Bee Aware Month - Bee on the Point

During the Christmas holidays, I was introduced to a neighbour that runs a couple of bee hives in the backyard and it had me thinking. With all the building on the Point, what are we doing to support the bees in the area?


How might we develop a campaign to get people to create spaces for supporting insect life on the Point. (Hobsonville Point) though others could come up with another slogan.

Design outcomes

• Logo development (Bee on the Point)
• Poster
• Brochure
• Graphics for packaging Design for seeds that could be laser cut into the package
• Video to support that could go on community facebook
• Infographic on counting bees - see below to be part of the Great Kiwi Bee Count

A range of software could be introduced as students would need to use different software depending on their outcome. This would involve some workshops for students to learn different design applications as well as training in how to design an outcome for the laser cutter. Cut and score lines.

While these are just suggestions to get ideas started. Students could come up with their own unique ways to include different Design Outcomes.

Students would need to develop an inquiry into what these could look like, as well as to research bee friendly plants, this could include an investigation into what different flavours could be developed of honey using specific plants.
Finding seeds that could be purchased to include in packages to the community for them to plant using the Design Outcomes.

Timeline
Would need to be created before Bee Aware Month September.

Counting Bees
The Great Kiwi Bee Count is like a digital census for bees and the trends it reveals will help apiculture scientists learn more about how bees and other pollinators are doing in New Zealand.

Best of all, it will take just two minutes of your time! Here's what to do:
* Find a plant in your garden or neighbourhood that's in flower.
* Go to The Great Kiwi Bee Count page on your smartphone or tablet.
* Count how many bees and other pollinators you see over a two-minute period.Copied from: https://www.stuff.co.nz/life-style/homed/plan-bee/96169350/take-part-in-the-great-kiwi-bee-count

Ideas and resources:
https://www.stuff.co.nz/life-style/homed/garden/94799038/join-nz-gardeners-plan-bee-register-your-beefriendly-garden-on-our-map
https://www.fortheloveofbees.co.nz/
https://www.pollinatorpaths.com/
https://www.fortheloveofbees.co.nz/schools-as-sanctuaries

http://www.treesforbeesnz.org/__data/assets/pdf_file/0018/141390/TfB_2013_Flowering-Times-National-Level.pdf

9 card logic puzzles

I was presented on my desk this week a parcel full of games and puzzles.

The first one I pulled out was a 9 card puzzle. This was something I remember getting when I was a kid and trying to work out.

However, I now look at these puzzles with a different level of understanding.

Where's wally logic puzzle

Mickey Mouse Logic Puzzle

The part I like about these is the tracability of these puzzles.

While they might seem simple, the math starts to get quite huge and remember I got these wrong, I have yet to solve these. 

Given is a puzzle game with nine square cards.
On each of the cards there are 4 pictures at top, right, bottom and left.

Goal: to lay out the nine cards in a 3x3 grid in such a way that all "inner" (complete) character are properly combined with adjacent cards, i.e. have a front and rear end.

Even though the puzzle looks simple at first glance, there is an extremely big number of combinations given that you can rotate each piece in 4 different ways.

Is there an algorithm that could be used to help get the answer.

There are only 9 pieces, and thus each potential solution is representable by a small structure (say a 3x3 array of pieces, each piece with it's rotation), so the exact description of the pieces isn't too important.

What you'd do by hand is to place a piece, say at the upper left side, and try to complete the square by fitting matching pieces into the rest. So you'd never consider any combinations where the first and second pieces don't match, cutting the search down considerably. This kind of idea is called backtracking. For it you need a description of the partial solution (the 3x3 grid with the filled in pieces and blank places, and the pieces not yet used; a specific order in which to fill the grid), a way of moving forward (place next piece if it fits, skip that one if it doesn't) and backwards (can't find any fits, undo last move and try the next possibility).

Obviously, you have to design a way to find out if a potential match exists (given the filled in neighbours, try all orientations of a piece in it's asigned place). For such a small problem this probably isn't performance critical, but if you'd try to solve, say 100x100 the case is different...

and now with the maths, The number of possibilities is: 9!*4^9 = 95126814720

Who knew a 3x3 puzzle could be that fun and have these possibilities to explore computational thinking. Students could even develop a program to help them solve this problem.

unplugged tangram puzzle

I am using this an example today. This is something that I have been doing with Adventure Racing students. Getting them to find the puzzle pieces throughout the school. When you are told that there are 7 pieces and have to find them to put the puzzle together. It's a bit of exercise.

This then turns into putting the pieces together into the square. A challenge in spatial thinking as well as algorithm design.

Then using them students can put them into different shapes. Using the Main Activity students have to sit back to back and communicate putting the pieces in the right order.

This has also been carried out using LEGO blocks as well. Which the students found easier.

