The STEM+X challenge, created by NBN Co and the Australian Business Community Network to make the most of the national broadband network, will conclude with a competition between all eight schools.

The 'X' in the term stands for the differing creative interests of pupils, who can apply STEM principles and skills to their own interests.

Grade 6 pupils Rocco, William, and Makayla Holmes, said it was a lot of fun working in teams through exercises that involved standing on pieces of paper, holding hands and linking up to the computer to create reactions on the computer screen.

"Everything was awesome," Rocco said.

Invermay Primary School principal Tony Brazendale said the program was an excellent chance to develop the key STEM skills of collaboration, teamwork, and creative thinking.

NBN Co chief network deployment officer Kathrine Dyer said using the broadband network to target educational goals was important.

"With one in two Australians predicted to need online skills such as programming, software development and digital technology to remain competitive in the 2030 job market, getting students excited about learning STEM will be vital to their future success," she said.

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What does a zucchini have in common with a computer? According to grade 6 pupils at Invermay Primary School, they can both make music. The school is one of eight Australian schools taking part in a new STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) program encouraging pupils to find out how technology impacts the 'real world'.

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Blog - Anthony Speranza

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A blog by Anthony Speranza on learning, change & technology.

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In 1959, the British physicist and novelist C.P. Snow delivered a famously controversial lecture at Cambridge University. He described a post-war schism between two groups - scientists and the literary world.

Snow identified this as a newly emergent divide, across which each party was more than happy to sneer at the other: Scientists proudly unable to quote a phrase of Shakespeare, and literary types untroubled by the second law of thermodynamics.

Those divisions within the university seem now more deeply entrenched than ever before. And those working within the arts and the sciences face a third antagonist in society: Populism, with its attendant and increasing distrust of intellectuals.

This powder keg occurs in a context of growing economic disparity and, incongruously, the increasing role of technological innovations in our daily life.

I'm a computer scientist who studies digital culture. I try my best to bridge the divides, but constantly ask the question: How can universities train our scientists, technologists and engineers to engage with society, as Snow suggested, rather than perform as cogs in the engine of economic development?

I believe we need our educational system to engage students with issues of ethics and responsibility in science and technology. We should treat required arts and humanities courses not as some vague attempt to "broaden minds" but rather as a necessary discussion of morals, values, ethics and responsibility.

Identifying society's grand challenges

I was recently part of a conversation at the Fields Institute at the University of Toronto which asked another question: " What does the A stand for in STEAM? "

STEAM inserts arts into the acronym for STEM (science, technology, engineering and math). I chose to frame the arts more widely to include the humanities, and asked the attendees: How do we identify the challenges we wish to work on?

(AP Photo/Matthias Schrader, File)

In the 1960s, Alan Ginsberg bemoaned what he saw as the dominant culture oppressing artistic creativity. Written today, his poem Howl might cry something like this:

"I saw the best minds of my generation spend their lives optimizing microseconds out of their high-frequency trading algorithms, or devising routing-algorithms for drone-delivered burritos."

Are these the biggest problems for our society?

Graduates of science and engineering programs understandably chase positions in start-ups or high-salaried finance jobs. Their knowledge of algorithmic development, data analysis or simply structured scientific thinking may net them fantastic jobs at a variety of private-sector employers.

But the problems they engage with, while impacting a large number of citizens, may not improve the lot of those citizens.

Our graduates' entire careers might develop advertising software that reaches millions, without engaging the larger questions of our lifetime for those millions.

Technology raises moral questions

There are major issues of debate in our scientific and technological community, with serious questions about bias, power and control.

Let's take a few examples from the headlines of this year:

1. We are increasingly seeing the influence of software algorithms in applications with life-changing impacts, such as criminal sentencing or employment. These software systems remain unmonitored "black boxes" that may be influenced by racial bias, special interests or simply bad science. We can't tell, as the systems are protected from scrutiny by intellectual property law. Or, in the case of deep learning, they are evolved systems too complex to be decoded by their very developers.

