I plan on relating this topic to video games, film and television, and other topics that revolve around design, data, and modeling. I think a cool thing to use would be programs that can translate data (scientific data) into a variety of ways, such as weather tracking.
I think that this is one of the most accessible lessons for students to relate personally to computer science. Games, videos, CGI movies, avatars, maker-bots; just a few of the outcomes of digital design that are a large part of you people’s interest. But making digital images that are beyond rudimentary, students gain a first-hand connection to the digital graphic world they live in and can expose on a personal level the expansive nature of the computer sciences
I plan on using Photoshop, PowerPoint, Excel Graphs…
I’m using Gimp instead of Photoshop. Gimp is free, and has nearly all the same functionality that Photoshop does. This lesson relaites very well to the idea of how a computer monitor handles an image. Each point in the matrix is a location that can be handled just like a coordinate plane. This lesson can be used to help the kids understand how photo images are stored.
Personally, I am completely dumbfounded by this lesson. Due to time constraints to complete this PD, I will not have time to continue research over the Labor Day weekend. I am leaning to just focusing in on the Photoshop tutorial for this U1 Days 11-14 and the videos. This would result in the objective of Identifying Mathematical Connections in the output of the tools not being met and some of the higher level learning implemented in the lesson being missed. I need to do a lot more research on this to make it work.
This is going to be a very hard lesson to keep the kids enganged in. The design process is tedious and I had a difficult time keeping myself interested. I chose the easiest pattern and got sick of doing the design anyway. I will try to keep the kids going by telling them to imagine how hard it was to do this one bead at a time without the triangle, line, and rectangle iteration options.
I would go through the lesson and luckily, my school has Photoshop. I will then show the videos and have a discussion on how CS is incorporated in virtual design. If I am lucky, I might be able to get a couple of my friends who work for Blizzard (World of Warcraft) to talk a little bit of what they do and the importance of CS in their daily lives.
Hi mjmullin
Is there something I can do to help clarify things for you? What are you most stuck on?
-Dani
I would explain how it correlates. Students will have an opportunity to explore the internet for alternative ways to create pictures.
To peak student interest into Computer Science, I will let them view and play with programs that my former students created in Alice and Scratch. Additionally, I will have them learn JavaScript and Html. This way they will see that if you have an interest and/or dream you can fulfill it with knowledge gained in the field of Computer Science.
I plan to relate this lesson to computer science by encouraging students to look at information through visual representation and design as well as 0’s and 1’s. I think integrating Autodesk in this lesson will keep students engaged by allowing them to design their own product. Students can also create maps and other Infographic presentations that reinforces concepts from the prior lesson.
I like the idea of being able to relate this example back to a reproducible pattern that can be shifted by changing starting parameters. Changes in input can give back different results.
Not sure I will be able to implement this lesson. I am supporting about 20 different school districts using distance education. I will look into what used to be Google Sketchup to see what the educational options are for licensing the Sketchup product now. In the past this would have been a good tool, easy to use, highly engaging for students, and free. Now I do not know about the cost.
As someone already suggested, I might try using Gimp instead of Photoshop as well to help students connect math to images.
I plan to relate the beading problems to the iteration process in programming. Identify where the patterns are and how they can be repeated to reduce the number of lines of code necessary to do the same thing. I think the graphing will help them understand the adjustments that need to be made in the code with respect to x and y axes.
1 Like
How do you plan to relate this lesson to Computer Science and keep your students excited about the concepts?
I plan to use all the sources provided, and allow the student groups to choose one of the animation out of the three choices. The Avatar video and the 3D rendering will surely attract their attention. (I will need to edit the avatar video to its most useful bits, since it is a bit long)
What other resources might you use in the lesson (for example, if you don’t have access to photoshop, what kind of tools could you used)?
I plan to also use Google Sketchup ( http://www.sketchup.com/learn) as a long term project to create a virtual 3D model of our school floor (we occupy the third floor). They would have to go and measure the halls, (height, length, with) rooms and angles to renderer their 3D models as accurate as possible. The cool thing about sketup app is that they can add to the model, as they get better.
Below you may find my beads. I loved the connection to math.
The three cultural design activities are wonderfully interactive ways for students to learn about data. I am fortunate to have Photoshop available for all of my students however I’m not sure if I would have them use it at this point in the curriculum. They could easily crop and save their screenshot in preview. I think Photoshop would be more valuable in enhancing later unit such as web design.
After having the students watch the video on Avatar I will be able to have a discussion about the relationship between Computer Science and images/graphics. My students have done a lesson on animating their name and they were extremely . Code.org has several tutorials. In addition the resources listed for this lesson will be helpful to use with the students.
