Ayesha

Papert's article talked about computer science as a grade school subject. He proposed to create an environment in which the child will become highly involved in experiences of a kind to provide rich soil for the growth of intuitions  and concepts for dealing with thinking, learning, playing etc. An example that he mentioned was writing simple heuristic programs that play games of strategy  or try to outguess a child playing tag with a computer controlled turtle.  Papert also spoke about a programming language called LOGO, which he used to teach children of most ages and levels of academic performance how to use the computer. How it works is that the student will sit at a console and will give instructions to the machine and immediately get a reaction. An experiment was done with 7th graders where after three months, they could write programs to play games  and later on also worked on programs to generate random sentences. Even later, they went on to ma...

 This week, I worked on adding certain challenges to the original python code that I created. I worked to expand my current python code skillset to include functions and randomness. Using the resources provided by my professor, I was able to expand my python code.  I started by trying to create randomness by drawing a circle using different integers which changes the size of the circle every time I run it. So instead of the circle coming out from the same spot every time, it would come out from different areas and allow the circle to be different sizes. I set the range for the random integers to be between 1 and 10. I did not want to go any larger as it made the pattern too big and go out of the screen space. I also changed the loop from instead of 12 iterations to be 6 iterations to fit the space. This would mean it would only repeat the process 6 times instead of 12. In addition, I tried to create a function that stores value of the random integer in x and y. I then printed ...

Welcome back to my technology blog! This week's assignment was a little overwhelming as I was unable to attend the class for it. However, I did not let this bring me down. I watched the recorded lecture and began to explore Python. I went into it with an open mind, although my fumbles with TurtleBlocks was still in the back of my mind. Watching the lecture recording helped me get started. I was able to play around and write the code for a square etc. The Replit library was a literal vault! It had so many different codes to choose from. I started to think of what kind of project I could create that could "wow" the class, as requested by my professor. Thinking of shapes, I remembered this incredible and innovative museum I visited a few weeks ago in NYC. It's called "The Artechouse." It is an art space dedicated to showcasing experimental and technology driven art installations and live audio-visual performances. The visuals were absolutely amazing and mind-bl...

Whew! Where do I start?! I will honestly admit that this week's tech assignment was a very challenging one. I know I had no prior knowledge of coding before this class, but I did not expect it to be this difficult. When our professor first introduced TurtleBlocks to the class, it seemed daunting, but I actually did catch on to the tasks we were instructed to do. As our assignment for this week, which was to write the code for our name in TurtleBlocks, was announced, I was a little scared. Little did I know that fear would turn into apprehension and frustration. When I started trying to work on the assignment, I felt optimistic. I began playing around with the few blocks that I was familiar with. To my disadvantage, I did not know how to use majority of the blocks. I tried using forward, right, backward, and left, but I just could not get the sequence right. I attempted this several times with no relief. This was it, I thought. I will just tell my professor that I tried but I was u...

Welcome back to my fun technology blog! Today I worked on creating a fun learning activity for my future students! Since I will be teaching Biology, I thought it would be a great idea to stick to the Animal Kingdom idea that we went over during last class. Please enjoy my design of a Data/Data Visualization Learning Activity! Name of Activity: Animal Kingdom Classifications Grade Level(s) targeted: 10th grade Content Area(s) targeted: Biology Learning Objectives: Students will learn about the many different classifications of animals. They will understand that each animal belongs to a Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, and Family. They will use RawGraphs to visualize this and organize the graph. They will have the opportunity to play around with the data set and have it cater to how they want to see it. Describe the activity: Students will navigate onto RawGraphs. They will load in the data that I will provide to them. Working in groups of 2 or 3, students will work together to create a da...

 To continue on from my previous post, I further explored visualizing data and data sets with another platform called RawGraphs. For some reason, this seemed to have a bit of a more modern twist to it. I have to do some research and find out what year each site was created--I will get back to you all on that! So because I will be getting my certification to teach Biology for grades 5-12 (hopefully!) I was drawn into choosing the sample data set of the Animal Kingdom Classifications. This was a much smaller data set compared to my previous one of top 1000 IMDB movies. That's 1000 versus this one had 65 rows. It's funny because I thought 65 would be much easier to work with and visualize, however towards the end, my graph still looked very crowded to me.  In RawGraphs, I noticed there were A LOT more options for chart types. Some of them I had never even heard of. From dendrograms to sunburst, there is a chart type for every preference! I think this is cool because if someone ha...

This week, I spent some more time playing around with data. I chose to stick with the data set I used in my previous blog post. This will help give a better comparison and understanding.  First, I began exploring with DataWrapper. To me, this felt like a place where I could expand my data from GoogleSheets. I simply copied and pasted my GoogleSheets share link into DataWrapper, and all of my data transferred seamlessly. After reviewing all of my data was correct, I chose a chart type for my data. I actually had quite some fun with this exploring all of the different chart types and how it made my data look. I will mention that at certain points, the website froze, and kept giving me a "Form Resubmission" popup. This happened a few times. I assumed this was because my data set was very large, literally 1000 movies and all of their details! I ended up choosing a scatterplot. This is because I like how the data was spread out and represented more clearly than other chart types. ...