Week 13 – First Class Session at St. David’s School

Intro

As mentioned last week, the Middle School CS Teacher Mr. Donald Slator has graciously agreed to help us set up a class session with his students at St. David’s School.

Playtest Observations

We integrated our experience to the class of 8 middle school students, they were deliberately separated into 4 groups by Don and no detailed instructions were given. We observed that all of the groups were able to understand how to interact with our experience, and they were actively collaborating and communicating to make progress towards building the animation.

Unfortunately, we did witness some major technical issues happening during the playtest, which caused disconnection for two sessions. But after the session all kids indicated that they’ve got the gist of the experience, and thought that it was a fun and collaborative way to learn programming.

Don’s Thoughts

Two days after facilitating the session, Don had another class session with the same group of students to teach Alice 3, before having a debrief session with our team.

He shared a lot of helpful insights and it was mostly positive. Despite experiencing technical issues, he was very happy to see the collaboration aspect of our experience in action. He also mentioned that the class we taught was one of the “problematic” group because he’s always been worrying about how to get the group to work together. And our experience was a great solution, as the students were actively collaborating and communicating to solve problems.

However, he also pointed out that one of the current problems he can see is students spending too much time on scene building and not putting enough attention on programming. This could for now be solved by the teacher instructing students to move on during class, but is something to consider moving forward.

One surprise we had was that some of his students were asking if they could play our experience again in class, and Don suggested that there might be another opportunity next week if we are down for another class session, which of course we agreed. We will be focusing on debugging and improving usability this week to prepare for the next session.