Think back to your in-person PD experience. What challenged you the most? It may have been a module that you liked quite a bit, but it may have been one that you didn’t understand as well. What about it did you find challenging? Did you want to set it aside and move on to something else, or did you want to conquer it?
When we came up with our own scenarios that mimicked the spread of disease model I had the most trouble. I knew what I wanted to do but didn’t feel like I had a full grasp over all of the blocks and ways to use them. It took a lot of swapping places with my partner or just looking at a piece of paper and trying to draw what we wanted to happen then go back to the computer screen to see if we could find our error or omission.
I enjoyed the summer PD in Columbus, OH, but had problems with my laptop.
I felt Day 1 was informative, Day 2 was my most productive day, and Day 3 left me feeling inadequate because of browser (Safari & Firefox) inefficiencies.
I think learning what to development an experimental design that uses models to conduct experiments will be very challenging. And the results will be very rewarding to my students and me.
Honestly the most challenging thing for me was to continuing finding ways to modify or tweak what I was doing. There were some others in our group that needed more time in areas that I didn’t need time in so finding ways to edit and change things to keep learning at my pace was the most challenging.
The most frustrating part was figuring out what block was what color. I was given a cheat sheet, but if the drop down menu was colored coded also, that would help. Figuring how to put the blocks together was challenging. Simply taking a block out of a loop makes a world of difference, but figuring that out can take a while. 90% of the time I persevered, but when it came to trying to alter the chemical experiment, I got so far and then let my group take over.
The most challenging part of the training was not using starlogo nova, but the paired programming. When I am learning something new, I need hands on experience. It was very frustrating for me to sit and watch someone else move blocks. I wanted to move at my own pace and experiment on my own.
Day two was the most challenging and frustrating to me. We started with programs that we made the previous day, but with new partners who didn’t make the same programs. We tried to manipulate one of our programs to fit our spread of disease model, but discovered it would have been easier to just start fresh.
The biggest challenge was the detailed problem solving. I stared at the screen for the longest time and found that my error that was clogging up the entire works was based on a semantic error. I wish I knew what each block meant better so I could problem solve when students hit walls like I did. That left a real sense of teacher fear - what do I do when I really have no clue?
I guess understanding the sequence on how to develop the program. Computational thinking.
I was moving along well when I had technical difficulties and the work I had done did not save. It was a bit frustrating to start over when everyone else was moving along. Took a breath and continued on.
Hmmm…most challenging??? I would definitely have to say that it was when we were working on installing a second pump in the Water module. We had all of the code done correctly, but it wouldn’t work! We kept playing around with it and on a whim decided to change the color of the tip…and IT WORKED!!! Now we know…pink and orange will not work, but other colors do!
The most challenging part was to get the predators so that they didn’t over produce and kill all of the rabbits and wipe them out. I ended up putting in an “add predator” button that helped me to control when the predator entered the scene. I made it harder for the predators to reproduce and made the grass, rabbits and predators spread out very wide when they reproduced because clumping seemed to cause extinction.
My largest challenge was not understanding the logic behind the pages and drawers. Once I had that I was able to move forward, but very slowly because I was trying to match the picture’s color to the appropriate drawers as I was writing the commands. I was determined to conquer this, but it took time!
Working on the spreading of the disease was a challenging model. My partner and I had ideas but didn’t really know how to implement them into the model. We needed more direction from our instructors to understand which blocks and how they worked to create our model.
What challenged me the most was figuring out how to simulate an idea and what that would look like. I have also been working on how to incorporate this into my lessons.
The most challenging part for me was figuring out which blocks to use, and how to arrange the code to do what I wanted. I struggled with translating a conceptual idea into code and vice versa.
Arranging the code so that it responded to what I wanted it to do. Just getting use to the program as well. Making things more complicated instead of basic.
It was difficult when the code run as expected. Even when the code appeared to be working I often found on reflection it only appeared to follow the design I had in mind. When reading the code over I would find that I was not really giving precise enough direction to the agents, or I was not really counting the result I wanted to monitor. I was an outstandingly frustrating experience in critical thinking. I would not walk away from the computer until I could figure out the problem.
I actually feel like the most challenging part of the summer PD was the first day. I felt overwhelmed with information. I wasn’t sure how I would put it all together and I was definitely concerned about how I would use this in my classroom. After days 2 and 3, things became clearer.