However, this was also based upon memory, having to run to another area and memorise a section of the problem to take back. This involved students verifying and testing to make sure that the right pieces were in the right place.

Introduction

Your students may or may not have played with tangrams before. If they have, you can skip this portion, and move right to explaining the main activity.

Explain to the students that tangrams are usually used to solve puzzles. You receive a set of seven "tans" and must use them all (without overlapping any) to recreate an image that has been given to you. Often, this is done as an individual activity, and the player is allowed to see the image that they are trying to recreate. Many times, you can lay your pieces right on top of the image silhouette to be sure that the solution is just right.

Main Activity (20 min)

Algorithms

We are going to use our tangrams in a slightly different way than most. Instead of looking at our puzzles and trying to guess which shape goes where, we are going to get puzzles that already tell you where each shape goes.

You might think that this will make it easier, but it won't, because students will also not get to actually look at the image that we are trying to recreate! Instead, a teammate will be describing the image to us.

To keep it from getting too difficult, we will not use puzzles that require all seven pieces.

Directions:

1. Divide into groups of 3-5.
2. Each player should cut out their own set of tangrams.
3. Have one member of each group select an Algorithm Card without showing it to anyone else.
4. The person with the Algorithm Card will try to explain the image to everyone else without letting them actually see it.
5. The other players will build their pictures off of the description given by the Card Holder.
6. When the Card Holder is done, everyone will show their pictures and see if they all ended up with the same image.
7. If everyone ends up with the same drawing, the Card Holder can show the card and see if everyone matched the card.
8. If any of the pictures in the group are different from each other, have the Card Holder try describing the image again, using more detail.
9. Choose a new Card Holder and a new Algorithm Card and repeat until everyone has had a chance to describe an image.

Play through this several times, with images of increasing difficulty.

Wrap Up (15 min)

Flash Chat: What did we learn?

• What did we learn today?
• Was it easier or harder than you thought it would be to describe an image to one another?
• Did any group end up having arrangements that all matched?
• Can you share some tricks that you came up with that helped your group match the Image Card exactly?

Journaling

Having students write about what they learned, why it’s useful, and how they feel about it can help solidify any knowledge they obtained today and build a review sheet for them to look to in the future.

Journal Prompts:

• What did you learn today?
• How do you feel about today's lesson?
• Can you think of tricks to make it easier to describe tangram pictures to a partner?
• Describe why you might want to be very detailed when creating algorithms for writing code.

An assessment task

https://code.org/curriculum/course4/1/Assessment1-Tangrams.pdf

https://curriculum.code.org/csf-1718/coursef/10/#algorithms-tangrams0

Rubber duck

What is the purpose of the rubber duck? Why is it a part of what you do?

The rubber duck we talk about is yellow, small, can be carried around and starts conversations.

The rubber duck is part of my work at the school. Be it to be used as a resource kits for students to engage with, or as a compulsory bit of equipment for students to carry on adventure racing trainings and competition, the rubber duck is almost a mascot.

It has become more to me in the past number of years.

The rubber duck came into being for me when looking at programming for my seniors at school. Many students needed someone to talk to about their programming problems, and normally when talking to the teacher they would come up with the answer themselves.

Rubber duck debugging was introduced: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging

There was one rubber duck in the classroom, and it soon became a hit when students would pass the rubber duck around when they were having issues with their programmes, or projects.

The rubber duck was then used to support a number of other initiatives around the place, from getting scouts to interact with others at a jamboree.

This then started to become an opportunity as I would teach computer science principles. Be it searching and sorting with numbers on the bottom of rubber ducks, through to binary representations. Students often talk about the ducks, or getting given a duck when they solved the problem.

This year the duck became a bit more. With the adventure racing team. When you hand out the forms of what the compulsory items are and when you check them before going, you knew that that did not have everything. The duck was a grand way to check whether they had everything. "Show me the duck." 

The duck then became something that the students could take with them on races incorporate in their outfits. Take photos of while doing the race.

In the last few weeks of school last year, the duck took on another challenge. To be a part of someone's morning each day. This developed a challenge, an opportunity and a way to show Manaakitanga in a different way.

DigiCreate - DDDO PO3

DIGCREATE - DDDO PO3

Graphic novels are a great place to start Integrating English and Digital Technologies together, as well as integrating Art concepts.

The following resources have been made available for Teachers and Schools. In the teacher's guide they there are pages of a practising artist talking about the different tools and techniques that they use to develop the novels.

Getting students to develop content, ideas through an English lesson and then using ipad's, drawing tablets, to draw there own characters and place them into an environment that could be created as part of their art class for backgrounds using different art techniques. The focus was a single page as part of their work.