2. In biotechnology we see conversations about the use of CRISPR for germ-line editing - a domain in which genetic edits affect not just a patient but carry through to future generations. Others are debating gene drives, a way to short-circuit nature's checks and balances, allowing gene edits to spread to an entire population far more quickly than natural evolution could manage.

3. We're seeing the science community and major nations seek to address the challenge of climate change through geoengineering, making massive-scale edits to our planet's most fundamental systems.

These are not technological issues. They contain technological issues but they are not fundamentally technological issues. They are ethical ones. They require sophisticated experts to debate issues of ethics and society - to plan what, and if, we need to create.

(Shutterstock)

It's as if we've encountered several simultaneous Manhattan Projects through the application of military DARPA funding, venture-capital investment and advancements in cloud-computing. We are seeing a whole host of life-changing technologies come to fruition after decades of basic research - and the rapid prototyping tools and production pipelines of the modern era have let us scale these new inventions faster than ever before.

And, as with the questions about ethics and the atomic bomb that led to the formation of the Federation of Atomic Scientists, we suddenly have important moral questions that only those creators have unique and important insights into.

We need to make sure STEM graduates working in these fields are able to engage with the toughest questions of our time: What, where and how should our new inventions be engaged?

Grounding experiments in empathy

I would like to see university curricula in STEM subjects expanded - to discuss whether we should develop certain technologies at all, with ethical concerns a common thread throughout our studies. The risks to society of anything else seem paramount.

I don't argue that all policy-makers should be scientists, but rather that scientists should include the world of policy and social impact in their remit. They should be able to credibly think about and discuss those impacts with the rest of the world.

Snow thought the scientific mind "impatient to see if something can be done" - which echoes the "bias to action" so prevalent in start-up culture.

Action can be important, and even governments, not known for agile movement, are starting to embrace learning-through-doing. Finland, for example, has a department of experimentation which aims to bring design-thinking experimentation into policy work.

(AP Photo/Rajanish Kakade, File)

But even design thinking, the darling methodology-of-the-moment, grounds experiments in empathy. The developers of solutions should themselves be engaged with those affected by their works, co-creating through a direct engagement with users, with customers, with clients, with citizens.

Teaching ethics through the arts

And how else do our universities teach empathy, ethics and citizenship than through our arts and humanities fields?

There may be specific questions of citizenship, of responsibility, that we feel any and all STEM graduates should engage with (as there may be basic numeracy, stats or scientific literacy required for any non-STEM-trained citizen of the digital age).

I make no special claim to know the precise content of these classes, or to prescribe the curriculum of our degree program. We must develop them together. Tangible examples include this crowd-sourced list of Computer Science Ethics courses compiled by Casey Fiesler at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Crises in medical research, such as the Tuskegee Syphllis Study, helped jump-start the fields of medical ethics and bioethics as well as concepts such as informed consent. Medical professionals now engage with complex questions of inclusion, representation, voice and agency.

These aren't elements of dosage or measurement, but rather touch upon more abstract ideas of rights, values, and meaning - core elements in our study of the humanities. It's time for the rest of the STEM field to engage with the same issues.

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STEAM not STEM: Why scientists need arts training

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In 1959, the British physicist and novelist C.P. Snow delivered a famously controversial lecture at Cambridge University. He described a post-war schism between two groups - scientists and the literary world.

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Techtrails Toolkit is an interactive way to discover, learn and explore the jobs of the future.

With rapid technology growth and access to vast amounts of information our societies are changing, which means our jobs are changing.

In the future, we will need off-world habitat designers, virtual surgeons, space tourism operators and bioprinting engineers!

We will need people to have lots of different skills. We will need designers, enablers, doers, builders and visionaries, which one are you or are you a bit of everything?

Discover where your passion and interests can lead you by using our Techtrails Toolkit.

Learn how to use our Toolkit

You can explore the jobs and careers of the future in your favourite subject area or tell us what you're interested in and we'll provide you with a list of all the possible jobs. Even if you know what you want to do, you can find out more information on the skills and pathways.

