One of the most interesting conversations I had during the #gettingUnstuck event last summer was about the idea of combining art and coding to give projects a unique aesthetic. The teachers participating in the conversation lamented the fact that most teachers, when working with students on a coding project, focus on very serious stuff. Even when we add that little extra A to STEM and make it STEAM, the “art” part is secondary and expendable.

If this pushing aside of art has been true all along, how much worse is it during the pandemic? I can’t help but think…

One of my favorite reasons for working in Scratch is that I can see, very clearly, how my code works. I see immediate results and can iterate based on what I see. That makes following my “what if…?” ideas easy and usually leads to even more learning and discovery. Designing activities that encourage these explorations helps students further their understanding of computational thinking concepts and practices. Here is a fun Scratch art project I created recently that teachers could use with their students, whether they are meeting in person or remotely. It’s a project that could be used in an…

Sometimes using the wrong search terms takes us on interesting journeys. Today, while looking for research on note-taking and fMRI results, I landed on this post on the BrainFacts website. The TL;DR version of the BrainFacts post: reading comprehension on screens is inferior to reading comprehension on paper because “research.” Of course, as a technology advocate and someone who has read pretty much exclusively on screens for the past decade or so, I had to dig deeper. TL;DR version of my take: Please don’t believe everything you read, even if it is on a .org website.

Reading is very different…

Do you ever see something and can’t leave it alone until you figure out how it was made? It happens to me often. In fact, it happened just the other day. I’ve made a ‘spirograph’ application on Scratch, and I was looking at how other Scratchers have coded similar projects. I ran across one in particular that had a beautiful introductory scene. I watched it a few times from the project page before looking behind the scenes in the code.

The animation is composed of layers. The top layer is white rectangle that has cutout letters on it. The bottom…

What happens when you take one step, turn one degree, take one step, turn one degree, and continue doing that a total of 360 times? You will walk in a circle — or more accurately, you’ll walk along a 360-sided shape with each side measuring one step. You can split this shape into 360 congruent triangles with internal angles measuring 1º at the pointy centers and 89.5º at the corners on each side of your foot.

This may not be news to you, and you may have an easy time understanding this description and imagining the process and shapes I’m…

I have written about the dangers of social media in education before, how trying to create “Twitter-worthy” lesson plans can lead teachers down a dangerous path of providing a veneer of learning designed primarily to look good in pictures. Back then, I focused on what happened in the classrooms around me, with students in attendance. Some teachers trying to impress administrators, or to get hired at a different district, often engaged in this kind of behavior at my former school division. It was annoying, and it encouraged the same kind of questionable praxis from teachers who might have otherwise stuck…

Yesterday I took a picture of a carpenter bee with some gooey stuff stuck to its face. The bee did not look well. It was moving slowly and trying very hard to dislodge the stuff which seemed to be keeping it from feeding properly. I looked online for what might have been wrong with the bee, and then I reached out to the one person I knew about who worked at the intersection of insects and fungi.

It is important to say I don’t really know Dr. Matt Kasson. I know of his work, but we’ve never met. I ran…