After School 20-21 Jordan Knecht (In School)

Teacher Name: Mrs. Netter & Ms. Lewis

Teaching Artist Name: Jordan Knecht

Big Idea: Building Blocks

Inquiry Question: What can we create with the basic building blocks of technology? How can we use building blocks to create our own digital worlds. 

Openness: 

Standards and how we engaged them:

MP.2 Reason abstractly and quantitatively.

MP.1 Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them In all of our activities, students were provided with the basic tools and presented a challenge, but were not given any pre-determined solutions. Students were able to find and implement their own solutions in a wide variety of manners. 

3.MD.6 Measure areas by counting unit squares (square cm, square m, square in, square ft, and improvised units).

Our use of grids (arrays) in pixel art gave students the opportunity to count units. For example, students would be asked to make a 32x32 pixel grid and were asked 

Arts

Anchor Standard 1: Generate and conceptualize artistic ideas and work. Students were constantly being asked to create their own works, starting with a concept which was provided by our challenges (prompts). 

Anchor Standard 2: Organize and develop artistic ideas and work. Often, we would continue projects over the course of multiple days, allowing students to develop their ideas. Other times, we would change up projects each day while using the same computer programs, so that students could deepen their engagement with the programs.

*Anchor Standard 4: (Elementary) Select, analyze, and interpret artistic work for presentation. Each class, students took turns sharing their works, providing complements and questions to each presenter. We also responded to different music in class by creating our own visuals to accompany what we heard. This activity allowed students not only to respond to visual work in writing or speech, but to create visual work in response to what they heard. Other times, students were asked to create new visual work inspired by other visual work.

Anchor Standard 6: Convey meaning through the presentation of artistic work. In our interpretation and analysis of other works, students also strengthened their ability to convey their own meaning. This was assessed each time students presented for the class. 

Anchor Standard 7: Perceive and analyze artistic work. This feels like an extension of Standard 5.

Anchor Standard 10: Synthesize and relate knowledge and personal experiences to make art. Through personal storytelling, students were able to relate their own personal experiences and knowledge to the work they were perceiving or creating. 

Anchor Standard 11: (Middle & High School) Relate artistic ideas and works with societal, cultural, and historical context to deepen understanding.

PK-5 Works reflecting everyday values, family, friends & community. Very often, students were making work about these topics, sharing with the class, and receiving reflections from peers and teachers. 

PK-5 Use experience & external resources to distill meaning & purpose. Through sharing music and art, students experienced a wide range of input. 

Building Blocks

The aim of our program was not to create polished finished products. It was apparent very early on that students could use a break from their rigorous schedules. In response, we pivoted, focusing on communing as a group, cultural exchange, and providing as wide a smattering of experience with different modes of creativity as possible. These different modes of creativity were our building blocks. Our building blocks were the tools (computer programs and technologies) we used to explore drawing, music, writing, storytelling, technology, as well as many other things.

Structure

The in-class format provided a unique structure for teaching, since classes switched over every six weeks. We worked with grades K-4 during our time in-school. Unlike after school, which continues for the entire year, the challenge was not elongating attention over an expanded duration, but instead was how to make meaningful contact within a short period of time. Our curriculum was very similar, but in many ways was accelerated. Students might only have one or two class periods with a particular computer program. With that said, it was incredible to see how students reacted so positively to an alternative style of learning during their school day. The culture of our class was much less hierarchical and more lateral. We often voted on what we'd like to do and had open discussions. 

Each new class group began relatively the same, but diverged from the common starting place, based on needs and interests of the class. 

We started out by studying the most basic elements of on a computer - the pixel. In order to become acquainted with the Pixil Art computer program, we gamified our learning. This began with a pre-existing game called Brain Spin. We presented scanned Brain Spin cards and students were given a time limit for submitting guesses of what the image could be. The main point of this game was to introduce students to a new paradigm of education in which inquiry, experimentation, and exploration are valued. This game champions open creativity, rather than "right or wrong" answers. It also facilitated neural pathways between the right and left hemispheres of the brain as students were asked to translate visual stimulus into writing. 

Our classroom connected one day by serendipitously sharing backgrounds and going into outerspace together. During this class, we ended up completely scrapping the original plan and taking a trip into outerspace on Google Earth, eventually, floating down to New Sullivan and taking a trip down the road to Rainbow Beach.

Building Connection (The Chat)

The chatbox in our Google Classroom played a very important role for our classes. Students were able to expel fleeting thoughts that would have otherwise been distractions, work out disagreements, share links, and ask questions. Many students who are not regularly vocal would be very active in the chat, providing deeply valued input that would have otherwise not been shared in an in-person class. 

Often, through the chatbox, we would witness writing abilities far beyond what would be expected at a certain grade level. Many times, even first grade students would be writing in full complex sentences. 

Building Connection (Songs)

Another commonality amongst all of are classes was that every single class began and ended with a song chosen by a student. This created a culture of mutual respect in which everyone had to take turns hearing music that they may or may not like. This also meant everyone got to have the spotlight in a completely non-academic context that they felt connected to. Very often, the songs students chose would inform the trajectory of our exploration for the remainder of class. 

