I had the greatest struggle with the model I created to simulate the spread of disease. There were certain things I wanted to incorporate in my model that I couldn’t figure out the code for. While it was very challenging there wasn’t a time I can remember that I wanted to quit. I just wanted to finally get it to work. I certainly took breaks from it. It was frustrating at times when I just didn’t have the understanding or skill to make the simulation do what I wanted it to do.
My greatest challenge is setting up a working graph. This is something I still need to work on. I know how to place the graph, but my challenge is setting up the code correctly so the graph updates the information correctly. This is something I plan to continue to work on so I can teach my students.
The most challenging thing for me was getting the agents to do what I wanted them to do. Choosing the correct coding and then inserting them in the correct places and the correct orders.
The thing that challenged me most during the PD was the “Water as a shared resource”. During this module my partner and I had to get the water to drain through the ground. We felt like we were doing really well but some of the simulations just wouldn’t work. It ended up being that specific colors wouldn’t work, so the whole time we were doing it right. With that said, the glitch made us go back continuously and check our blocks to find the mistake. After looking everything over, again and again, the whole thing really started to make sense. At first, I was really wanting to conquer the module, but after failing so many times, I just wanted to be done! I’m afraid that my students will feel the same way if they get stuck.
Like others are saying, when we worked on modeling our scenario after looking at the epidemic model. It was very frustrating as we were having network issues. As a group we worked on one computer so I didn’t feel like I fully understood what we were doing/manipulating during the modules. I also would have liked to work with the same person over the 3 days as I felt like I would have made more progress since we worked so well together and few off each other.
For some reason I did not get the beginning of phase 1 e-mailed to me, so I was lost on the first day. I felt like I was playing catch-up on both day 1 and day 2. I rarely had time to complete an activity, so it was difficult to apply that knowledge to the next activity. I was frustrated with the forced Pair strategy…love working with others. I am not a visual learner, so watching my partner didn’t help me. I am still lost at the skills my partner did.
Biggest challenge was getting the lions to prey on the rabbits,
I thought it would have been helpful to have reviewed the first half of the first morning-the general vocabulary, the drawers and how to connect the pieces. I was frustrated that the color coded sheet was color coded on the program so that seemed to take a long time and I worry about my 7th graders getting frustrated at this part.
I understood the programming fairly quickly, but what challenged me the most was figuring out how to make a predator “sniff out” their prey and head toward it instead of continuing to move randomly around the world. Attempting to make a simulation as realistic as possible is important - and then having students determine what is not realistic about the model is also important.
I was determined to work through the issue until it worked properly, but I know some students will become frustrated and just want the “right” answer. I think that is why paired programming is beneficial. I also like the fact that there is not always one right answer in programming depending on how the problem is approached.
I was most challenged with determining where to place blocks to either get turtles to act the way I wanted them or to get graphs to chart the information I wanted recorded. To me, I find taking my experiment design on paper, at times, hard to convert to code. Specifically, when trying to program collisions I have had difficulty getting them correct. I found myself setting the coding aside to go back over my design to check for flaws.
I felt most challenged by the vocabulary.
What challenged me the most was the final model in which my subject was Chemistry. Trying to get the simulation to mimic a real word disease was challenging but I found it helped me understand both chemistry and coding better because you began to recognize the limitations of the simulation and had to discuss similarities and differences of the two. This caused myself and my partner to engage in high yield strategies for learning that our students would really gain from.
Module 3 was the most challenging since many of the turtle behaviors were pre-fabricated and we did not necessarily understand the logic behind the code.Being able to add our own predator and change the interactions was interesting. Having a partner kept me from throwing in the towel when I felt frustrated. I think it will be less stressful for students because they will be tackling the problem for 45 minutes of their school day rather for 7 hours like we did. My brain got pretty tired by 3 pm. 
The most challenging aspect of the PD was in completing the enhancements to our models. The basic tasks and tweaks were made easily, so my partners and I would add on to the code to make the model even more detailed. This added amount of code was a little frustrating because when something didn’t work as expected, it was hard to figure out what place we went wrong. It was challenging and it did make we want to conquer it.
Understanding some of the coding sequence and where to place it.
The most challenging thing for me was to make the disease transmission realistic. If you contract a disease, there is a period where you are contagious but do not present symptoms of the disease. I could not figure out how to incorporate this into the simulation.
The most challenging aspect for me was trying to trouble-shoot my coding as well as others. From prior programming experience, I have learned more about the program from trouble-shooting rather than learning the program to begin with. Knowing tricks of trouble-shooting will really be beneficial when working with students. One tip I learned from the instructor was to make small changes to the program and check to see if it works rather than adding a lot of code all at once. I spent a long time trying to find a small mistake that I made. By adding a little bit of code at a time, I would have caught my mistake quicker.
I agree that figuring out which blocks to use took some getting used to. It helped when we were given the paper with all the different drawers and blocks on it. I found that partner programming came in handy when two people were trying to figure out which drawers to use for which blocks rather than one person searching.
In the beginning of module 3 I was feeling confident but I soon began to struggle. My population of predators multiplied exponentially covering my entire terrain and it would cause my program to stop working. It was very frustrating trying to figure out the cause but after some assistance I learned that one step of the directions were causing the extreme population growth.I believe using the partner system was extremely helpful because my partner was able to see the mistake. I think this system will also work well in the classroom.
Thinking back to my PD experience and evaluating some of the challenges, I had the most challenges with the actual module I choose. Because I wanted such an intricate model that expressed a real life scenario, it was difficult to code some of the directions i wanted the agent to follow.