Choose Your Favourite Subject Area

If you have a favourite subject area start in the section, 'choose my favourite area.' After you've chosen your area, you'll be presented with a range of exciting jobs, click through and see what resonates with you.

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Techtrails Toolkit is an interactive way to discover, learn and explore the jobs of the future. With rapid technology growth and access to vast amounts of information our societies are changing, which means our jobs are changing. In the future, we will need off-world habitat designers, virtual surgeons, space tourism operators and bioprinting engineers!

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Changing temperature impacting local water

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While Tasmanians enjoyed exceptionally warm summer waters in 2016, scientists have confirmed it was the most intense yet and they predict more to come.

But while the marine hotspot made swimming in Tasmania a bit less bracing, the impact on oyster and salmon industries was dire.

Scientists who have analysed data from September 2015 to May 2016 have produced a report on the heatwave and they said as well as it being the most intense, it was the longest recorded off Tasmania's east coast.

"Through the summer period, at least in the peak of the summer, we would see something like about 16 to 17 degrees Celsius and we saw it up to about 19.5 degrees Celsius," climatologist Neil Holbrook said.

"In scale it was about half the size of Tasmania and it was more than 3 degrees above climatological average and went for about eight months.

"This was the strongest marine heatwave ever seen in the region."

The heatwave was driven by an abnormally strong surge in the East Australian Current which also brought with it fish usually seen in warmer waters.

"Those warm waters came in the form of eddies but this was particularly strong and is consistent with a climate change response," he said.

"The impacts were quite extensive. We saw species' range extending that we've seen in the past but were more prevalent than we've seen before, things like mahi mahi, yellowtail king fish and snapper," he said.

Dr Holbrook said the study would be important for the state's multi-million-dollar aquaculture industry.

Photo POMS disease attacked juveniles, causing millions of dollars in damage to the industry in 2016.
ABC News: Lucy Shannon

The warm waters were responsible for the deaths of black lip abalone in certain parts but also a devastating outbreak of the Pacific Oyster Mortality Syndrome (POMS) which cost the industry millions of dollars.

Profits in the state's massive salmon farming industry were also affected with warmer water slowing growth rates.

"There was salmon compromised to [the point that] salmon growers noticed a performance decline or performance drop," Dr Holbrook said.

The IMAS report also found it was almost certainly caused by human-induced climate change and Dr Holbrook warned similar marine heatwaves would happen in the future.

"The type of response we saw in the region is consistent with climate change and our analysis suggests an event of this magnitude is more likely under climate change," he said.

That could cause habitat decline, more disease threats like POMS and more species migrating south.

Photo Warm water species like yellowtail kingfish are becoming more prevalent.
Chris Lewis

"The new species might actually impact on the existing species but I think the problem is that the species that are migrating that are coastal, will come down to Tasmanian waters," Dr Holbrook said.

"But then they've got nowhere else to go really because then we go into the Southern Ocean. So that is a potentially a problem."

The report's authors said it was not too late to mitigate climate change factors.

"What we're really trying to understand is the factors that underpin our marine heatwaves of this kind so we're really trying to understand the physics behind it and also potentially the impacts," Dr Holbrook said.

"We can choose to mitigate by reducing carbon emissions. That will have an impact in the longer term over a climate change response from human activities.

"We need global governments to work together and in unison to try and combat this problem.

"A response on climate change will go a long way to helping reduce the impact of many, many things such as marine heatwaves that we've seen."

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Marine hotspot off Tasmania most intense yet, more damaging heatwaves to come, scientists say

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While Tasmanians enjoyed exceptionally warm summer waters in 2016, scientists have confirmed it was the most intense yet and they predict more to come. But while the marine hotspot made swimming in Tasmania a bit less bracing, the impact on oyster and salmon industries was dire.

