Digital Makerspace

The TEK I will be working with for my Digital Makerspace is Math 2.9D determine the length of an object to the nearest marked unit using rulers, yardsticks, meter sticks, or measuring tapes. This relates to the gardening TEK Metro E wanted focus on "Use measurement to accurately measure plant growth and amount(s) of soil, plant food, etc." I will utilize the Digital Presentation category from the multimedia fair. The student work I viewed utilized Google Slides, Google Docs and YouTube. I plan to create a lesson through Google Slides or Canva and then upload it to Nearpod to create an interactive lesson that will include online games and engaging activities on their device. I plan to incorporate this measurement content into the theme of gardens and outdoors. We will have games that require measuring in a garden and promote deeper thinking through questions. Discussion will also be had about how else CT skills could be used in a real garden, such as measuring a space and creating a digital model to organize or plan a garden. I have found two games so far and I would like to find an app to allow students to create their own digital garden model based on certain dimensions. 

Gnome Garden Measuring game

This game has students measure different things as the gnome strolls through a garden.

Woodcutting Measurement game

This game has students mark the correct measurements on a log for the woodcutter to chop. This could be related to garden theme because, just like my personal garden, wood can be used to build a raised garden bed.

Here is an example of students who created a digital presentation from the multimedia fair:

Habits Around the World

Educational Arcade

The ISTE standards I plan to focus on for my activity is-

• 1d: Develop resilience and perseverance when approaching CS and CT learning experiences, build comfort with ambiguity and open-ended problems, and see failure as an opportunity to learn and innovate.

-By having students build their own digital garden model using specific measurements will likely create a trial-and-error situation which will promote students to see when failure happens, they can persevere through it to find a solution. This can also be related to the theme of gardening. When you garden problems can constantly present themselves. Whether it is needing fertilizer, battling pesky garden bugs, or combating unfavorable weather.

• 4d: Create CS and CT learning environments that value and encourage varied viewpoints, student agency, creativity, engagement, joy and fun.

-Providing a learning environment that is digital based in a tech driven world will provide students with an engaging lesson that they will motivate them to practice their knowledge in a fun way.

• 5a: Evaluate and use CS and CT curricula, resources, and tools that account for learner variability to meet the needs of all students.

 -The digital presentation I plan to make and coordinate with my activity will allow for differentiation based on the student's needs. It will be easy to add engaging web-based activities for students to work on based on their own individual skill levels. 

• 3c: Plan collaboratively with other educators to create learning activities that cross disciplines to strengthen student understanding of CT and CS concepts and transfer application of knowledge in new contexts.

-Because we will be working in pairs and also working with individuals from another class, I think 3C is an appropriate standard that will be utilized for this activity. We will have to collaborate in our meetings about what we plan to do and with our paired partner to decide on how to facilitate our activities and lessons.

After meeting in the iCreate lab there are a couple of stations that could be utilized for our MakerSpace activity. We saw a few stations such as a sticker maker, a cricut, and a 3D printer. I could see using the cricut to create foldable planter out of card stock that students could measure that would align with the math measurement TEK I chose. I could also design a decorative ruler to show students, as something that might motivate them to visit the iCreate lab themselves.

In the iCreate lab on 10/17 we decided on a Cricut template to make flowerpots to demonstrate the impact of various environmental conditions that are both favorable and unfavorable. We will also use stickers that were created in the lab to label the appropriate plant growth. We will create plants in different growth conditions and the students will put the sticker to the appropriate plant growth based on the condition.

Our flowerpot cut-outs and stickers: