Introducing research skills to 2nd graders with hypermaps

With all of the smokey, save the air days that we've encountered this year due to the North Bay fires, students inevitably had questions and comments about the wildfires and their impact on our neighboring community. So, we launched an inquiry project last week that began with a "What do we know" & "What do we want to know?" chart and led to a clustering of the students's questions to look patterns and connections.

(Last year's situation was much, much worse this time of year, and having been stuck inside for weeks due to extreme spare the air days, students last year also had similar questions, so this year's project was actually and revamp of last year's inquiry project with our students.)

We discovered 5 overarching questions that the students had about the wildfires in California:

• How do they start?
• What is fire "made of"?
• Can wildfires be beneficial?
• Where do wildfires happen?
• How do we stop a wildfire?

The goal now-- to have students research the answers themselves using a guided research technique. I also realized that this could be a great opportunity to have students explore local geography so I create a Google MyMap with pins at various fire sites in California.

On each pin I embedded different photos of wildfires, videos about the science of wildfires and links to articles and readings on each pin so that students could "search" for the information that they needed. I color coded the 2018 pins and the 2019 pins so students could easily see the difference in the number of wildfires in California last year vs. this year. I also loaded KMZ files of wildfire maps created by local news organizations that traced out the size of some of the largest wildfires as a way of comparing the fire areas to the size of local communities that our students are more familiar with (we could view the fire area overlay against the size of our local town, for example).

Before launching our hypermap, we gave a mini-lesson to our 2nd graders on research skills. The
topics we covered included:

• Writing a better search phrase
• Honing in on the content you actually need (and avoiding all the other "noise" on the Internet)
• Using reliable resources

We modeled using the hypermap to "search" for the information that would help answer their
individual research question and ignore everything else that was not relevant to their topic. We also explained the importance of paying attention to the reliability of resources (and let them know that we pre-screened everything this time so they don't have to rate the reliability themselves). We linked the map into our Google Classrooms so that students could easily access it and they were given 2-3 40 minute sessions to explore and practice researching. 

Our students loved having so much learning choice organized into one place (maps, video, reading and photos) and are practicing important Internet research skills in a scaffolded and safe format.

Our Map:

Empathy interviews: teaching 2nd graders skills needed to "learn from others"

This week we launched a deep dive into interviewing skills with our 2nd graders as part of a design thinking project related to this year's Global Read Aloud books, Dreamers by Yuyi Morales and Stella Diaz Has Something to Say by Angela Dominguez.

Students learn from others & synthesize information--
2 of the 8 design abilities

Empathy is not only the heart of design thinking, but is also imperative to living and working in our increasingly globalized society. As a design thinking school, our goal is for students to develop a strong base in how to empathize with others, and truly empathizing with someone requires getting to know them. Strong speaking and listening skills are paramount for developing more empathetic students.

Our students had previously practiced interviewing each other in quick fire design challenges, but my team and I wanted to use this opportunity to explore in more detail the skills that are required to interview another person and then organize and synthesize the information that an interviewer gathers from their interviewee.

As part of the design thinking committee at my school, our first meeting this year was all about breaking down the interview process and what types of skills students may need to practice in order to become proficient empathy interviewers.

My 2nd grade team and I decided to focus on the following:

• The difference between open and closed questions
• How to write good interview questions
• How to build rapport with an interviewee
• How to actively listen during an interview
• Taking notes
• Asking follow up questions
• Organizing notes post-interview
• Synthesizing information from multiple sources (as students would need to use what they learned from both interviews and from reading Dreamers and Stella Diaz...)

How to write questions

We started by talking about the problem/opportunity for design as a whole group. Before we wrote
any questions, we needed to determine what we wanted to learn more about-- in this case, what it feels like to not be able to communicate or to not be understood in the place that you live.

We crafted a problem/opportunity statement as a whole group (mostly teacher-led at this point, since students are not yet proficient in writing problem/opportunity statements) and then dove into the idea of open vs. closed questions. The teachers started asking students how we could learn more about the way it felt being in a country where you didn't speak the language. Students brainstormed a variety of questions and we recorded them on a slide for the whole class to see.

A strategy our 3rd grade team recently taught us that we want to use the next time we generate interview questions is to use an empathy map to guide our questioning. What should we ask to learn more about what they do, say, think, feel? I like the idea of giving students a template to help them generate a variety of questions.


Before launching our interview, we also had to discuss what it means to build rapport with an
interviewee. We explained that it might be tough for a stranger to immediately start talking to them about an emotional topic, and that we should ease our way into the interview with lighter "get to know you" questions. And so our 2nd graders added a hand full of opening questions to the list like "where are you from?" and "when did you move here?"

Taking notes

We gave our students a very basic note taking sheet to record what they learned while interviewing our subject, their 2nd grade teacher Mrs. Flores, who herself was an English Language Learner in her early days of school.

We didn't want writing to be a barrier for our students during the interview so they were allowed to write, sketch or both. We also talked about the power of recording an interview so that you can go back and listen to the interview later when synthesizing your notes, so we set up an iPad and used the voice recording tool to capture the entire interview.

The interview

We left the list of questions posted that students had generated as a group and then asked for
volunteers to ask those questions of Mrs. Flores, keeping in mind that we wanted to practice a "soft start" to our questioning. So we determined as a whole class which question we should start with and a student stood up and asked.