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Green Bronx Machine -- growing our way into a new economy: Stephen Ritz at TEDxManhattan

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http://www.tedxmanhattan.org/2012talks Stephen Ritz is a South Bronx teacher/administrator. With the help of extended student and community family they have grown over 25,000 pounds of vegetables in the Bronx while generating extraordinary academic performance. His Bronx classroom features the first indoor edible wall in NYC DOE which routinely generates enough produce to feed 450 students healthy meals and trains the youngest nationally certified workforce in America.

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Plastic waste in the ocean is a global problem; some eight million metric tonnes of plastic ends up in the ocean every year.

Read more: Eight million tonnes of plastic are going into the ocean each year

One possible solution - paying a small amount for returned drink containers - has been consistently opposed by the beverage industry for many years. But for the first time our research, published in Marine Policy, has found that container deposits reduce the amount of beverage containers on the coasts of both the United States and Australia by 40%.

What's more, the reduction is even more pronounced in areas of lower socio-economic status, where plastic waste is most common.

Plastic not so fantastic

There have been many suggestions for how to reduce marine debris. Some promote reducing plastic packaging, re-purposing plastic debris], or cleaning beaches. There has been a push to get rid of plastic straws, and even Queen Elizabeth II has banned single use plastics from Royal Estates! All of these contribute to the reduction of plastics, and are important options to consider.

Read more: Pristine paradise to rubbish dump: the same Pacific island, 23 years apart

Legislation and policy are another way to address the problems of plastic pollution. Recent legislation includes plastic bag bans and microbead bans. Economic incentives, such as container deposits, have attracted substantial attention in countries around the world.

Several Australian jusrisdictions, including South Australia, the Northern Territory, and New South Wales), already have container deposit laws, with Western Australia and Queensland set to start in 2019. In the United States, 10 states have implemented container deposit schemes.

But how effective is a cash for containers program? While there is evidence to suggest that container deposits increase return rates and decrease litter, until now there has been no study asking whether they also reduce the sources of debris entering the oceans.

In Australia, we analysed data from litter surveys by Keep South Australia Beautiful, and Keep Australia Beautiful. In the US, we accessed data from the Ocean Conservancy's International Coastal Cleanup.

Read more: The future of plastics: reusing the bad and encouraging the good

We compared coastline surveys in states with a container deposit scheme to those without. In both Australia and the US, the proportion of beverage containers in states without a deposit scheme was about 1.6 times higher than their neighbours. Based on estimates of debris loading on US beaches that we conducted previously, if all coastal states in the United States implemented deposit schemes, there would be 6.6 million fewer containers on the shoreline each year.

Keep your lid on

But how do we know that this difference is caused by the deposit scheme? Maybe people in states with container deposit schemes simply drink fewer bottled beverages than people states without them, and so there are fewer containers in the litter stream?

To answer that question, we measured the ratio of lids to containers from the same surveys. Lids are manufactured in equal proportion to containers, and arrive to the consumer on the containers, but do not attract a deposit in either country.

If deposit schemes cause a decrease in containers in the environment, it is unlikely to cause a similar decrease in littered lids. So, if a cashback incentive is responsible for the significantly lower containers on the shorelines, we would expect to see a higher ratio of lids to containers in states with these programs, as compared to states without.

That's exactly what we found.

We were also interested in whether other factors also influenced the amount of containers in the environment. We tested whether the socio-economic status of the area (as defined by data from the Australian census) was related to more containers in the environment. Generally, we found fewer containers in the environment in wealthier communities. However, the presence of a container deposit reduced the container load more in poorer communities.

This is possibly because a relatively small reward of 10 cents per bottle may make a bigger difference to less affluent people than to more wealthy consumers. This pattern is very positive, as it means that cashback programs have a stronger impact in areas of lower economic advantage, which are also the places with the biggest litter problems.

Read more: Sustainable shopping: take the 'litter' out of glitter

Ultimately, our best hope of addressing the plastic pollution problem will be through a range of approaches. These will include bottom-up grassroots governance, state and federal legislation, and both hard and soft law.