Jordan kept a written order of who would share songs on what day. Students would regularly remember their specific day for weeks in advance and excitedly wait their turn. This engagement also gave students an additional reason to be excited to show up to class. 

When each class began and ended with students getting to share their own personal interests, it became much easier for them to feel comfortable sharing their frustrations, failures, mistakes, and successes with the class while engaging with new academic territory. 

Our songs also allowed us time to get some energy out - to dance, jump around, wiggle our bodies before sitting in front of a computer in concentration for nearly an hour. 

Chicken Wing Beat was an all time favorite across the board. It was the common denominator amongst all ages. 

Pixel Art

https://www.pixilart.com/draw

We introduced digital art by starting with the most basic elements of on a computer - the pixel. In order to become acquainted with the Pixil Art computer program, we gamified our learning. As mentioned above, Brain Spin was a great way to break the ice, having students make their own "incomplete" images to use in the game.

Pixel Art (Challenges)

https://www.pixilart.com/draw

As students became more comfortable with Pixel Art, we created different time-based challenges. Sometimes, we would look at emojis, talk about how they relate to feelings, and then try to make our own. Sometimes there would be limitations such as constraining dimensions to a 32x32 pixel canvas (which is relatively very small and limiting). Students would often suggest challenges, such as making a Bratz self-portrait or making their favorite animal. Eventually, students began not only choosing subject matter, but also defining size & time constraints.

At the end of any challenge, we would take turns sharing not only finished works, but process of how they were created so that students could see how each other worked differently within the same program. Often, while presenting, students would find out that they had used a tool or technique that no one else knew about and get to teach the entire class. 

Students riff off of each other as they explore abstraction using pixel art without any prompting from the teachers.

Emojis

We used emojis to talk about iconography and feelings. We talked about how simple images could encapsulate complex ideas. As mentioned above, students designed their own emojis on PixilArt. Below, students wrote their own stories in the chatbox using emojis. After the stories were done, students took turns guessing what the stories were. Students would unmute themselves and tell the story of what they saw out loud. 

We used the website EmojiCopy to easily copy and paste stories into our chatbox.

Storyboards/ Comics

https://www.storyboardthat.com/storyboard-creator

Our emoji stories generated an incredible amount of content. Even though there had been no writing in English, students ended up "writing" countless stories through emojis and their own interpretations. We used these stories as a basis for storyboards/ comics using the online storyboard creator, Storyboard That.

By providing a large selection of customizable images, this computer program freed students from having to create their own images. This allowed students to focus on telling stories without having to worry about whether or not they were good at drawing. It provided another opportunity for expression.

Block Coding

https://studio.code.org/s/dance-2019/lessons/1/levels/1

https://studio.code.org/hoc/1

Another way we explored blocks was through Block Coding. Again, we gamified this learning experience by presenting this new form of computational logic as dance challenges or mazes including characters they liked. This brief introduction was a way to expose students to the potential of getting into computer coding. As was expected, many students didn't particularly enjoy this, but those who did ended up spending their free time outside of class exploring coding in more depth.

Beep Box

https://www.beepbox.co/

We expanded experience with pixels and arrays into the temporal realm, exploring music making together, using the program BeepBox. BeepBox is a free online music sequencer, which allows users to fill in different blocks in order to trigger sounds. Students were able to draw complex sequences and play them out in song form.

3D Pixel Art

https://www.3dslash.net/

As an extension of our work with two-dimensional pixel art, we also moved into three-dimensional territory with the program 3D Slash. In the example below, students were challenged to design and build three-dimensional houses either by accumulating or removing colored blocks. As always, students shared work in progress, as well as finished works. In all of the sharing, new tools and techniques were discovered and students were given the opportunity to teach the class. 

Building Blocks of the Screen

The blocks that we appeared in on screen were very important to us. Each was an insight into our own personal space and provided a platform for each person to share a part of themselves with the class. On some occasions, students did not have computer or tablets, so our digital arts projects would become entirely physical, utilizing the tools students had at home, whether they were paper and pencil or simply perception (hearing, seeing, feeling, etc.). Sometimes students weren't able to access particular websites or programs we were trying to use. Openness was key to moving forward in positive ways. Whenever we hit roadblocks, we just pivoted and continued. It was only reasonable that if we were asking students to be creative problem solvers that we, as educators, practiced what we preached. Below, you can see many times when students used their non-digital resources at home or in class to still explore the building blocks of digital arts.

Building Books

At the end of the year in one of Mrs. Netter's first-grade classrooms where most students did not have access to personal computers or tablets, we ended up pivoting entirely and working exclusively with physical media. After weeks of different drawing exercises, we compounded the work into a more complex form - books. Students were taught how to fold paper and stack it together to make their own books. We talked as a group about what books consisted of and what they contained. Students provided all of the elements without being given the answers from any teachers.