We were pleasantly surprised at how well they paid attention to the flow of questions and politely corrected each other or made suggestions when they noticed that we needed to change our questioning.

Most every one of our 70 students were so engaged in the interview process that they were actively asking for more time to fill in their notes, and were independently asking follow up questions based on Mrs. Flores's answers (a skill we thought we might practice after round 1 of questioning, but it ended up happening really organically!).

We also recorded audio the interview on one of our iPads while the students were asking their questions. This way, we could revisit the interview and analyze our questioning strategies and follow up questions.

After the interview -- synthesizing our learning

We wanted our students to learn more about organizing their notes after interviewing and how to Dreamers book), so we used thinking maps to compare and contrast information from the two sources. We launched this whole class, and then I had my students continue on their own.
synthesize what they learned (from both the interview and the

I posted the audio recordings of our interviews into our Google Classroom, plus a video of Yuyi Morales talking more about her book, Dreamers. Students could use the notes that they took live during the interview and could listen to the recordings of Mrs. Flores and of Yuyi Morales to add additional learnings to their thinking map.

The final step-- using those organized notes to write a syntheses statement describing what they learned about how it feels to live somewhere where you don't speak the language.

Impact

It was exciting to see the way that our students' more in depth analysis of their empathy
interviews/observations led to more curiosity, additional questioning, stronger connection-making and more thoughtful ideations as we moved through the design process.

Having only previously interviewed their grade level peers in design work, we were also pleasantly surprised to see our seriously and carefully our 2nd graders worked through the interview and analysis process. Working with a real "client" added an authenticity to the work that made it more important to them, and so it became work that they cared about doing well.

Redesigning Back to School Night at Campbell School of Innovation

This week's 2nd annual Back to School Night event at Campbell School of Innovation (CSI) was the most fun I've ever had at a back to school night!

Last year, our inaugural year as a school, we committed to rethinking back to school night. If we are a school of innovation, focused on design thinking and creativity and innovating the education experience for students, we couldn't very well host a "traditional" sit and get back to school night for our families. So last year began our journey into rethinking what back to school night would look like in our learning suites and our school, and this year, in our 2nd iteration, we had an opportunity to build on last year's event to create something even more engaging and meaningful for our families.

Our plan-- allow parents and families to experience a "day in the life of a 2nd grader".

We began by having all of our 2nd grade families enter our Wonder Lab together-- a shared workspace between our learning suites in the 2nd grade building. We regularly have all the 2nd graders work and learn together, with all three teachers (rather than the old school model of having them spend their time solely with their one teacher in their one classroom) so we wanted our families to experience that as well. We had some fun music playing and a welcome message up on our TVs while families had a few moments to meander in and socialize a bit.

Last year, with just two 2nd grade classes, we had families circle up for a pared down morning meeting (a la Responsive Classroom) during which they introduced themselves and read a morning message, but we're much bigger this year so this time we just had families stand around the Wonder Lab while we read a welcome message to the group.

The 2nd grade team then used 10 minutes or so whole group to introduce ourselves and also other team members that we, and the students, work closely with on a regular basis; to run quickly through some FAQs (mainly about our communication tools-- and that we'd send home weekly all the things info they'll need this year); and finally, we played a video that we made of the students describing what makes CSI unique and special to them.

Finally, it was play time! My team and I set up three different stations that we thought best represented the 2nd grade experience. In one learning suite we set up a BreakoutEDU game--the first game that students completed with us this year. In another suite we set up a mini design challenge-- parents were given a planning sheet and were asked to empathize about their kids, ideate, and then rapidly prototype a gift for their children. In the third room, we asked families to design and color in dots for their children (as we celebrated Dot Day all of last week) that the kids will be able to view in 3-D with the Quiver augmented reality app.

Families chose how many stations they wanted to visit, we opened up all of our learning suite walls just like we do for our students, and the families spent the rest of their time designing, creating, prototyping, and playing together with the entire 2nd grade community. In the process we had a chance to model the ways that our 2nd grade students engage in learning choices, creative thinking, collaboration, empathizing, exploration, hands-on experience, authentic learning, reflection and play.

The feedback was beyond what we could have asked for! Below, some quotes from families, & observations made, during and after the event:

• "...we've decided that this is so relaxing..." (comment from parent coloring a dot)
• "... this is so great!"
• So fun to see families taking so much thoughtful time on their design planning pages & really diving into their prototyping work
• The gorgeous dot art that families spent 15, 20, 30 minutes creating for their children
• "I hope he/she likes it..." (when talking about the prototypes they were creating)
• Shouts of excitement from the BreakoutEDU room as families began to solve puzzles & open locks!
• "But we're not done yet!" and "...we're having too much fun!" (comments from parents as Back to School night was ending and they were still making)
• "Our children are so lucky to have you!"
• "I was a little underwhelmed at the thought of doing a back to school night for the 13th straight year (and did feel guilty about it) but have to say your school/grade/classes made it such a fun experience... Love the concept and now can confidently say execution of the school!"

photo by @thehughes2

Scaffolding the "Ambiguity" for 2nd graders with "Design for a Buddy" 2.0

A new year has begun and that means an opportunity to iterate on the design work and projects that we engaged in for the first time last year in our 2nd grade classes!