Along with these strategies, we must see a shift in the type of we products use and their design. Both consumers and manufacturers are responsibility for shifting from a make, use, dispose culture to a make, reuse, repurpose, and recycle culture, also known as a circular economy.

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Deposit schemes reduce drink containers in the ocean by 40%

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Plastic waste in the ocean is a global problem; some eight million metric tonnes of plastic ends up in the ocean every year. Read more: Eight million tonnes of plastic are going into the ocean each year One possible solution - paying a small amount for returned drink containers - has been consistently opposed by the beverage industry for many years.

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Article

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Updated February 08, 2018 15:43:30

Australia's recycling industry is feeling the impact of China's ban on a range of imported recyclable rubbish, with industry leaders warning they cannot keep collecting recycling if there's nowhere for it to go.

On January 1, China stopped accepting 24 categories of solid waste, disrupting the export of more than 600,000 tonnes of material out of Australia each year.

Now the ban has begun to bite and recycled waste is being stockpiled in warehouses in certain parts of the country.

North of Sydney, Hunter Resource Recovery CEO Roger Lewis says it was only a few months until the issue would reach "a critical point".

"There's only so many warehouses where you can put stock, and to lease warehouses is expensive," Mr Lewis said.

"We can't keep picking it up if there's nowhere for it to go."

In Victoria, recycling company Visy will stop accepting waste from 22 regional councils from February 9.

In a parliamentary inquiry into recycling in October last year, Visy warned without China buying recycled waste, material would start piling up.

"The impacts of the China ban are already being experienced, with stockpiling of product in the hope that prices will improve," Visy said in its submission.

"This will see a glut of recyclable materials with 'no home'."

While the Victorian Government said it was working with councils and the companies to resolve the standstill, it was unclear where that recycled material would go.

What happens to our recycling?

Currently, recycling companies collect, sort, and store waste.

Much of it is then packaged up and sold overseas for further processing to convert it into reusable raw materials.

However, under the ban, one of the major routes to send recycled materials overseas for that processing is now closed.

Industry leaders said Australia lacked the infrastructure to do all that work on-shore.

So, to deal with the excess, contractors began filling warehouses with stockpiles of recyclables.

"I think we made the mistake, everyone nationally and internationally made the mistake, of looking to China to be the quick fix," Mr Lewis said.

He said the China ban could lead to a national crisis, unless councils and governments acted quickly.

"If we - as in all governments, at all levels - don't step up and address this as a collective issue, then we could see the demise of kerbside recycling."

What are some possible solutions?

This should be the wake-up call governments need to invest in local recycling infrastructure, Mr Lewis said.

"I think this is a good opportunity for us now to critically examine how we manage our own waste," he said.

"What we should be doing is managing it, not exporting it. Dealing with the product ourselves."

However, adding to the problem for Australian recyclers is a price war with cheap, non-recycled products.

According to Waste Management Association of Australia (WMAA) president Garth Lamb, reprocessed materials are often passed over in favour of cheaper options made overseas using virgin materials.

"We have to have [governments] focused on preferencing things that have a sustainability benefit, that are creating all these new jobs in the community, that are bringing all these range of benefits that onshore remanufacturing brings," Mr Lamb said.

One example he suggested was using Australia's glut of recycled glass to make road base.

"A lot of the big state government road projects, they could suck up all the glass that's being stockpiled around Australia into one of these big road projects," Mr Lamb said.

But he said this was being repeatedly overlooked in favour of newly mined sand.

In a statement, the company Suez Waste Management agreed governments should step in to assist the local recycling industry.

"Governments also have a role to play in stimulating markets for recycling and recycled products," the company said.

"We believe there should be policies to compel manufacturers to use more recycled material in their products and packaging, thereby creating sustainable demand for these materials.

"For plastics, we should also be looking at policies to encourage greater use of recyclable materials in products and packaging. For example, California introduced legislation that imposed a minimum of 25 per cent post-consumer recycled content in certain packaging products."

