From the desk of Mr. Walters

Recently, I decided to roll out Classcraft in all of my Seventh Grade classes, and I have found it to be surprisingly effective. Not only do students take the health and experience of their characters very seriously, but they also strive to help their teams and classmates in general. One thing that surprised me was how much students crave XP (or experience points). What I do with Classcraft has no effect on student grades whatsoever. Yet, I can attach points loss / gain consequences to my behavioral and procedural expectations via  XP and HP . While these points don't matter in terms of students' grades, they do matter a great deal to students, who are ultimately more concerned with the game than their grade anyway. They get so excited about equipping their avatar with custom stuff, and many of them are becoming XP hungry. There are many students who are serious gamers and are used to being able to " grind " for XP in a game. In the way that I...

Okay, I'm going to need you to bear with me while I rant a little bit, whine some, and cry out for help and advice. Engaging Middle School students is hard, even in the computer lab. Most of the garbage out there that is marketed to teachers, particularly in the technology department, is not only teaching antiquated skills, but is also incredibly " edukitschy ". Every once in awhile you find a gleaming diamond in the rough that is awesome and free. This rarely happens for teachers, and when it does, it becomes all the more heart-breaking when it suddenly goes away. Sometimes we only get to greet these things at a distance, and due to our circumstances never get to enter the promised land before the world has moved on.    Project Spark Project Spark was a game creation / simple programming environment for Microsoft Windows 8.1, 10 and Xbox One, which was the very beautiful child of it's homely parent, Kodu. Kodu is a visual programming tool which builds on i...

Okay, so I don't know Charlotte Danielson , and I cannot seriously make conjecture on her leisure activities, particularly in the realm of video games. With that out of the way, I wanted to explore some of the ways in which the use of simulations, games, gamification and game design relates to and can exemplify the four domains of Danielson's Framework for Teaching and learning . Today, I'd like to begin with Domain 2, Classroom Environment. In future posts on this topic, I plan to explore the other domains. For those of you who are being evaluated using the Danielson framework and who also happen to be doing gamification (with or without Classcraft), feel free to steal liberally from the language in this post for your professional "evidence folder". Gamification, Levelling up my Classroom environment with Classcraft I've been using Classcraft off and on since last year, but I'm just now really starting to get into a groove with this thing. ...

This is the second in a 3-part (maybe 4) series on setting up a sweet STEAM classroom in your Middle School. If you want to go read part 1, it's here: MS STEAM starter pack pt. 1: Programming Design & STEM vs. STEAM So, this topic is all about putting the "A" in STEAM . It used to be STEM, and for a brief time it was STE[A]M, but these days it's STEAM, and for good reason. Apple did not experience the massive market success that it is known for by making products that were simply functional. For better or worse, human beings are drawn to beauty. We love stuff that looks good, and I believe that any STEAM program worth its salt will cover the basic fundamentals of design. This is much more difficult than it sounds. Somehow, whether in advertisements, user interfaces, or simple brand marks, the people who understand design wow us and suck us in with their brilliant use of typography, color, and composition. I think most of us have an inherent sense of w...

Perhaps, like us, you unwittingly chose a Cube 3d Printer  for your school or classroom, either because of it's iOS air printing capabilities or because you were sold on the fantasy of it being seamless and simple. LOL... Then, when 3d Systems announced it was discontinuing its line of consumer machines , you may have felt abandoned and hurt and confused. For us, it was a pretty low blow, considering there was no prior announcement about this and we had just purchased one of these bad boys for nearly $800.00; no small amount for a public Middle School. We may have gotten a lot of distance out of this machine, nonetheless, as we had stockpiled quite a few of the proprietary filament cartridges. If you've used one of these at all, though, you know the  filament cartridges are crap , and definitely the weakest link when it comes to this printer. The filament is terrible and you're constantly disassembling and reassembling cartridges. The filament cartridges are also this...

This is the first in a 3-part (maybe 4) series on setting up a sweet STEAM classroom in your Middle School. I will link all three parts here when they're finished. MS STEAM starter pack pt. 2: Design The Premise I am a middle school computer science teacher. It's what I do. I LOVE my job. I also often speak at universities, blog, tweet, and just generally build as many relationships in the education world as I can. In my travels, I have heard the following scenario at least a dozen times (probably more, but I am prone to exaggeration, so I'll stop at a dozen).  Hi, Clint. I'm a Librarian for Generic Area School District in Upper Generic County. My school is phasing out the Library curriculum and turning our Libraries into [ultimate action-packed / STEM / cafe-related / Multi-media adjectives] Centers. I'm being asked to teach a Middle School [Coding / Game Design / STEM / STEAM] Class, and I know nothing about this stuff. I think they're trying t...