Our first day of school kicked off this year with a design quick fire challenge that we also used on last year's "first day", but this year our work included a few upgraded elements. Last year's first day of school design experience left a number of our 2nd graders in tears as they struggled through their anxiety about failing, their fear of the unknown (i.e. no directions to follow & no cookie-cutter project to create) and their perfectionist tendencies.

Now in year two, my team re-vamped our "Design for your Buddy" design challenge-- with a particular focus on ideating, rapid prototyping, navigating ambiguity, and iterating skills-- to include scaffolding elements to support those students that need the support while developing their design mindsets.

Update #1: Diving deeper into empathy with Toy Story

Our new grade 2 team member, Dayan Flores, had the brilliant idea of launching our project with a clip from the new Toy Story 4 movie, to help students develop empathy for their classmates and how they might be feeling on the first day of school (for many a new school, since we just opened last year). Students related extremely well to the main character's experience of being nervous at a new school and others were even more excited to get prototyping once they made the connection between the Forky character (who the little girl makes out of everyday materials to be her friend) and the project at hand.

Update #2: Design vocabulary instruction

We embedded explicit vocabulary instruction into our day 1 work. We defined key design words we wanted our students to be able to use that day, integrating multiple means of accessing the language (movement, orally, visually). Understanding the language had a huge impact on their understanding of the process itself. Spending time defining "prototype" and "rapid prototyping" for example also meant they were better prepared to create something quickly and not get so wrapped up in making their creation perfect.

Update #3: Supporting design conversations

Most 2nd graders aren't used to interviewing others, asking questions and giving feedback so we spent a significant amount of time modeling this process and brainstorming sentences we might use to interview our partners. The teachers did most of the modeling in this first design challenge of the year, but as a grade level we had the students help us come up with example questions for the interview process. We recorded the suggestions on the board and then read them aloud whole group so that students had the language that they needed to talk to and interview their assigned buddy.

Update #4: "To-do" lists

In our design work, the teams often end up working at different paces, and it becomes challenging for students to know what's next as everyone around them is working within a different part of the process. This year we integrated a "to-do" into our 1st design challenge to help students keep track of where in the process they were working and what was coming next.

To-do lists became a regular fixture in our projects last year, but not until the second half of the year. We decided to launch this executive functioning tool right away this year to help students "navigate ambiguity" (one of the d.School at Stanford design abilities for design thinking) and it really helped many of our students move at their own pace and cut down on a lot of the "what next" questions.

Update #5: Maker bags as an option

Many of last year's melt downs during our 1st day of school design challenge had to do with the "openness" of the work. Ideating, choosing materials, deciding how to craft a prototype in a timed setting... for some students this was more than overwhelming. This year, we decided that we'd have a few pre-made sets of materials available as an option for students that needed a starting point.

With many of our students now in their second year at CSI, we didn't have as many needing that kind of support, but there were still a couple that did. We were able to talk them through getting started a little faster with their rapid prototyping when they had a small set of materials to choose from rather than an entire room full of materials. The kits quelled some of their anxiety and is hopefully a first step toward them independently navigating ambiguity in future design work.

"So you want to make a cat for your buddy? Okay, well this paper tube looks a bit like a cat's body to me...what do you think? What else might your cat need? Which of these items on the table looks like a tail/leg/etc?"

Update #6: Reflection starting day 1

Knowing that reflecting is such an important part of learning, our team wanted to improve on how often we embed reflection time into our work. In "Design for a Buddy" 2.0 we carved out about 10 minutes time at the end of our work for students to reflect on the process. We basically just wanted them to start thinking about what went well and what was challenging. In our second design cycle (post coming soon) we had students do more reflective writing and then recording in Seesaw to explain some of their thinking and design process.

Raspberry Pi Troubleshooting Printable

I noticed among my colleagues in the last couple of years that a barrier for them in getting started with the Raspberry Pi is not knowing how to troubleshoot common issues that arise in the classroom. I also discovered while using the Pi with my elementary students that I often need a quick reference sheet for them to use when doing their own troubleshooting. For my students, it takes too much time during our school day to try and navigate the web to find the help they need mid-project.

And so, I decided to put together a printable 1-pager of common issues that both teachers and students can quickly reference when working with the Raspberry Pi in school. Feedback welcomed!
(you can also access this document via Piktochart)

Elementary CS through the lens of design thinking

A couple of weeks ago, Andrew Collins (inspired by an article on the CSforAll website) asked the Picademy community whether anyone is using design thinking methods with students in their programming and digital making work. As an educator at a school centered around design thinking mindsets (Campbell School of Innovation), I am excited about the impact of design thinking in our programming and making work.

In the last couple of years I've tried to move beyond simply offering "color by numbers" programming lessons. Rather, a number of the programming and digital making lessons in my classes are now centered around solving a real problem or designing for a "user".

Some background on design thinking...

Design thinking is an iterative and creative problem solving method that has been in play in the business world for several decades and has really been made popular in recent decades by IDEO and the Stanford d.School. It's only been in about the last 10 years (if that) that design thinking has made it's way into education and K-12 classrooms.

CSI design model

The thing that really makes design thinking unique from other design processes is the focus on "human-centered" design-- the empathy piece of the puzzle. Rather than designing what we think someone might like, we engage in needs analysis and empathy mapping to fully understand our audience and then design for their needs.

The design model that we created for, and use at, CSI is the Seek, Learn, Lead circular model. Using this model, we challenge our students to become opportunity seekers, innovators and reflective designers and makers.

My 1st design + programming project 

I've always been a fan of project-based programming lessons, but during the 2017-18 school year I wanted to up the ante a bit. So I partnered with talented art teacher, Kimiyo Cordero, and my creative TOSA colleague at the time, Misty Kluesner, to develop a project that challenged a group of middle school art students to learn some programming with the goal of creating a piece of art for an authentic audience. We asked students how they might create a statement piece about the environment for an audience of their peers and families by simulating the aurora with recycled materials and LEDs. (more details about the Aurora Borealis project available here)

Most of the students had zero experience coding and couldn't fathom the relationship between programming and art. But knowing that the plan was to make something unique for an authentic audience, they hesitantly agreed to give it a try. Over the course of about 5 class periods I introduced our group of 7th and 8th graders to physical computing using the Raspberry Pi, Sense HAT and lots and lots of loose LEDs. It didn't take long for students to begin experimenting with their programs to create more interesting lighting effects to potentially use in their sculptures and paintings.

Knowing they were creating their work for someone other than their teachers inspired them to invest more thought and energy into learning and making, and inspired me to develop more design-focused computer science content in order to bring empathy and meaning to our project-based programming lessons.

Learning CS through the design process

1. CS lessons are designed around opportunities/problems

2nd grade design brainstorm

This happens one of two ways in my classroom. Since we are, to an extent, still training our 2nd graders to seek out opportunities for design, this doesn't always come naturally or quickly. As such, my teaching team and I will sometimes already have a project in mind and will use a guided inquiry or brainstorm model to lead students to believe that they came up with the idea. 

For example, one of the NGSS 2nd grade performance expectations is for students to make observations of plants and animals in different habitats, and my grade level team thought, 'wouldn't it be fun to find a way to authentically observe nature in our local urban habitat?' A perfect opportunity to incorporate some digital making with our Raspberry Pi computers! Unfortunately, this was not a question that students had posed as of yet, so we led a little guided brainstorm session during which we asked students to help us come up with ideas for safely and respectfully observing urban wildlife on campus. As students built on each others' ideas, we, as a class, eventually landed on trying to build and program a camera that would take pictures of animals as they set off a motion sensor nearby. 

Touch sensor wildlife camera with Pibrella and MakeyMakey

The second method of lesson design requires a little bit of a willingness on the teacher's part to not overly plan for a class. While I do keep my "intro to physical computing" and "intro to coding" lessons well planned ahead, for the most part, I want to design our programming and making lessons around an opportunity for design that we've determined as a class. I may have generic outline for a lesson ready to go, but the details are added as students identify learning needs specific to their desired "make". For example, I'd originally thought we'd use motion sensors on the wildlife cameras, but students had a great idea to attract animals toward the cameras with food dishes. We ended up using my original "intro to PiCamera" lesson but then ended up adding a mini-lesson on Makey Makey to the mix so students could add a simple touch sensor instead.

2. Projects are empathy-based

The heart of design thinking is empathy. Design thinking helps students develop a mindset of innovating for the purpose of improving the lives of, and helping, others. Approaching computer science instruction through the lens of design thinking has inspired many of my young students to want to learn even more about programming and digital making as they discover just what you can create once you learn some basic electronics, coding and computer science skills. While they have fun playing games to learn on Code.org, it's when they are challenged to create for someone else that my students really push their thinking.

Auto pet feeder prototype with motor & ExplorerHAT

During our Innovators Hour course last Winter, I asked my group of 2nd-4th graders, as part of their culminating project, to look for a design opportunity in their home, school or community. They would then use their new programming and electronics skills to create a prototype to present at our Innovation Fair in the Spring. Students' ideas ranged from at art bot for a sibling that loves art, to an automatic pet feeder to help their busy family with chores, to a math study app for a friend, to a robot "reseeder" for California's wildfire scorched forests, to a button press "signal machine" for me so that I wouldn't have to stress my voice trying to get the classes attention during our hectic maker projects.

Thinking empathetically in design also transfers into other areas of their lives. Once students begin to develop a mindset for understanding other people, their motivations and their needs, they begin to think that way more often in their social lives as well. Giving them specific skills for understanding others in design means they also now have those specific skills to draw from when communicating with friends, settling conflicts or learning to understand someone else's unique characteristics or abilities.

Watch rapid prototype

3. Rapid prototyping & personalized learning through "authentic" builds

Students are highly engaged in computer science through design thinking because they are learning programming while creating authentic artifacts. Even my 2nd graders, with their introductory skills in programming and digital making can at least create "rapid prototypes" that mimic what their final device would look like. Rapid prototyping is the process of quickly creating a physical mock up of the design solution that you've envisioned. Sometimes my students come up with some really great ideas-- like the wallet scanner that a student wanted to build for his dad so that he'd never again be surprised that it was time for a trip to the ATM-- but don't yet have the skills (and, often, neither do I) to build a working model. However, students can create a rapid digital prototype that showcases what it is that their invention would do.

