I'm behind in my blogging. That's all my own doing though. I have set the pace for my students, but I am allowing them to make mistakes. The main mistake is not paying attention to their time management. I am letting the pressure of the closing semester and their parents hammering on them be the punishment. I am not using grades as a disciple tool. See my blog post in the STEM Toolkit Blog for more on that.
Anyway, I have been doing a lot of going back and assessing old assignments and fixing the grade book and such. It is keeping me busy. But, I believe it is right. Anyway, enough about that. Here is where we are at right now. We are about halfway through Unit 2. Things are getting hard. Interestingly enough, my students thought they were being creative and it is starting to catch up with them. You see, I have all of the assignments in Schoology. They turn them in and I assess from there. I don't check every page of the labs. Only some key pages. to catch up since they are behind, many of the students are only doing the pages I am checking online. When we got to Unit 2 Lesson 3, I started checking the actual code on their computer. I also asked some questions and looked at other pages. I am still not requiring them to do everything, but I am asking about it and pointing things out. 2.3 gets into structs (structures) and making custom types. I had them turn in a screenshot of page 10. But they had to have the lab checked by me in person. Pretty much from here out, they have to talk to me. I have questions and want to be able to help them with small things. Page 10 deals with static variables and static functions. It creates great conversations that are better held in small groups or individually. I also flip over to page 7 and look at the property observers. Most of the students haven't done it. I have been making sure that everyone is aware that I am not going to count off or require them to do it, but... I did point out how property observers are part of good coding and makes their lives easier. The last several days have been a succession of 1-on-1 conversations as they work to understand it. I love it. They are on their way to becoming self-motivated learners. It is keeping me busy, but that's the way I designed it.
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We did the Unit 1 guided project, Light, today. I had a blast. The students did as well. Several are working to get it on their phone. I am making them work through how to do it on their own. The goal is that they get familiar with looking up developer things like that. If they are going to take the initiative here, then they are more likely to make their own app and see it through to the end.
As always, I brought up a student to "drive". I was able to move around the room and help out people who needed it. The first thing that way too many people needed was for me to read their code and figure out where they messed up in typing it. They were trying to be too lazy to even look at the iBook guide. That didn't last long. I showed them all how to use the multiple desktops and move between them to make it easier to look at both the book and Xcode. Sadly, most of them had previously turned in their school iPad and it is biting them back now. The consistent errors by students were:
All of these gave us great opportunities to work on our debugging skills. When they came up, I worked with the student who was stumped to learn what the editor was telling them. Then I had my student at the presentation station recreate the error. We went through how to read and understand what they were looking at and why. I was really excited because my 6th period class wanted to try some things out along they way. They wanted the app to start out black instead of white. This led us to great discussions. It also gave me the opportunity to point out how they can change up the projects as they wish as long as they demonstrate the core concepts the project or lab is getting at. I'm all for them doing things differently as long as they learn it and can explain it. |
About this blog pageThis is my blog covering the activities and results from my work teaching App Dev with Swift. Archives
February 2021
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