US Students in "Advanced Topics in Computer Science" Code in Machine Language

Upper School students explore coding languages in their Advanced Topics in Computer Science course. Through collaboration and curiosity, they build on their skills to complete a variety of projects including the video game Pong.

Advanced Topics in Computer Science on vimeo.

The Makey Makey Learns a New Language!

In the 7th Grade Science classroom students designed an interactive object using a MakeyMakey kit. Students were asked to create different locations on the object, where by touching will complete a circuit and produce distinct sentences in the language they are currently studying at the Middle School. 

Upper School Algebra 2 Desmos project

Thank you to Mariah and Christine for coming in over Spring Break to hang up the results of this year’s Desmos Project. Students in Algebra 2 and Algebra 2 Honors worked on this project prior to Spring Break. The goal of the project was for students to transform basic parent function graphs to form a picture. Students used transformations to move graphs up, down, left, and right, and to stretch or shrink them. To create their pictures, students had to restrict the domain and range on the functions in order to get the portion of the graph they want. The project was completed using Desmos which is the “next generation of the graphing calculator” and instantly plots any equation.

-Katrina Fuller

Congratulations to BB&N Upper School Computer Science Students

Earlier this week a team of four BB&N computer science students attended Providence College's annual High School Computer Programming Contest, and they won second place!

The team also won 3rd place at the MIT Blueprint Hackathon this past Sunday.  Way to go programmers!  below is a summary from one of the participants:

Blueprint was basically all day Sunday. We (Cassandra, Aaron, Jack, and I) made a game for iOS called Gravity 4. It is essentially connect 4 except one may press a button and the board rotates and the pieces likewise fall according to the rotation. Cassandra and Aaron worked on the UI and game mechanics. Jack and I implemented wireless multiplayer using Parse as a backend. We had around 10 hours to code the whole thing and by the end we had a good product with only a few bugs. Three judges reviewed our app and we ended up getting third in the advanced division!

Providence College was a problem solving contest. There were a total of 9 problems, which one had to solve using either Java or C++... It was a lot of fun, but  it could have been better with more challenging problems and more teams (there were only about 14 teams of 4 people each). 

-Vishnu

New Upper School student club formed 2015-2016: Mobile App Development Club

          Programming has always been a very important aspect of our lives. At first, it was something cool that we didn’t really understand but nevertheless wanted to mess with. Whether it was making games with Processing or writing code to help with math problems, we saw it as a fun tool. In sophomore year, two of us took AP Computer Science in order to really build and expand on our knowledge. During this time, we also participated in programming competitions such as the USACO, where we have qualified in the silver and gold divisions. At the end of year, our final project was to make a mobile application that notified people in BB&N about their current classes and schedule. We also wanted it to be flexible for schedule changes and capable of notifying students about school wide events with push notifications. While much of the actual logic and backend was completed for the final project, we continued to fix some bugs throughout the summer. We felt that with more people and ideas, we could make this app better and thus the idea of a Mobile Application Development club, or M.A.D. club was conceived. 

          Going forward, we have a member working on a better UI for the application. The rest of the club is discussing possible future features relating to the app. We would like to make it possible for all schools to use, not just BB&N. We are considering adding a lunch menu feature as well. Besides the BB&N app, we are also discussing other projects such as games. The club time is used to bounce ideas and communicate plans; actual coding occurs behind the scenes. Club members demonstrate code and teach newcomers as well. Currently we meet on Tuesdays and we are considering meeting on Thursdays to get more time to communicate. For us, it’s really cool to have a direct impact in a community and create applications that people can use to make their lives more efficient. At the same time, we like to have a little fun too– so we mess around and design games.