Google Classroom for personalized resources

Students also tend to be self-motivated during this process to research ways that they can most accurately prototype their idea, leading to new programming and electronics learning along the way and truly personalizing the learning experience for each student. Yes, it can be challenging at first for me when I'm trying to help 20-25 students with each of their own unique creations. However, instead of trying to teach each and every one of them how to make what they want to make, I shift to providing lessons on research and online learning strategies. I used Google Classroom to push out YouTube videos, websites and my Raspberry Pi activity cards to groups based on their skills they were trying to learn. I also connected teams that were working on similar skills so that they could support each other in learning what they needed to learn in order to complete their custom projects.

4. Reflect, Iterate & Develop Patience

Beyond prototyping an initial solution to a problem, design thinking also involves testing an idea, receiving feedback from a user and developing 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc. iterations of the prototype to continually improve the original idea. This can involve a lot of patience... something that elementary aged students don't always have. Teaching students to be precise in their work, reflect on their work and iterate to improve has been much more successful in our design work than simply asking them to go back and fix their errors on a rote worksheet.

Early in the school year, during last year's primary election season, we studied government with our 2nd graders and talked about the importance of voting. We also read an article about how slow it can be for votes to be counted and the effect that has on the election process. Students then brainstormed ideas for "speeding up" the vote counting process and decided on creating a voting app because it could automatically calculate votes as people submitted.

At the start of the school year, most of our 2nd graders had little to no coding experience, so the work we started in Scratch at this point was complicated and at times frustrating. That being said, not a single student gave up on the project. They worked with each other to learn and fix their bugs, several made creative changes to their projects that made them unique from our class project, and some spent the entire school year continuing to iterate and improve upon their app as they learn more programming during the year. This kind of commitment to improving a project is unlike anything I'd ever seen before in my 10 years of teaching! For me, this was a testament to the impact that design thinking has on not just computer science instruction, but on learning in general.

(Re)Inspiring Innovative Mindsets Through Making

Bringing making into education isn't just about access to the materials; it's also about developing a maker mindset in our students and cultivating their confidence to be makers.

During the first week of school last year, my teaching partner and I tasked our 2nd graders with a quickfire design challenge: get to know a partner and then make a gift for that person out of the materials of your choosing.

Most of our students were thrilled with this first "assignment", but not all. Having not taught 2nd grade before, I assumed that all 7-8 year olds would be thrilled about an assignment that required them to cut, paste, color and glue, but that wasn't necessarily true. A handful of our 2nd graders weren't at all excited. On the contrary, they were stressed... some stressed to the point of tears each time we launched a making project that didn't come with step-by-step directions of that put them at risk of not doing something "perfectly" the first time.

In his 2006 TED Talk, Sir Ken Robinson stated that we tend to grow out of creativity, or more recently, that we are educated out of creativity. It was in that moment with my students on the first day of school that I learned that this is happening even earlier than I'd realized, and that we have a duty in education to help bring that creative confidence back to our students.

Why Develop Creative Confidence?

So why is it important to cultivate more creative confidence in students? We know that our world continues to change rapidly, and in the larger scheme of things, the future of jobs is changing significantly.

The World Economic Forum 2018 "Future of Jobs" report found that 50% of companies expect automation to continue to replace some of their workforce by 2022, and because of that, new jobs will be created, but with a stronger emphasis on more flexible roles. Anything that can be done by a machine, simply be creating an algorithm for that task, will be. In the coming years, there will be a larger need for those in the workforce to be more adaptable, multi-skilled, able to think critically and creatively in their roles. Creativity is third of the list of skills reported as most likely desired by employers in 2022 and innovation is number one.

Also a part of his 2006 TED Talk, Sir Ken Robinson reminded us that if "...you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original..." A characteristic of the maker, the creator, the innovator is the confidence to try something and know that it might not work out the first time and that's okay. Having creative confidence and a maker mindset is being willing to continually fail forward on the journey toward creating something amazing.

Seymour Papert, often referred to as the father of the maker movement, questioned in his book, Mindstorms (first published in 1980), "Is the computer programming the child, or the child programming the computer?" With all of this technology around us, it is imperative that we understand how it all works. Artificial intelligence and machine learning may sound like things of a Ray Bradbury science fiction novel, but they are already, right now, impactful parts of our everyday lives. Digital making ensures that students are not just using computers to create, but are actually learning how to control those computers as they create with them.

Most importantly, it is the hands-on learning, the authentic experiences, and the learning by doing that we know really make learning stick. This is not a new idea, and yet it is still not common practice in all of our classrooms. Seymour Papert also wrote in Mindstorms that "...discovery cannot be a setup; invention cannot be scheduled." The most powerful learning happens when we make authentic discoveries and have to solve authentic problems. Mitch Resnick echoes this idea in his book, Lifelong Kindergarten. Learning through making means learning to iterate, take risks, solve problems, think creatively, and collaborate authentically. It's a chance for students to learn in context, making the learning more sticky.

The Barriers

We know that children are naturally curious, so what then become the barriers that create such an anxiety in some of our students at such an early age?

Psychologist Thomas Curran studies what he calls the "plague of perfectionism" and notes in his research that there has been a siginificant increase in perfectionist mindsets in our youth in the last 25 years. Two of the causes that he discussed in a recent TED Talk stood out to me.

One was the onslaught of social media in the last 10 years or so and the effect that social media is having on young people. The images of the "perfect lifestyles" that are portrayed all over social media instills in our students this overwhelming need to achieve that perfect life. And while you might not think that this would be as much of an issue at the elementary level, it is. Yes even 7 year olds are dialed into the most popular "YouTubers" of the week, and if you've ever watched the Seesaw and Flipgrid videos that my students record for me, you can tell that quite a few of them hope that they'll soon be the next YouTube star.

A second cause of perfectionism that Curran talks about that was even more concerning to me was the way that we rank and sort our students in schools. Part of this problem is such a hugely systemic issue, it's hard to know what to do about it as a classroom teacher. State required testing, AP tests and SATs are not something that the average educator has much control over, and the pressure that those tests put on students, teachers and parents alike is, according to Curran, affecting students' mental health like never before. Even at the elementary school level I notice the stress that our testing culture has on young students... the tears, the escape acts to the bathrooms every 10 minutes, the heads down on desks during a short math quiz, the scribbling or ripping up of papers in a moment of frustration... I've seen them all. 

That being said, I am not at all anti-assessment. Knowing what my students can do independently helps me to plan better instruction, suited to their individual needs. But the type of culture that we develop around assessment in our homes and classrooms can either positively or negatively impact our students' beliefs around assessment. 

Making mayhem

It also seems that fewer and fewer students are being given time for creative moments and play in their overly academic, overly scripted, overly planned, overly plugged in days. This is one of the reasons that my schools is a no-homework school. We may send our students home with the option to continue a project that we've started in class, or to teach their families a new game that we learned, and we also encourage them to read at home, but generally we want our students to go home in the evening and have time to play, spend time with family, explore, follow their passions, be creative. And at first, it was a tough adjustment for both students and their families. But now, it's fantastic to see students go home and make cardboard sculptures in their free time, and develop their own video games in Scratch, create slideshows about the things that they love, produce movies about their vacations, play with the new Micro:bit or Raspberry Pi that they're parents bought them, write fantasy stories and books... and then bring those creations back to school to share with their peers and teachers. We love seeing students working on their passions at home instead of spending hours on busy work.

Nurturing Creative Confidence

How do we help nurture our students' creative confidence? And help them develop more of a maker mindset?

Students present project made with Raspberry Pi & MakeyMakey

1. Provide more opportunities for making

First off, simply providing more maker and creating opportunities in the classroom can have a huge impact. We constantly tell students that practice makes permanent in the "core" subject areas and the same goes for creativity. The more we engage in creation and making, the more proficient we become in ideating, trying new things, getting messy in the making process and being okay with that.

In the book Empower, educators and authors John Spencer and A.J. Juliani remind us that even with all of the content that we must teach and the assessments that we're required to give, we are still the ones designing the learning experiences in our classrooms. "Standards are the architect's blueprint," they write, "and you, the teacher, are the still the builder and designer." Finding the time for our students to play, make and create empowers them as makers.

2. Scaffold creative work
Secondly, we can scaffold creative and maker projects in our classrooms. Some students will need a framework within which to start their maker projects. In my classroom, all making projects typically start with some type of mini-lesson or guide to help them get going. With our digital making projects, I use printable, step-by-step guides that my students can use to learn the basics at their own pace. I might also provide them with videos or project directions from the Raspberry Pi or Code Club World websites that they can use to help them create (and then customize) what they want.

3. Give them a target
I also like to give my students a specific learning target to work towards. For many students, having a clear end goal in mind gives them necessary constraints within which to focus their creative thinking.

4. Create by copying
Sometimes we use templates that students can duplicate and then customize to make the work their own as they're learning a new tool or technique. During our first digital design project last year, I pushed out a Google Drawing to all of our 2nd graders and they were able to use the template to change as much or as little of the design as they chose to, so that they could get comfortable with the new tool while creating. When they are ready to create their own from scratch they will, but in the meantime that have the resources that they need to help them.

Students use targets & printable guides to learn new making skills

When practicing creativity, artist and writer Austin Kleon encourages us to "steal like an artist." Something I've noticed in some of our students suffering from extreme perfectionism or maker anxiety is the belief that you can only truly be creative or innovative if your idea is completely new. This belief holds them back from ever getting started. Kleon, however, reminds us that nothing is ever complete original. Our creative work is often encouraged by something we saw or read somewhere else. Creativity is many times a collaborative effort-- an idea built from someone else's idea, that was built from someone else's idea, that was built from someone else's idea. I let my students know that copying to learn is perfectly okay.

The Scratch platform is a great example of this. Scratch encourages what they call "remixing." Copy someone else's program (with credit of course) and remix it, change it, improve upon it and then reshare it. When working within the design process, we teach students that ideating involves not just coming up with as many new ideas as you can, but it can also mean building off of others' ideas as well.

5. Model, model, model
We can also encourage more creative confidence in our students by modeling that mindset for them. We model reading, writing, math, science skills with our students... why not model creative thinking and maker mentalities. I like to create alongside my students in the classroom, doing the same creative work that they are and modeling aloud make ways of thinking when I can. "Well, I don't exactly know how to do this yet, but let's look it up..." or "...let's see what happens if I try this...." or "This isn't looking quite the way that I'd imagined, but this part is kind of cool so I'm going to keep it and see how it turns out."

