Computing

Animated GIFS teach students how to sequence and develop ideas, but not only. Here are the learning objectives for the lesson with information in brackets referring to the Blooms Taxonomy.

• Learn how to sequence image and text data to develop an idea (mid order thinking skill) (soft skill)
• Create an animated GIF (higher order thinking skill)
• Understand speed and frame rates (low order thinking skill) (hard skill)
• Collaborate in a team using Microsoft Teams and Keynote (mid order thinking skill) (soft skill)
• Be able to export file as an animated GIF (low order thinking skill) (hard skill)
• Be able to share the animated GIF to Showbie and evaluate each others' work (a star and a wish). (low order and high order thinking skills)(hard and soft skill)

We then printed these Vector Citizen Selfies and made a display on the wall. The students love seeing themselves as members of a community.

In this unit of work, I wanted students to think of a sustainability problem and how they could use AI to solve it. Given that the MIT STEAM projects this year revolved around water, the students wanted to to create boats equipped with cameras that would, with the aid of AI, sort fish from plastic.

The task below required students to write a book, fit for a younger audience that explains how a computer works. Rather than rote- learning the theory from a book, the aim of this activity was to interact with the information and create a useful digital artefact.

The book was exported as a movie file, due to the animated GIF in Chapter Two which the pdf did not support. There is no voice-over recording, but perhaps next-time, I will encourage students to narrate some of the content.

Each chapter was created in a 45 mins lesson. The students are 12-13 years of age and EAL learners.

These series of lessons were delivered during the Covid-confinement, which means that students did not have access to the real hardware as they would in the classroom. Despite this, the fact that students were creating very real content, I do believe that a solid foundation for learning about hardware and software was achieved by all the students. Self-assessment tests (GCSE style for 16 year olds) showed that they had achieved high levels of understanding.

In Chapter One, students had to identify which devices were input, ouptut or both to deepen their understanding of how data flows between devices.

In Chapter Two, they had to get familiar with the internal components and connectors of a computer and show via an animated GIF how and where the components fit on the motherboard.

In Chapter Three, they had to create a mind map of all the devices and group them into Input, Output, Both and Internal Components.

In Chapter Four, students had to move away from hardware and get to know software. They had to show that they understood the difference between Operating Systems and Specific-purpose software apps. In this case, icons of the various apps were used.

On our return to school, after the Covid confinement, I decided to take the students outdoors to photograph organisms, use AI to identify them, document the data in a spreadsheet, use and write formulae to collate the data and interpret the data. The students loved this activity, because it was real!

Earlier in the year, we had programmed an interface to an AI engine, which detected whether items found in the lake were fish or plastic. The students had then learned that the clearer the photos, the higher the results. To my suprise, many students had worked out that if their pictures of the organisms were not taken in good light, were not sharp or representative of the object, the species would not be identified by the app. For some students, it took them a while to realise that it wasn't the app which it was at fault, but the quality of their photographs - really wonderful to see those "aha" moments when the penny finally dropped!

The below examples show differentiated work organised by age and level of complexity of the spreadsheet table, the use or creation of formulae and in the interpretation required.