Mr Lamb said all levels of government needed to assist in finding a solution.

"Recycling in general, and the environment, is supposed to be a federal issue first and foremost - the state of our environment as a whole," he said.

"Then it becomes state government in terms of managing waste, and then a local government [issue]."

A number of other government and private industry bodies, including Visy, were contacted for this story, but were yet respond.

Topics: environment, environmental-impact, environmental-management, recycling-and-waste-management, industry, australia, china, asia

First posted February 08, 2018 12:06:25

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Chinese rubbish ban 'could see end of kerbside recycling' in Australia

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Updated February 08, 2018 15:43:30 Australia's recycling industry is feeling the impact of China's ban on a range of imported recyclable rubbish, with industry leaders warning they cannot keep collecting recycling if there's nowhere for it to go.

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Questions Are the New Answers, with Warren Berger

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Journalist Warren Berger discusses how thinking in questions can catalyze innovation and reveal more effective answers. The time to adopt this mindset is early and Berger advocates for teaching this skill in primary schools. Berger is the author of A More Beautiful Question (http://goo.gl/rUr785). Don't miss new Big Think videos!

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Inquiry-Based Learning: The Power of Asking the Right Questions

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Inquiry-Based Learning: The Power of Asking the Right Questions

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Edutopia is a free source of information, inspiration, and practical strategies for learning and teaching in preK-12 education. We are published by the George Lucas Educational Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization.

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"I Wonder" Questions: Harnessing the Power of Inquiry

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"I Wonder" Questions: Harnessing the Power of Inquiry

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Edutopia is a free source of information, inspiration, and practical strategies for learning and teaching in preK-12 education. We are published by the George Lucas Educational Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization.

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Michael's Blog - STEM X Academy

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Several years ago, I started my exploration of Scratch coding with a group of highly motivated students who were happy to dive in, figure out how it worked, and answer my questions - which typically started with "How on earth did you do ...?" We went on a learning journey together, and considering that I didn't really know what I was doing, it is quite surprising how far we managed to travel.

Fast forward to 2017, the first year that we had to assess and formally report on our students' understanding of, and application of visual programming. I spent my Christmas holidays teaching myself Scratch, drawing upon tutorials published by MakeBlock, and any resources I could find on the Internet. I delved into event blocks, loops, IF/THEN branching, and tried to work out which Scratch skills should be taught at each year level. I was fairly sure I understood the content; and based on my experiences teaching Scratch in our after-school/lunchtime clubs, I thought I knew how to teach it. The assessment was still a grey area, but that wasn't going to stop me diving in and attempting to teach Scratch coding to all students from Years 4-6 for the first time.

Teaching Scratch Game Design

As part of my new STEM and robotics teaching role, I have been teaching a Scratch game design course in Year 6. Term 1 proved to be rather challenging. The sheer scope of students' skills and past exposure to Scratch, ranging from absolute beginner to extremely advanced, were hard to differentiate for. In addition, this was the first time many of these students experienced my approach to teaching Scratch, which relied heavily on the use of online learning videos and tutorials shared via YouTube and Google Classroom. While some students produced some extraordinary games like the one above, there was signficant room for improvement.

For the Term 2 unit, I decided to explicitly teach and demonstrate some Scratch skills, running 5-10 minute mini lessons and demonstrations of the use of event blocks, loops, and IF/THEN branching. Students then had opportunities to delve further, using differentiated Scratch tutorial cards to learn more about Scratch. During one of these sessions, a question started to arise.

When designing a maze game, students need to work out how to control their character sprite movements using the WASD and/or arrow keys. I was pointing the girls in the general direction of using IF/THEN branching blocks (aka conditionals) for their arrow key controls, but we kept encountering problems ... Firstly, the IF/THEN block ran once when triggered by an event block; and secondly, the colour sensing (for maze walls) didn't seem to work properly.

Problem solved?