I tell them stories about my own maker projects and setbacks that I've faced and how I work through those setbacks. How it took me 6 months to figure out how to successfully record audio waves on my Raspberry Pi and then to convert that into sound waves that print in a graph, but after a hundred failures and a lot of help from friends, I finally had part of it figured out!

The Impact

It is easy to say that we don't have time for more making in our classrooms. That there are too many other things to do, but the benefit of nurturing students' creative confidence and maker mindsets is the impact that that mindset has across all aspects of student learning. Making offers a safe and engaging space for students to practice making mistakes; a more low stakes arena within which to fail and then figure out a new to try and make something work. And having spent months developing that mindset within my own young students, I have seen their attitudes toward challenges and difficult tasks change. They aren't as quick to get frustrated and they are much more solution-focused than they were at the beginning of the year. They take more initiative to solve problems and to make decisions for their own learning.

Student statements on importance of making in education

And for some of our students, making finally gives them the opportunity to shine. One of my favorite
examples of this happened a couple of years ago, when I was working with a 5th grade class on a digital making project in Minecraft Pi. One of the students in the class had been struggling with math most of the year. The project that we were working on involved using the Python 3 coding language to program the construction of a colonial tool in Minecraft Pi. This particular student happened to be a big Minecraft fan, and although he had zero experience programming, he quickly became one of our project experts. Suddenly, a student that was barely getting by in his traditional math class, was explaining 3-D coordinate systems to his classmates, and calculating area and perimeter in Minecraft as he made construction plans with his team.

Maybe most importantly, providing more time for creativity and making, and helping them develop more confidence in their ability to be makers, my students are now more excited about learning when they get to make something real. They have more fun creating than filling in worksheets, and it is exciting to see the pride in their faces when they've created something out of seemingly nothing.




"Cultivating Confident Creators" talk given at Pi-Top Learning by Making series, L.A. 
(April 2019)

Creating Urban Wildlife Cameras with Raspberry Pi in 2nd grade

Our first full Raspberry Pi project with all of the 2nd graders was a success-- well, mainly in that most all of the 2nd graders loved learning how to use the Raspberry Pis and program LEDs and cameras. We were not as successful in getting our projects to work the way that we wanted to, but our students did learn yet again how to adapt when a project is turning out that way that you originally planned.

We launched the digital making project as a part of the ecosystems NGSS & ELA unit that we were working on, as a way of addressing CS standards as well as the NGSS standard that students make observations of plants and animals.

Before diving into making our wildlife cameras, my teaching partner, Terri Hughes, and I did a little background work with students to make sure that they had some understanding of the hardware that they were going to be working with. We read Hello Ruby: Journey Inside the Computer to each of our classes and discussed the difference between hardware and software. We also taught students computer-related vocabulary so they could speak accurately about their machines and the work we'd be doing (monitor, mouse, cursor, inputs, outputs, etc.).

Next, we brought all of the 2nd graders together and launched our digital making project with a  question. We reminded the students that we had watched lots of animal videos throughout our ecosystem unit, and that we noticed their interest in animals on our own campus--so we asked them, "how might we better observe urban wildlife in our own community?"

Before ever mentioning that we were going to make our own wildlife cameras, we had students practice their brainstorming skills by coming up with all the methods they could think of to make observations of nature on our school campus without disturbing that nature. When several started talking about cameras, it was at that point that Mrs. Hughes and I announced that we thought that sounded fun and that Mrs. Haughs had everything we needed to create and program our own wildlife cameras.

Day 1 of digital making involved getting students into teams of 3. I've found that groups larger than that don't tend to work well-- there's not enough for everyone to do.  I told students that we wanted the teams to be balanced, so that each team had a strong coder, editor and builder/electronics person (or, even if they weren't sure they were strong in an area, that at least it was a skill they were very interested in) and then had the students develop their own teams. They did a fantastic job of making the teams themselves, and took the process very seriously, pointing out to me who would be the "expert" in each skill on their team as I approved each team.

Next, we reviewed the parts of the computer that we'd learned with Hello Ruby as a whole group, and pointed out each of those parts on the Raspberry Pi. I asked students what was missing from our Raspberry Pi so that we could use it and they had to list off the other parts of hardware that we'd need (keyboard, mouse, monitor, power). Then we took turns, one person at a time from each team, picking up those materials from our computing corner until teams had everything that they needed to get started.

As for electronics components, I decided to use Pibrella HATs, motion sensors and PiCameras on this project. I put the Pibrella HATs on the Raspberry Pis ahead of time so students wouldn't have to learn that on day 1, and left PiCameras off for the first couple of lessons, while students learned how to setup the code that they needed in Scratch in order to program the Pibrella. The goal was to get the motion sensors up and running first, as I tend to struggle with these from time to time. I've found that they end up being way to sensitive or not working at all, and I wanted students to be able to get over this hurdle in the beginning and leave the "easier" stuff, like the Picamera, for last.

To help students learn how to program each element, I made a Pibrella-focused slide deck/activity card deck that we printed off for the groups. I like the "copy to learn" format for getting students started. With the printed card deck, groups could move as slowly or quickly as they wanted through the project and then customize as they learned how their program worked. This format helped teams worked more independently and try to solve their own problems while I circulated the room.

