PBLWorks: The Project

PBL Works has recently launched a new podcast called The Project. I listened to the first six episodes today, and it was well worth the listen.

In Don’t Send a Professional to do an 8th Grader’s Job, Ron Berger of EL Education talked about a project that had city engineers training students to do energy audits of the schools. The students then took a proposal to the city with recommendations for $156K worth of improvements, saying the city would recoup its investment within 5 years. The city actually did it, and recovered their investment in 2 years. The rest of the discussion is about the power of having students do “beautiful work” – that is, authentic work that has real value. One of the points Berger makes is that it’s hard to do beautiful work without examples to aim for, which is why EL Education created Models of Excellence.

Some of the points made across episodes are that we are living in a project-based world, and while project-based learning might be trickier to implement and assess than your standard worksheet, it’s also a lot more authentic and helps students learn skills they’re actually going to be able to use in life. There’s a blooper episode, which discusses the pitfalls of project-based learning, that gets at the idea that learning to implement it is a project all its own, and one you’re not likely to get right on the first try. But there are lots of resources to draw on, and this work is worthwhile. The episodes also address the equity aspect of PBL, that all students deserve access to meaningful work, and that high-quality PBL gives students needing work on the fundamentals a reason to do that work.

This Teachable Moment highlights opportunities for PBL during the pandemic and discusses the free e-book PBLWorks offers with ideas for parents and educators to engage their students in the moment.

The “Breaking Bias” Project discusses an ambitious project with five teachers across three high schools in different states designed to help students recognize their biases and break them down. This project was planned before the pandemic and George Floyd, but seems especially powerful in this time. Getting students in different places and from different backgrounds talking with each other and recognizing how their environment creates and reinforces biases is an amazing thing.

I’ve taught robotics with a project-based mindset, and I try to bring that mindset to my science and computer science classes as well. But there’s clearly room for growth. I would really love to build these skills, and to help students recognize their power to do authentic, meaningful work.

PBS: Game On

This morning I participated in an interactive webinar put on by PBS Learning Media and Breakout Edu. After an introduction to the activity, we were put into breakout rooms with small groups with instructions to introduce ourselves and start the game. The goal was to explore the PBS Learning Media site and learn a bit about how to use it, and to solve puzzles along the way, using the information we learned. It was a fun little game, and seemed like a great way to engage students. I don’t know how hard it is to create games, but perhaps I will find out: participants are supposed to receive a free one-year subscription to Breakout Edu. It doesn’t include the kits (presumably), but should include access to the site, to create virtual games. I’m looking forward to checking it out!

Random Cool (?!) Stuff

BioDive, featured in this TED Talk, is “an immersive dual virtual reality/digital experience where middle school students are marine biologists investigating the delicate ecosystems of venomous marine snails. Throughout their expedition, students observe, discover, and hypothesize about abiotic and biotic factors that impact marine biodiversity.”

East of the Rockies is an interactive narrative AR experience told from the perspective of Yuki, a 17-year-old girl forced from her home and made to live in one of Canada’s Japanese Internment Camps. – Apple devices only

IEEE Reach provides teachers and students with educational resources that explore the relationship between technology and engineering history and the complex relationships they have with society, politics, economics, and culture. Inquiry units, multimedia sources, primary sources and hands-on activities.

ImageJ – Image processing and analysis in Java, from NIH.

Organic Chemistry Lab Experiences – Five open-access VR labs. If you use them, let them know. Reporting usefulness back to their funders can help fund the creation of more labs.

PolarTrec – “Activities, opportunities, and resources for educators to learn more about the polar regions and polar science.”

Book: How to Do Nothing

I don’t remember how this particular book wound up on my to-listen list, but it was there, and looked interesting, so I went for it. In How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell isn’t really advocating that people do nothing, but instead that they disengage from the attention economy and engage in life with intention. As she warns at the start of the book, it’s a bit of a ramble at times, because it comes out of her own experiences and reactions.

More specifically, the book comes out of her reaction to the 2016 election and some of the aftermath (though not the pandemic – it might be interesting to hear her thoughts these days). She gets into Burning Man and Commune life and other attempts at “dropping out,” looking at their successes and failures. She talks a lot about bird watching, and developing an awareness of place and of ecology.

As an educator, I think an awareness of how the attention economy works is important, partly so we don’t get caught up in it ourselves, but mostly so we can help our students be aware of it. There are behavioral scientists that have been working on getting our attention through advertising for many, many years, but the internet allows that work to be much more targeted and far more insidious. For our students, that’s just how it’s always been, and they may not even be aware of how they’re being played.