Putting everything in a forever loop seemed to work. It used a single script, and in my mind at least, was a "logical" solution. Yet, I was struggling to understand, let alone explain, this question: Why did the IF/THEN blocks have to be in a forever loop in order to work?"

Uncovering a fundamental misunderstanding ...

Standing on the train station platform one morning, I found myself revisiting, and pondering this question. It occurred to me that I actually knew someone in the programming industry who might actually be able to provide an answer in terms I could understand.

My longtime friend and programming expert can be best described as a maths geek with an incredibly logical mind. He specialises in developing software controlling LED signs, such as animated city carpark signs which tell you how many bays remain, and bus stand information displays somewhere in New Zealand. To this day, I still enjoy teasing him when his little dots don't work, including the time his code was used to display terrible Christmas decorations on a city carpark sign. Anyway, I digress ...

As I hopped on the train, my friend replied to my Twitter message, kindly pointing out that " IF/THEN branches did NOT need to be in any kind of loop in order to work". After reviewing his suggested reading links on the Scratch wiki, it became apparent that I had a serious gap in my understanding of the underlying logic and structures of the Scratch visual programming language.

Oops.

A whirlwind professional learning experience

For all my research and experimentation with Scratch over the years, I'd missed something that should have been blindingly obvious. Scratch reflects the logic and syntax of a formal, event-based programming languages, and includes events, and structures such as branching (IF/THEN conditionals) and repeat loops. To my chagrin, I'd been seriously muddling up my teaching of events and IF/THEN branching.

Meeting up with my friend for coffee a few days later, I began what was to become a whirlwind professional learning experience. We spent hours talking through programming concepts, examining and evaluating example Scratch projects, and discussing the best way to introduce and develop students' visual programming skills at different year levels. The conversations continued via Twitter for weeks, and I'm just starting to feel like I can comprehend and apply what I've learned.

Visual programming and formal written programming languages are machine languages
Christiaan Colen via Compfight
Formal languages are designed so that applications written in those languages can run on devices such as desktop and laptop computers, tablets and smartphones. Each formal language has its own syntax (similar to a natural language's grammar), which include set programming structures and rules which define how the computer reads and executes tasks. A computer is a machine, which only understands your typed code if you use the exact words, logical structures (e.g. IF this condition is met, THEN do this), and punctuation that conform to the syntax of that language. Scratch is a formal language that is presented visually rather than as text, though text can be used in some of its structures.

In terms of Scratch, an event could be a key press, a mouse movement/click, or the broadcast/receipt of a message. Whenever an event is triggered, it activates a script, a programmed sequence of actions. For example, whenever the right arrow key is pressed, the sprite will move 10 steps along the x axis (to the right). Branching (IF/THEN conditionals) are used for a different purpose. They change the sequence of the script or instructions depending on whether a condition is TRUE/FALSE. Branching is especially useful for sensing walls, monsters, traps, and other sprites in Scratch game design.

Rethinking how I teach visual programming

While the original solution involving a forever loop does work, it is not considered to be good practice because of the demands that it can place on the device. While it isn't the end of the world that my young students have been using a forever loop as a container for IF/THEN branching to control user input via the arrow keys, it is important that they understand the logic, structures, and recommended techniques of the language they are working with - especially if they choose to explore other formal languages, such as Java and/or Python, in their secondary schooling.

There is no one right way to write a program, so we need to try and teach our students to create code which is logical, structured, easy to implement, and which addresses the user's needs.

So this is a simple example of the recommended programming technique for controlling a sprite with your arrow keys, with colour sensing branching.

Drawing some conclusions

Firstly, I am extremely fortunate to have a friend with programming expertise and experience teaching adult education. Without his patient assistance, I'd still be stuck teaching the same flawed thinking and approach for the foreseeable future

Secondly, it has become really obvious that in order to teach visual programming effectively, I need to develop my understanding of the logic and syntax structures of the programming languages I work with. While it isn't necessarily a pre-requisite for introducing and experimenting with Scratch, it really, seriously pays to understand the concepts that students are exposed to as they tinker, problem solve, and create digital solutions with code.