-Members of the Upper School Mobile App Development Club

BB&N Teachers attend STEM forum at Harvard

Last Wednesday, February 18, a few BB&N educators were able to attend the Harvard Graduate School of Education's Askwith Forum "A Space of Their Own?  Girls, Women, and STEM."  In attendance were Lower School Academic Technology Specialist RM Pellant and Upper School math teachers Mark Fidler, Chip Rollinson, and Mike Bernstein.  HGSE advertised the event as follows, "Girls and women are significantly underrepresented in many areas of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education and STEM professions. In this group conversation, we will discuss what factors contribute to female underrepresentation in STEM, why female underrepresentation is problematic, and how to support broader participation."  The event was moderated by Karen Brennan, Assistant Professor of Education, HGSE, and the panelists were:

• Kimberly Bryant, Founder, Black Girls CODE
• Maria Klawe, President, Harvey Mudd College
• Jane Margolis, Ed.M.'88, Ed.D.'90, Senior Researcher, UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies
• Stephanie Wilson, Astronaut, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)

At the Askwith Forum, panelists discussed what factors contribute to female underrepresentation in STEM.  Watch their discussion here.

Below are some of the takeaways from Mark Fidler:

"A major focus of the "Girls and STEM" panel discussion at the Harvard Ed School was on girls and computer programming. Discussion touched upon the impediments to girls entering the field at all levels - elementary school, middle school, high school. college, and in industry. There was discussion of racial and economic factors, too. Mike Bernstein, Chip Rollinson, and I attended. Mike and I felt that the most important suggestion for us was to make introductory programming experiences fun, not scary, and social. This week, the EPC approved an Upper School programming course designed to be all three of those. At BB&N, we have a much higher female percentage of AP Comp Sci students than at most schools. Mike and I are committed to improving that with our goal being 50%."

Lastly, below are a couple of related resources shared by Chip Rollinson:

• http://www.engadget.com/2015/02/20/jerry-lawson-game-pioneer/
• http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/07/upshot/how-elementary-school-teachers-biases-can-discourage-girls-from-math-and-science.html?ref=topics&_r=0

A few more resources related to the event:

Harvard Gazette: Code Like a Girl

Black Girls Code

Black Girls Code Founder Kimberly Bryant on Inspiring Students to Pursue STEM

Tech Spotlight: Kimberly Bryant, Founder of Black Girls Code

-Megan

6th Grade Technology- September in Review

6th graders have gotten quite a bit done so far this year in technology class.  They have read the "Technology Use Policy" and read and signed the "iPad Rules and Consequences" document.  They have completed their iPad 101 training and set up their iPads for the year, creating a folder for all of their google apps and setting up their BB&N Gmail accounts.  They have also set up a folder for each subject in google drive to organize their 6th grade work.  They have created two private blogs- one for Language Arts, which they have shared with Mrs. Huff, and one for technology, which they have shared with me.  Their technology blog will be used for reflecting on their experiences using the scratch programming environment this year.  Lastly, they have explored the scratch website, created a scratch account, and read the scratch community guidelines.  6th graders will spend the next several weeks learning more about Scratch programming.

Summer Inspiration from HGSE

I took part in two learning opportunities at the Harvard Graduate School of Education this past summer that I would like to share with the BB&N community:

1) I was asked by a professor at the Ed School to help edit their updated Scratch "Creative Computing" Curriculum Guide, a design-based introduction to computational thinking.  Working closely with the Scratch curriculum guide gave me a new perspective on MIT's scratch programming language, particularly the value of reflection in the classroom.  Because of this experience, I have decided to modify my Scratch unit slightly and have my 6th grade students create a scratch design journal this year as well as make it a priority to give them more time in the classroom to think about and talk about their projects with one another.

2) I was extremely fortunate to be able to attend Project Zero's "Future of Learning" conference and while there became aware of their recent "Out of Eden Learn" project to accompany Paul Salopek's travels around the globe.  Learning about the "Out of Eden Learn" project was such an exciting end to my summer, as it brings together a number of experiences that I think are so important for our students in this day and age- students involved in the project are using technology to connect with people around the world, and they are communicating in meaningful ways.  For those of you who are not yet familiar with the "Out of Eden Learn" project, it is a platform created by Harvard Graduate School of Education's Project Zero.  They partner schools with 4-6 other schools throughout the world in what are called "walking parties."  Every two weeks the waking parties take part in "walking steps," together completing six steps.  Along the journey, schools learn about Paul's experiences around the globe as he travels on his "Out of Eden Walk."  Stay tuned to hear more about the walking steps our 5th grade students take this year...

