This week we started teaching our HCI course! On Sunday I went with Sarita to the orientation for the students and parents we will be working with. I collected consent forms and talked to some parents about our research. There seemed to be a lot of people interested in our work so it was really fun to talk to everyone and tell them about what we are doing. Then on Monday morning I printed out extra surveys and consent forms and made packets of them for students who had forgotten them. Then Taneshia and I went to the school Monday afternoon for the class.
During the class I sat in the back observing and taking notes, Taneshia video taped the class, and Sarita assisted with teaching the class. We did a series of "Technology Time Trials" with the students, which they all enjoyed very much. We put the students in groups and put 3 cell phones at the front of the room. Each team selected one person to run up to the front of the room and the task was to turn on the cell phone and call Sarita, whose number was written on the board. The students were very excited about this and had a really fun time doing it, I had a really fun time watching it. After class, I went home and typed up all of my notes from the class
On Tuesday I worked on creating formalized lesson plans for the rest of the classes, you can see the ones I have finished on the Syllabus page of our wiki. This turned out to be a more difficult task than I had originally anticipated because as hard as I tried to base it off of the syllabus that I wrote during my first week of work, it just wouldn't fit. I had to cut out a lot of the content because there wasn't enough time to go over it all, and high school students just won't sit through a lecture. It was also difficult to come up with fun activities for each day. I made sure to put in something each day where the students can get up out of their seats and move around the classroom.
On Wednesday morning I was hosting a friend from out of town, so we went out around the city for a while. We walked through Olympic Park and went to the aquarium. The aquarium was really cool; they had beluga whales, which were my favorite part. Sadly, I did not get any good pictures of the beluga whales. It was really cool to see all of the animals and fish there because I always forget how many different kinds of creatures live in the water since you don't see them every day.
Then on Wednesday afternoon, we taught our second class, for most of the class I sat in the back and observed. The major activity for the day was to go around the school and use digital cameras to take pictures of things that related to the digital desktops that the students will be designing through out the summer. So we put the students into groups and walked around the school with them while they took their pictures. After class on Wednesday I went home and wrote up my notes from the class.
On Thursday morning I added some more things into my notes that I had forgotten to put in initially. For the rest of Thursday and on Friday I worked on creating more of the formalized lesson plans for the next two weeks of our course. Throughout those two days, the lesson plans changed a lot based on what we want to get out of it for out research. For next Monday we decided to have a 15 minute interview with each team of students to find out what career interests they have and what they think about the course so far. Two teams will be in the classroom looking at pictures they took in class the previous Wednesday, then writing about how those pictures relate to their digital desktop project. The other two teams will be doing interviews with Taneshia and me.
On Friday Sarita and I printed out the pictures that the students had taken in class and put them onto big pieces of poster paper. I also made some fliers for the students to put in their design logs. The fliers were about different technologies that have touch screens that they may encounter in their daily life. The fliers had information and pictures of the technology and implored the students to think about how they would design a similar technology. And that is what I did this week (in a nutshell) I hope you enjoyed reading; tune in again next week to Pam's weekly journal!
Week 1
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Week 2
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Week 3
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Week 4
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Week 5
Week 6
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Week 7
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Week 8
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Week 9
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Week 10