As I suspected, we ended up not able to get the motion sensors to work quite right, and as we didn't have much time for troubleshooting, we reviewed the term "prototype" and how sometimes in design we put things together as a sample of how the real thing might work, even if it's not exactly how we want the final product to look. Then, we learned to program buttons instead and by the end of the unit, every team was able to program their button to turn on at least 1 LED and take their picture.

In the end, one small set of students wanted to keep working on their project independently and so in their free time they recreated the camera project, adding a Makey Makey and copper tape for touch activation and trying to create some "camouflage" elements to the prototype so that we could more easily hide the cameras somewhere on campus (even color matching our school walls to the paint they used for camera cover).

How do you teach a 2nd grader to own their own learning?

One of the goals that we had as a site upon opening CSI was to personalize learning by helping our students become more self-directed learners. The question is, and continues to be, how do you teach elementary-aged students to take ownership of their own learning?

When we talk about self-directed learners, we're not talking just about students being able to work independently, but also that they will take initiative in their own learning. Educator and writer, John Spencer, created a simple and concise visual for explaining self-directed (see below & read his blog post "Taking Choice Menus to the Next Level" for more info).

Courtesy of John Spencer

As an elementary school teacher, I fully believe that even our youngest students are capable of becoming self-directed learners. The trick is, how to get them to a place of making their own learning choices, and sticking with those choices when they get tough.

Our First Steps Toward Self-Directed

In my 2nd grade classroom, I've started a few routines to help scaffold the journey toward more self-directed learning. Most of my 2nd graders came to me this year ready to follow directions and complete the tasks offered to them. Asking them to make decisions for their own learning, however, was a bit trickier, and figuring out to support my students' journey towards self-directed learning has become a matter of trial and error. 

Here are some of the more successful strategies that I've used so far:

Learning Targets

This was actually a district initiative, put into place about two years ago as we began our PLC (professional learning communities) training with Solution Tree and as one of our schools became an EL School. I mention all of that mainly to say that I cannot take credit for the idea of learning targets, but I can say that the more that we use them in our day, the more powerful they become for helping students personalize their own learning path by giving them a clear target to achieve. 

The idea of learning targets is to begin each lesson with a statement of what essential skill the students should be able to accomplish by the end of that particular lesson. It is not the same as the standards, as those are typically what we hope for students to accomplish by the end of the school year. The learning target tells students what I want them to accomplish by the end of just that 1 lesson. We review our learning target before and after the lesson, breaking down its parts and defining important vocabulary, and ask students to self-reflect on their progress throughout. And we don't just use learning targets for academic skills, we also write them to help students focus on "soft skill" goals.

When students have a clear target in mind at the start of the lesson, it becomes easier for them to determine the path they'll need to take in order to reach that target. (Leaders of Their Own Learning is a great read for anyone wanting to learn more about this.) As students have become familiar with using learning targets, they even help me write the targets from time to time, now.

Executive Functioning Supports: Our "To-Do" Lists 

Executive functioning skills are so important for helping students to become self-directed learners in our classrooms. Directing their own learning requires some type of strategy for organizing and planning learning tasks, monitoring progress, and determining how they'll demonstrate that learning. 

One support I've put into place this year for my 2nd graders are our monthly to-do lists. Work in our class is made up of a variety of "must-do" work and choice work (using a version of the Cafe/Daily 5 models). Each time a new "must-do" is assigned, we add it to our to-do list. Weekly, we all take out our to-do lists as a class and review what work we've turned in and what we still have left to complete. It's not a perfect system yet, but it is helping quite a few of my young scholars learn how to balance their time between choice stuff and the required stuff.

Choice Boards

Wanting to find a structure that would allow us to better personalize instruction for the variety of needs in our classes, our 2nd-4th grade teams have adopted the Cafe/Daily 5 model as a way of providing student's choice in their learning, and for teachers to provide more small group instruction. Students love having choice during Cafe time and it also becomes a way to help students learn how to make choices that benefit their specific learning targets. 

Because Cafe time is about students learning to work independently for extended periods of time, some training (and ongoing practice) is needed up front on how to maintain focus during work time and on what students can do to help themselves when they get stuck. As suggested in the Cafe trainings, we spent the first several weeks timing our independence and regrouping as a whole class as soon as a few started to lose stamina. We used that whole group time review our progress, record our "stamina times" and refocus on our learning targets. 

We also spend a lot of time reviewing what resources students have in our learning suite to help themselves (instead of always defaulting to asking the teacher) and keep these clearly posted on our Cafe wall. As the year has progressed, students are able to work independently for longer and longer periods of time, and are becoming fairly adept at solving their own problems until I'm free for conferencing with them in a small group or one-on-one.

My Next Steps

While we still have a long way to go, it's exciting to see my young scholars inching their way closer to becoming the self-directed learners that we hope they will be by the end of their stay at CSI. Now that my students are showing more independence during their learning time, I want to take additional steps to allow them even more ownership of their learning, including independently designed "inquiry projects" and student designed learning paths. In the coming month, my hope is to start meeting with students one on one to conference about their growth so far this year, and to help them set their own goals for their learning moving forward. I've created a "Learning Goals" recording sheet where each student can track their current learning goals, their personal assessment plan, and their reflections.