Developing my professional knowledge and expertise with Scratch has taken me years, and I still find myself filling in the gaps - including the ones I didn't know I had! One of my professional growth goals this year was to develop my understanding of how to effectively teach, assess, and support my students' learning in visual programming, with a view to eventually exploring formal written programming languages.

Ironically, I wasn't expecting to have to go back to the very beginning, and start from Scratch!

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Several years ago, I started my exploration of Scratch coding with a group of highly motivated students who were happy to dive in, figure out how it worked, and answer my questions - which typically started with "How on earth did you do ...?"

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Ideas for differentiation/extension

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Gifted Students in the Regular Classroom: TeachersFirst

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What sets gifted children apart from other students in a classroom? It is primarily the ability to absorb abstract concepts, organize them more effectively, and apply them more appropriately. The following suggestions will help you develop a classroom environment that will challenge and nurture gifted learners.

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Jacie Maslyk's Blog

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Reading a good book with your students? Have them consider how the story would be different if it was in a different setting? The wild, wild, west. Undersea. In a galaxy far, far away. In the jungle. Can your students write about it? SURE, but let's have them create it instead.

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Craig's Blog - STEM X Academy

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Intergration of subject areas - is always a great opportunity to extend and build on student learning. Read more "Ice House Challenge" Would it be a worthy sequel - along the lines of Empire Strikes Back... only time would tell

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The Galileo Educational Network has had the privilege of serving the educational community since 1999. Over the past 21 years, we have provided professional learning to over 40,000 dedicated leaders and teachers supporting and encouraging them to improve, strengthen, and change their professional practices to become more effective and innovative. We have contributed to the research literature in areas such as design-based professional learning, school and district leadership, design orientations to leading and teaching, responsive teaching, student intellectual engagement, and effective mathematics teaching. Unfortunately, like many good ideas, our time has come to an end as a formal organization. We know that many educators use our website for resources.
As a courtesy to those individuals we will maintain our website until June 30, 2021.

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Impacts of Design-based Professional Learning for New Teachers

Teachers new to the profession require additional supports to strengthen teaching practices and launch them on a trajectory of success and career long learning. Working in collaboration with a large urban school jurisdiction, Galileo designed and engaged cohorts of probationary teachers in a year long professional learning series. The focus of this series was to support new teachers in building competency to better meet the expectations of the Teaching Quality Standard (Alberta Education, 2018). Throughout the series new teachers engaged in cycles of learning where they were invited to design authentic discipline-based tasks and assessment practices to improve the learning of their students. These learning cycles also required teachers to gather evidence of the impact of their teaching on student outcomes and review this evidence with colleagues at each subsequent session.

Over the course of the 2018-19 school year, researchers from Werklund School of Education at the University of Calgary, studied this professional learning intervention and found statistically significant growth of these new teachers in four competencies of the Alberta Teaching Quality Standard: (1) demonstrating professional body of knowledge (through planning and designing learning activities, using instructional strategies to engage students in meaningful learning activities, applying assessment and evaluation practices); (2) engaging in career-long learning, (3) establishing inclusive learning environments when designing learning, and (4) applying foundational knowledge about First Nations, Métis and Inuit to Learning Designs.

The video reflects the learning experiences of teachers who participated in this professional learning series.

Hear from educational professionals about how the mentors at the Galileo Educational Network have transformed their teaching

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The Galileo Educational Network has had the privilege of serving the educational community since 1999. Over the past 21 years, we have provided professional learning to over 40,000 dedicated leaders and teachers supporting and encouraging them to improve, strengthen, and change their professional practices to become more effective and innovative.

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Resources aligned with Australian curriculum

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Scootle provides Australian teachers with access to quality-assured digital learning resources aligned to the Australian Curriculum.

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The benefits...

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Behind the News is a fun, accessible way for upper primary and secondary students to learn about what's happening in the world around them.