On Thurs­day I did an out­reach pre­sen­ta­tion at Kel­logg Mid­dle School. I pre­sented to all three Com­pres­sion (advanced) 7th grade math classes. Kel­logg runs on a block sched­ule so each pre­sen­ta­tion was an hour and forty five min­utes long. I think 7th grade is a great age to present to. The stu­dents are really enthu­si­as­tic and less wor­ried, as far as I can tell, about being cool.

I think the pre­sen­ta­tions went pretty well. I was really wor­ried that I would get through every­thing and then have noth­ing left to do. It turned out I got through less than half of the activ­i­ties I had pre­pared, which was really nice. I ended up doing the non-peanut but­ter sand­wich activ­ity, the draw­ing and instruc­tions activ­ity, Light­bot and a lit­tle bit of the CS Unplugged Divide and Con­quer activ­ity. There was a sub in the class­room for the first two peri­ods and the teacher was there for the last. All of the classes went pretty well but they seemed to get a bit worse through­out the day. I think all of us were really tired by sixth period.

The peanut but­ter sand­wich activ­ity involved the stu­dents giv­ing me instruc­tions to make a sand­wich and me tak­ing their instruc­tions very lit­er­ally. All of the classes really liked it. 6th period liked it the best. The peo­ple with desks near the edge of the room got up halfway through and sat on the floor between the closer desks so they could see better.

All of the classes (although less 6th period) spent a lot of time on the draw­ing activ­ity. It involved each stu­dent draw­ing a pic­ture, writ­ing instruc­tions for it and exchang­ing instruc­tions with another stu­dent. They then had to draw a pic­ture fol­low­ing the other student’s instruc­tions. There was a pro­jec­tor in the class­room that would project a doc­u­ment placed under the cam­era onto the over­head. It was won­der­ful to have for this activ­ity. After the kids were done with the activ­ity I showed some of their pic­tures and instruc­tions using it. The draw­ings were pretty funny. I was amazed by how many of the stu­dents wanted to share! I had been pre­pared to have nobody want to but way more wanted to than we had time for.

After draw­ing I had the stu­dents play Light­bot. They really, really liked it. It was inter­est­ing to see how the dif­fer­ent groups pro­gressed. For the most part each class divided approx­i­mately in half into fast groups and slow groups, with almost all pairs in each group on the same level. I was sur­prised, I thought there would be much more vari­a­tion in speed. The teacher really liked the game and said she would use it again. The stu­dents were pretty noisy while play­ing as they were all talk­ing to their part­ners. Every now and then one or a pair of them would say some­thing like, “Oh I see!” really loudly. They were really excited when they got it. One of the stu­dents even asked to play it some more dur­ing break.

After play­ing Light­bot I ended up with 15 min­utes left in 2nd and 4th period and 25 min­utes in 6th period. I showed the first half of the Santa’s Dirty Socks video and then dis­cussed it with the stu­dents. I had cre­ated a work­sheet with the ques­tions from CS Unplugged and handed that out. We were not able to go through much of it. This was the hard­est and, I think least suc­cess­ful, activ­ity. It was espe­cially dif­fi­cult in 6th period. Some stu­dents just got it. They under­stood, could rea­son about gen­eral cases, and the answers seemed obvi­ous. There were other stu­dents who were com­pletely con­fused and could barely under­stand being walked through the example.

Over­all I think the pre­sen­ta­tions went pretty well. If I were to do this again I might sub­sti­tute a dif­fer­ent activ­ity for Divide and Con­quer. For any­one else that does the peanut but­ter sand­wich activ­ity, make sure not to bring peanut but­ter, sub­sti­tute but­ter or some­thing else instead. I was really glad I was warned about this as one of the stu­dents was very aller­gic to peanut butter.

Wel­come to the K-12 Com­put­ing Edu­ca­tion sem­i­nar blog.  Each week, at least two par­tic­i­pants will report on our dis­cus­sion.  The read­ing list and assign­ments can be found here.