Bike Ride: Grijalva Park

The posted trail at Grijalva Park was a 1.1 mile loop (that bit in the upper right), so I added to and from along the Santa Ana River Trail and the Santiago Creek Trail. There have been some reports of assault recently in the area of the latter trail, so while it’s a reasonably pleasant ride, I didn’t stop for pictures. (All the women assaulted have been walking, so I’m operating on the assumption that I’m a more difficult target on a moving bike.) Roundtrip, about 21 miles.

Book: The Last Wish

When I have time, I’m a gamer, and I especially like immersive, open-world RPGs with a good story. I recently finished Witcher 3 on Game Pass. I’d played Witcher 2 some time ago. I’d never played the original game, though, on on a whim, went looking to see if I could get it. Just by chance, it was being given away free that day, so I got it. However, the post that highlighted this giveaway said the story in the games came after the books.

So I decided it would be fun to see if I could get the books. They are, conveniently enough, available from my library as audiobooks. I recently finished the what Goodreads lists as the first full book (numbered 0.5, so it may have been written later), The Last Wish. (There’s a short story, The Road with No Return, that’s supposed to come in before it, but I’ve not been able to get my hands on it.) It opens with Geralt of Rivia investigating a contract for a striga, a princess that was born cursed, but who may be able to be saved if someone can stay all night in her lair. He gets injured in this adventure, and goes to a temple to heal. While he’s there, there are a series of flashbacks that highlight other adventures, including travels with Dandelion and his first encounter with Yennifer.

It was a fun listen to get some of the back story on Geralt and his friends. Unfortunately, I don’t seem to be the only one inspired to do this. The next in the series, The Sword of Destiny, has 55 holds on 25 copies, so it will be a while before I get it.

GSP: Conrad Wolfram

Conrad Wolfram was recently on the Getting Smart Podcast, talking about his new book, The Math(s) Fix: An Education Blueprint for the AI Age. Based on what I heard, this book is definitely going on my reading list. The underlying problem is one that I’ve been hearing about at least since folks like Dan Meyer (who gave a great TED Talk back in 2010 that is sadly still relevant now). Our standard math curriculum is focused on teaching students the algorithms for doing math, and evaluating them on their ability to carry out those algorithms. Just the fact that you can call them algorithms should be an indication that computers can do that so much better than people can.

What we don’t seem to do (and very much need to do) is focus on figuring out the problem identification side of things: figuring out what algorithm is relevant, and why, as well as what information is needed for that algorithm and how to get it. That’s the tricky bit, the part that computers aren’t good at. It’s also the much more interesting part. If we teach students the computational tools that are available to them, and then let them use them, they can ultimately solve much more interesting and relevant problems.

Book: Elastic

I finished listening to the book Elastic: Flexible Thinking in a Time of Change by Leonard Mlodinow. The book compares top-down analytical thought to more bottoms-up creative thought. He highlights the human brain’s adaptability to ambiguity that gives computers so much trouble.

It is our capacity for elasticity in our thinking that computers (and artificial intelligence) find difficult to replicate. He considers the problem of identifying a chair: we do it pretty easily, but analytically defining the characteristics that make something a chair is quite difficult. Language processing is another notoriously difficult task. Computer translators have gotten a lot better, but computers still have difficulty when meaning is determined by context.

Humans operate based on rules, but we can be flexible (or elastic) about when to implement them and when to ignore them. We even have a phrase about obeying the “spirit” of the law, rather than the “letter” of the law. Even the most sophisticated AIs we have are still incapable of this type of thinking. In his TED Talk, Sylvain Duranton highlights the dangers of letting AI make decisions, because it implements solely rule-based thinking.

I’d recommend the TED Talk to anyone interested in exploring AI and machine learning. The book would be a good opportunity to dig deeper. Could be useful for upper-level computer science classes.

Bike Ride: Back Bay Loop

My dad’s car needed to go in for service, so I offered to take it for him. Turns out the service center is right next to the Back Bay, so I went for a bike ride while I was waiting for the car.

I had ridden most of this route before, although some of the segments at the south end of the ride had been closed the last time I was out this way. Part of the route was posted no bikes, so I got off and walked for that section.

SciFri Summer Institute

I’ve spent this week in the Science Friday Summer Institute. It was completely different than any PD I’ve previously attended. Each session started with a scientist presentation, introduced by a Science Friday Educator Collaborators. The scientists always started with presenting some sort of phenomenon to get our attention and get us thinking. They told us a bit about their story and how they came to be doing what they’re doing. Then they shared some of the work they’re doing with us. These presentations lasted about 30 minutes. For the rest of the session, 2 hours or so, we worked in grade-level groups to take what we’d learned in the presentation and figure out how we might use it in our classrooms. At some point while we were working, the presenting scientist would drop in to chat a bit more and answer any questions we might have.