4th graders part of a world wide Scratch project

The first Saturday of each month, there is a meet up at the MIT Media Lab for those local, Boston-area educators who are interested in sharing idea about Scratch.

At a meetup this past winter, I met a teacher who linked to a World Music project page which includes songs from students in many parts of the globe.  This has been a wonderful way to link students from many backgrounds and to help promote world peace.

BB&N 4th grade students learned a song in English and Swahili called, "Together", made a recording and they are now included in the project.  Fly over the world and have the dove descend over Boston and you will find us!

http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/11011006/

Debbie Slade, LS Music

The "Hour of Code" at the Lower School: Programming in the Classroom

In honor of Computer Science Education Week (December 9-15, 2013), the website code.org launched the "Hour of Code" program with the idea that every student in every school should have the opportunity to learn code.  There are several opportunities for our Lower School students to program:

Kindergarten used the BeeBot, a programmable robot, in literacy in January.

In December, 2nd graders completed the first hour of code on the code.org website.  In January and February they did also used the LightBob app and the BeeBot app.  After March break they plan to create math word problems in MIT's Scratch programming environment.

During several technology classes this winter, 4th, 5th, and 6th graders also used the code.org website, creating online accounts so they could continue their progress at home if desired.  4th graders have been learning Scratch as well and are now learning how to use Scratch with the LEGO WeDO kits' sensors and motors.

5th graders will spend their spring trimester in the technology lab learning how to program in LOGO, an educational programming language (in fact, the first programming language for children) originally designed in 1967.

6th graders have been spending a lot of their time in the technology lab exploring the new online Scratch 2.0 programming environment.  They are currently working on programming challenges from the Creative Computing Curriculum Guide, a design-based introduction to computational thinking.

tinkering with teachers

Yesterday I attended a MEMSET (Massachusetts Elementary and Middle School Educational Technologists) meeting at the Kingsley Montessori School in downtown Boston for two hours of "tinkering" along with other BB&N educators Jennifer Levenberg, Carol Fine, and Svetlana Grinshpan and my daughter Hannah.  We all used conductive copper foil tape to make a simple circuit with a battery holder which lit an LED following a video tutorial by Jie Qi from the High-Low Tech MIT Media Lab using a template.  We also discussed the possibility of arduino in the classroom by exploring the SparkFun inventors kit with a peer from the Pike School and looked at Makey-Makeys and how they interact with the Scratch programming environment with educators from the Chestnut Hill School.  If you are interested in exploring tinkering in the classroom, BB&N has Makey-Makeys, pico boards, arduino kits, and raspberry pis to play with.  We also have several books in our library if you would like to read up on engineering and programming.  Below are a few of our titles:

• Invent to Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom by Sylvia Libow Martinez and Gary Stager, Ph.D.
• Super Scratch Programming Adventure by the L.E.A.D project
• Getting Started with Raspberry Pi by Matt Richardson and Shawn Wallace
• Sew Electric: a Collection of DIY Projects that Combine Fabric, Electronics, and Programming by Leah Buechley and Kanjun Qiu
• Encyclopedia of Electronic Components by Charles Platt
• Learn to Program with Scratch by Majed Marji
• and lots of books on programming with LOGO

Talk to an ATS if you are interested!

5th Grade Update- April and May in Review

5th graders have spent the last two months programming in a LOGO environment.  LOGO is an oldie but a goodie.  I used it myself as a 5th grader.  It is a great piece of software for the students to use in the spring because it aligns perfectly with the math unit on geometry.  Students programmed a turtle to move around the screen, drawing pictures, and they used their math knowledge to calculate the interior angles of polygons to draw shapes.  Every class they built on their previous knowledge to learn LOGO commands, write their own commands, introduce variables into their commands, and combine commands to create more complicated commands.  For example, each student taught their turtle how to draw a square by writing their own square command and how to draw a triangle by writing their own triangle command using the following commands that the turtle already knew: repeat, forward, and right.  They then combined their square and triangle commands to teach the turtle how to draw a house.  The final culminating project was getting the turtle to draw a scene related to their science "Project O" field trip.

