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.