Here is part of the design and planning of one of the students work that was developed as part of this integrated module at Hobsonville Point Secondary Schoo

Graphic Novels

Graphic novels are a genre of literature that present their narrative primarily through pictures. Graphic novels are an ideal way of encouraging reluctant readers to engage with a detailed extended text. 

Arohanui: Revenge of the Fey 

This resource is part of the graphic novel series The Matawehi Fables. It tells the magical tale of two iwi: one thriving, the other starving and desolate, forced to enter in to a bargain to secure survival and a future for their people.

Arohanui: Revenge of the Fey (PDF, 3 MB)

Arohanui Teacher Notes

This teacher resource aligns to the graphic novel Arohanui: Revenge of the Fey. 

It is designed to help teachers use the graphic novel to engage learners and help them develop their skills across all areas of literacy.  The resource provides a basic and practical guide for teachers with a ‘how to’ focus on using graphic novels to support their literacy programmes.

Arohanui: Teacher Notes (PDF, 2 MB)

Meariki: The Quest for Truth 

Meariki is a slave to the people of Ngāi Kūwai. When the daughter of the chief is kidnapped, Meariki is sent on a quest to rescue her. Along the way she meets some interesting characters. Ultimately Meariki discovers her true destiny.

Meariki: The Quest for Truth (PDF, 5 MB)

Developing Historical Signage - DDDO PO3

History - WOTPOINT

One of the projects that students enjoyed has been to develop new signage for some of the areas around the community. This was a project that was developed around the integration of learning areas, Technology and Social Science, this involved them finding out information through their social sciences class, on an aspect of the history of the area. This enabled students to have an authentic context in which to learn and implement design principles. 

Learning Objectives (Social Science)		Learning Objectives (Technology)
To MAKE SENSE by understanding cultural diversity. To MAKE SENSE by understanding the significance of biculturalism in New Zealand. To FOCUS on interpreting resource material for validity, meaning and relevance.		To generate by producing a technological outcome To refine by transforming materials to be fit for purpose

Using a variety of ideas from paper's past, as well as students developing their own inquiry into an aspect of the area.

While we are lucky at Hobsonville Point to have such a variety of history around us, from being an RNZAF base, also around us is the former pottery companies that existed, they loved the white clay of Onekiritea. 

Also using the https://www.heritage.org.nz/the-list site, as well as local historical knowledge to get students investigating their local history. Aspects of research, collecting images that are on the https://digitalnz.org/ project. As well as students going and taking their own images, an aspect of this is included at the bottom of the email around enabling priority learners.

Students looked at the buildings and areas that exist on the point and choose one from the list that was provided or one of their own suggestions. 

Students learnt how to do isometric drawings, as well as drawing sketches. They then took these into Google Sketchup to enable them to learn new tools and techniques in an unknown piece of software that they could then use to model up an idea in the future.

While we used the Auckland Design Guidelines, getting students to design and develop a sign that could be used to display the information. This highlighted to the students the new part of the progress outcome of the DDDO Progress Outcomes.

http://content.aucklanddesignmanual.co.nz/resources/park-elements/interpretive-signage/Documents/Signage%20-%20Auckland%20Council%20Signage%20Manual%202013.pdf

Opportunity for Priority Learners.

Outcomes involved students even creating their location through the use of Minecraft, working at below curriculum levels. But opportunities to build and develop content that could be used to incorporate into their design.

Also involved a student that is wheelchair bound to hook up a go pro to there wheel chair computer bracket for them to go out and take photos of their historical place to be able to incorporate their research and own images in their work.

Progress Outcome 3 used

In authentic contexts, students follow a defined process to design, develop, store, test, and evaluate digital content to address given contexts or issues, taking into account immediate social, ethical, and end-user considerations. They identify the key features of selected software and choose the most appropriate software and file types to develop and combine digital conten

The Computational Thinking Duck

The Computational Thinking Duck

One of the key playtime activities that almost every child has engaged in is playing with LEGO bricks. Remember getting the playset, where you had a set of instructions to build a scene? Many a child has followed those instructions to create that scene, and then simply chucked them away to build something totally unique and different. LEGO bricks are a perfect outlet for creativity for both adults and children alike. We can teach not just creative problem solving, but also tackle key concepts in Engineering and Physics amongst others.

This activity uses 6 LEGO bricks. The task is simple. Give each person a set of bricks and tell them to build a duck. What do you come up with? Suitable for all age groups, this activity helps cover key computing and computational thinking concepts such as: algorithms and algorithm design, abstraction, evaluation, logical reasoning and many more. Download the teacher guidance notes below for full details.

Documents
The Computational Thinking Duck.pdf

I must admit when I found this today, that it was out of the blue, I am now trying to find all the bits to make this. It is one thing that I start my classes off with without realising it. I get them using the lego learn to learn series to design and develop a number of different items to get them thinking about design thinking. The duck is the first one of them.