Geometric figures with E-Toys

Lesson: Geometric figures
There are different geometric figures and their most fundamental elements are sides' length and angles. E-toys is one of the best tools to teach a esson about geometric figures.
Process:
1. Since there is always an initial point to start drawing any figure, thus first you draw a small dot.
2. In the viewer of the "dot" object, you create commands by specifying the size of angles and the length of sides, and then use the "pen" to automatically draw a geometric figure.

Example: drawing a Decagon
Angle (exterior) size = 360/10 = 36
Side length = 100

through these computations the students would be able to answer to the questions asked on pages 117-122 of the book Mathematics Pupil's Book Primary Six by the MINEDUC, regarding finding the size of angles, the length of sides,..

Outcomes:
* The kids will learn how to use the calculator through Calculate activity.
* They will have more understanding about angles and their relationship with the number of sides that constitute a figure.
* The kids understand visual elements better than abstract ones
* They will have a coding experience
* The best thing for E-toys, they can create a book of geometric figures

Teacher's training

Objectives

Before planning the teacher's training, we should first specify the goals we want to achieve. People may have different views, but according to my own experience with OLPC learning process in Rwanda, I think they need know not necessary how to manipulate XO and its built-in software but how to use this technology to ease their lessons. Each teacher should be able to use the most basic and multi-task XO software (I will define what programs I think are more fundamental) since we have only one week of training. Note also that it's not a very good idea to overload the material to the beginners.

To-teach list

1.Record: Elementary school students develop their knowledge much better through visual elements, and pictures can be inserted in a plenty of activities; so Record should definitely be taught.
2.Write: In any activity, you need to type at least the name of the project, so they should know how use keys like Shift in order to capitalize or something else. They need to know to create tables (which easier to collect a database) , to change the font, the color of the text...
3.E-toys: when I get to talk about E-toys, that when I use the term multi-task software, because it helps to make an infinite number of pages in more organized way. You can assign a topic to each page (for example a geography book, having a page for rivers, another for climate, two pages for eclipse and so forth). You can what other activities do, for insistence painting/drawing (Paint), writing (Write), coding (scratch or turtle art).

Training planning

DAY 1: Quick facts about XO (how to open the laptop, role of antennas, capacity, journal, shortcuts keys to home, to network, screen max/min, battery, saving/keeping)

DAY 2: Record and Write. This would the time to teach them these activities and network. They would take a picture of themselves in Record and use to write their short biography and then share them with 3 other people. A then end, we can do an application of making a pictionary that consist of different subjects (geography, math, english,...). Assign them homework.

DAY 3: Help to fix the problem they encountered in their homework. Introduce E-Toys and show them how if they a lot of stuff to write E-toys Book would have been easier. Introduce the painting tool in E-toys. Divide them into groups where they would be required to come up with a lesson/topic and show how they can teach it with the laptop.

DAY 4: Help them for some issues. Let each group present their work. CLOSE!!!!

Understanding teachers' complaints

Even though I didn't conduct any teacher's training, because the teachers were unavailable due to the ongoing exams, I was able to interview one teacher at Kagugu about their life and job. He is a mid-thirty-year old man who teaches math. When we started the conversation he told me the most important thing that would make his life easier is "getting a good salary". Despite having a wife and a couple of kids, it doesn't matter for him even though he would be assigned to work far from his family. After i noticed how ambitious he was, i asked for his views about XOs. "I was so happy when they announced the deployment of XOs at Kagugu", he told me. At first he wasn't open about his feelings about the OLPC learning project. But later on, he cited all the challenges that keep him from achieving the goals of OLPC.
1. " We don't get trained enough so we don't feel comfortable with using laptops in class, moreover usually some kids know more than we do", some teachers think it's embarrassing.
2. " There are some subjects we don't any idea how we can teach them using laptops" which is understandable, but i think sometimes they oppose using them in anything.
3. "Even though we would use them, we would waste a lot of time, since it takes time to distribute and branch the laptops to the power; mainly because of the new professorial education system, we have only less than 45 minutes in a class"
4. "All classrooms have more than 40 students so it's time-consuming to go over and check if every single student is doing the right thing."

I'm still thinking the best planning to oppose these obstacles but if anybody has a point or a suggestion to make, feel welcome to post them here.

Is there any way to motivate teachers to make good use of XOs?

This week, I didn’t do any teacher training session because of the unavailability of teachers both at Nonko and Rwamagana. However I had three game programming training sessions to the kids at ESCAF and Nonko. These student’s trainings gave me a hint of what we should focus on during either teacher’s or student’s trainings. They both need motivation and practicable examples of what XOs can do. For insistence, I noticed that after kids have practiced a particular game, they get more understanding of using Scratch commands.

I figured out this is the same case for teacher too few weeks ago when I was at Kagugu where this English teacher didn’t want to use scratch to teach his students a topic about relative pronouns. His main concern was that he wouldn’t be able to grade (evaluate) his pupils. He didn’t want to grade each child’s XO; but after we explained him that he can tell the kids to submit their work on the host page where he would grade them without checking on every laptop, he found out the importance of scratch activity. This is only one example, but I know all the teacher are like this one, they need to understand not necessarily how to use every single piece of a certain activity but more importantly how it can helpful in the day-to-day life.


Apart of from this observation, I would also suggest to install gcompris and English4Fun activities on the laptops of students at ESCAF because almost all of them have shown a productive result from those activities. I think that even five interns would be enough to install them in all the computers for few hours, so we should schedule a day to do this technical support for the sake of these considerably-motivated students.

Scratch-developed soccer game to be made by the kids

We started this week working with the only private school to have received XOs laptops. From what I heard the students’ parents of this primary school ESCAF situated in Nyamirambo contributed to buy these laptops and OLPC agreed to help training them. The OLPC learning team has initiated three learning clubs at ESCAF: Journalism, Game Programming and Story-telling. In the game programming club which I am part of, we asked kids to cite all games they wanted to develop and we made them vote for the top four then divided them into groups. My group was supposed to develop AGATI – which is a relay-race-like game.

Because there was another group that was developing a RACING game, I proposed to the kids another game called LESI. It seems like air hockey in which they use feet; it’s played by two players where each one defends his own goal by shooting the ball in the goal of his/her opponent. Moreover you can’t stop the ball; you are only allowed one touch. The students - especially boys- love this game because they practically play it almost every single day.



I was so impressed that ESCAF pupils are eager to learn and use XO activities and I liked their communication. The only issue I meet there is that the kids are in different grades; so that if I need to show them some mathematical concepts – for insistence the graph - , some get them pretty quickly but I have to take more time for the others.