4th Grade Update- April in Review

4th graders have been particularly excited to come to technology class over the last couple of weeks because we have started using Scratch.  Scratch is a programming environment created by the MIT Media Lab's Lifelong Kindergarten group about 6 years ago.  If your child is really interested in Scratch, it is available for download FREE from the scratch website.  A new beta version of Scratch 2.0 is also available if students want to explore it.

Students have been learning how to use Scratch by completing the Scratch cards provided by MIT.  This week students are also starting to learn how to use the LEGO WeDo kits with Scratch by completing the "Scratch and WeDo Getting Started" activities with partners.  Pretty soon they'll be building LEGO models that can interact with the Scratch programming environment with motors and sensors.

Middle School Students Study Biomimetics

Nice to see our middle school students having an experience like this...
" About ten seventh and eighth grade students from Buckingham, Browne, & Nichols School in Cambridge piled in a van and made their way up to Nahant on one of the rainiest, windiest days imaginable... Yep, that’s right — biomimetic robots... the neurological systems of animals like lobsters and bees, ... robotic systems whose mechanical circuitry mimics the animal’s neurological circuitry. This allows the robots to behave more like real animals capable of dealing with unforeseen circumstances."

Check it out on Northeastern's blog:

http://www.northeastern.edu/insolution/other/2013/04/biomimetics-for-middle-schoolers/

6th Grade Update- January in Review

6th grade students have spent the past month learning how to program in MIT's Scratch programming environment by exploring the software and completing various projects, both self-designed and as outlined in the Scratch Curriculum Guide.

6th Grade- "If You Really Knew Me..." Project Update

Because of Hurricane Sandy, the deadline for the Language Arts Scratch "If You Really Knew Me" project was moved to today.  All final projects will be posted on my Scratch gallery by the end of the day today.  Check them out!

6th Grade- "If you Really Knew Me..." Project

6th graders are starting their Scratch "If You Really Knew Me" projects this week.  After finishing their "The View from Saturday" discussions in Language Arts class, they had a challenge day where they shared  stories about themselves as a way to get to know each other better and build community.  As a follow-up to their class discussions, students are now creating Scratch projects about themselves in Technology class.  The projects include a background, a narrative which will be recorded, and an avatar, a virtual version of themselves.  The final projects will be posted on one of my scratch website galleries so students can view each other's projects before departing for Hulbert.

Is Your Child Interested in Programming?

If your child is interested in programming, check out this book I just bought: Super Scratch Programming Adventure!  The comic book is a great way to introduce kids to programming, as it teaches them fundamental programming concepts while they create their own games.  The book takes kids on an adventure, teaching them Scratch programming along the way.  The website for the book also includes downloadable resources such as sample Scratch projects that the kids can play.

6th Grade Scratch in the Classroom

6th Grade students are starting to use MIT's programming environment called Scratch.  Their first assignment will begin when they finish reading and discussing "The View From Saturday" in Language Arts class.  They are learning how to use the software by completing the Scratch Cards and several mini projects.

Update on LEGO WeDo at the Lower School

4th grade students just completed their second LEGO WeDo creation and are beginning their third model. Students built and programmed a mechanical lion that makes sounds and is motorized to lift and lower its front legs as if it is sitting up and lying down. They “trained” their lions to sit up and roar, then lie down and snore when they threw it a “bone” made with a tilt sensor. Now the students are in the process of building a mechanical bird that makes sounds which are activated by manually tilting the bird up and down to lift and lower its head and flap its wings.
(The looks of surprise captured on the children's faces in the photograph above are due to the lion's head popping off as the students were trying to figure out the correct motor power and number of rotations required to make the lion sit up properly.)

-Megan Haddadi