This is where my being a generalist, combined with not currently having a job, put me at a bit of a disadvantage. Because I’ve taught in so many different kinds of classrooms, I didn’t have a clear audience I might develop for. I did spend some time hanging out with the other educators and bouncing ideas around, though, and it was interesting to hear what they were thinking about doing for their classrooms.

The scientists, and what they were working on:

Advait Jukar presented “Size Matters – Long Term Ecology of Megafauna.” He started with images of where large animals lived 50,000 years ago, then showed their distributions 20,000 and 10,000 years ago. The question was whether the disappearance of megafauna was a story of climate change, or if perhaps it was the spread of a particular invasive species: humans. The answer, of course, is probably both, but he did present evidence of the survival of megafauna in areas where those animals and humans coevolved.

Allison Evans presented “Shrinking Science to Fit in a CubeSat.” She opened with images of CubeSats, including an animation that showed the components, and a breakdown of dimensions. A 1U CubeSat is 10 cm x 10 cm x 10 cm, but they can be modular. One satellite she was working on was a 6U CubeSat. She discussed the challenges of miniaturizing components to work on a CubeSat. This made for a good discussion of materials science and constraints.

Ruha Benjamin presented “Justice by Design.” This presentation was similar to the one she did for CSTA, and opened with a description of a Community Innovation Project. She then invited us to look more closely, and consider the ways systemic racism was built into the project, however well-intentioned. She highlighted many examples, from the historical and blatant to those that are effectively a result of inertia.

Prem Gill presented “Seals from Space.” He opened with a video clip about how scientists are now able use high-resolution satellite cameras to monitor animal populations from space. In addition to images, he had sounds, and had us trying to differentiate “space sounds” from “seal sounds.” He shared some of the methods with us, including how data is ground-truthed. Because projects like these often generate a lot of images, and AI isn’t quite up to the task of sorting them out yet, citizen science sometimes helps out.

Sebastian Echeverri presented “How to Grab a Spider’s Attention.” He opened with a video of an interaction between two spiders, with a more colorful spider appearing to display to a drab spider. He got into the anatomy of spider eyes, what a spider might need to do to get the attention of another spider, and why it might want it, anyway.

Briana Pobiner presented “Who Ate This Bone.” She showed close-up images of bones and challenged us to figure out what might have created those marks. She then shared some of the methods people in her field use to distinguish between animal-caused marks and tool-caused marks. As bones get more recent (she often works with fossil bones), whether the bones might have been cooked comes into play, as well.

Moiya McTier presented “Galactic Archaeology and the Search for Habitable Zones.” She started with a visualization of orbital models in the galactic center. Unlike many astronomers, she’s drawn not by the visual beauty, but by the math of the galaxy. Her astronomy is cool, but she’s also a folklorist. She combines these two interests in the Exolore podcast, about facts-based fictional world-building. She teaches courses in world-building, too, starting with the physical environment, and creating cultures that would be the result of that physical environment.

Gioia Massa presented “How Veggies Grow (and Make Astronauts Feel) in Space,” She opened with a video of an astronaut harvesting leafy greens growing on the International Space Station, and then three astronauts enjoying eating them. She presented some of the challenges of trying to grow plants in a microgravity: There’s no convection, so no natural air flow. Water behaves strangely, clinging to surfaces. (She included a cool video of an astronaut wringing out a wet cloth, only to have the water gather on the outside and crawl up his hand.) She also discussed the psychological value of having plants on the ISS.

The last presentation broke the mold a little bit, because the educator collaborator, Laura Diaz, had a bit of her own story to tell. She showed us a Census Tract map of the State of California, and she grew up in one of the red zones, most affected by pollution. She then introduced Charlotte Smith, who presented her studies of Drinking Water Quality and Health in Jalisco, Mexico. Together, they talked about the power of location-based data, and encouraged educators to make use of Esri’s ArcGIS Schools Bundle in combination with Esri’s mobile apps to investigate all kinds of questions.

The last day of the institute switched gears a bit. The morning session focused on Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (JEDI). They gave us readings and resources, but there wasn’t much of a formal presentation. There were breakout rooms with discussions of different JEDI projects. The one I looked into was a scientist biographies project, highlighting diverse scientists. The afternoon session was focused on teaching around COVID, and again had breakout rooms for different aspects of that.

At the end, they told us they’ll be contacting educators again toward the end of the month or so, to continue working on classroom projects. Educators that participate in those sessions will even be paid for their time. Hopefully, I’ll have a target audience by then.