Reflection on the Lego Assignment
Submitted on 17th December 2005.
For this reflection, I used the 'what/so what/now what' to frame my thoughts. This means I tried to:
- recall what I (and my group) did - what was the experience (the What)
- think about how I felt during it and try to look at it in different ways (So what)
- consider what I have learned - have my perspectives shifted as a result of this experience; what actions am I going to take? (Now what)
I've grouped my writing under these headings below, but it's not a rigid classification. I have also added some further thoughts/musings under the headings of constraints and an intermittent journal of our group activities. Our group reflections on the project are on the web site we used to present our project.
What
We got a kit each, one of which was more or less complete while the other two were missing some parts. But we did have three RCXs and 4 motors and enough sensors. The idea we came up with was a maze or grid through which a robot would move, based on commands from 2 remote controls. The controls were operated by the 'teacher' and the 'student'. I did the programming for communications between the remote controls and between them and the robot. I helped with the programming of the robot's movement, though that was mostly done by Mary. Nicola build the robot. Nicola wrote most of the web site content which we all reviewed and amended. I provided a layout for the site.
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So What
The Lego assignment seemed like fun at the start - it was something fun (on the face of it anyway) and involved 'doing'. I remember having a Technics lego set when I was about 12. Actually, I think it was my younger brother's, but I took it over for a while. So Robotics Lego looked like the next generation of that and I thought I'd really get into it.
But it wasn't always fun....I felt pressurised because of the tight deadline (well, I made it tight because I focussed all my time and energy on the research paper assignment that came before it and they overlapped). Whilst I could see applications for Mindstorms Lego in teaching programming, I thought that would not really have been feasible with only one person of a computing background in the group (me). I have very little experience in education with children and that seemed to be an area in which to generate ideas. But being in a group helped a lot - pooling our thoughts yielded more ideas and we selected one of a few ideas early on - the 'maths maze'. It did get refined later on - we retro-fitted it to what we had done in terms of programming and robot movements. One thing we kept coming back to was to 'keep it simple'. Given the limited time and the fact that we were a group of only 3, we just couldn't have too much work involved.
We worked well together as a team. No one of us dominated the group, decisions were made in consultation with the group. We used e-communications a lot - our private group discussion forum in the VLE (Virtual Learning Environment - WebCT), email, texting and, to a lesser extent, a wiki. We also shared knowledge and skills. Mary, being a Maths teacher, had good understanding of how Maths is taught and also was able to make connections between what we were doing with learning theories, particularly those of Papert. Whilst I have been learning about these during this course, they are still new to me and I'm only beginning to make the connections to my shorter teaching experience and to my own learning styles. I was able to provide a nice looking web site layout (which we used for our digital presentation) based on one I'd done before, tweaked a bit to make it unique for this project. Nicola took notes about and compiled our group reflections during each of our meetings and put them into the website. She also structured the site and wrote alot of the content, tying our objectives into some learning theory.
I found that if left to my own devices, I would focus on the bit I enjoyed most - the programming part. It was something I was familiar with because I've programmed alot before and it was logical and made sense to me. I wasn't so keen on the building parts, despite memories of enjoying that with Technics Lego when I was younger. I've tried to figure out why that is. I think it's because I like to build based on a set of steps/instructions. I struggle to conjure up my own inventions of cars or robots and I've never been too bothered with getting 'under the hood' of things - literally, in terms of a car and figuratively too - I can easily work with the parts of something that I need to know about and accept that the other bits will do their job and not worry about them. Once I had an RCX and the software installed on my laptop, I was happily putting together the programs.
After thinking about this, I feel that I have to make more of an effort to do things that are outside my 'comfort zone'. Because I was working in a group on this, it was easy to let the others work on the bits I wasn't too keen on, namely the building of the robot. While this worked out well (we had to divide the work into units that could be worked on individually as our face-to-face meeting times were limited), I sometimes felt that I could get more involved in the building but it was easier to let the others get on with it as they knew what they were doing and it was being done well. It also suited the others to have me do the programming I did as they could concentrate on other tasks. Mary and I did look at each other's programs (mine for messaging, hers for movement) and took some time to understand them but were happy to let each other focus on the details of her own program. Nicola was interested in how the programs worked but was happy not to have to get too involved in them.
My way of working with the programs and the RCXs definitely reflects my position on Kolb's quadrants - we did this in class recently and I came out as a converger - I tend to go from ' Abstract Conceptualisation' to 'Active Experimentation'. I think about the programs in my head, then I write them. Then I try them out and see what happens. And if they don't work as I expect I make changes and try again. If they do work as I expect, I move onto the next bit of functionality. 
This comes, I think, from my programming work. That's just what I do when creating a web page or a program in Java. It happens naturally - it's just that now, since starting this MSc, I have a name for it!
I could also clearly see us, as a group, as well as me individually, going through Kolb's cycle of learning. We would apply the concepts - we had a robot, we had some programs to make it move, we would try this out (concrete experience). Maybe the robot wouldn't move the way we expected or the right message wouldn't get to it from a remote control. So we sat back, talked about what we'd seen (observation & reflections). We theorised as to why it went wrong - was the robot's light sensor causing it to stop rather than accept the instruction to move forward? What did we need to change to fix this (formation of concepts and generalizations)? Then we tried out the fix and saw what happened (back to concrete experience).
Something we realised as a team, when we werer putting together our final reflections, was that we had focussed very much on fitting an existing learning model into the technology. This limited what we were doing and now we all feel that we could have gone about it differently, taking a view more in line with that of Papert (cognitive constructionism) and thinking about what learning we could do with the technology. This would be taking the approach that technology can really change the ways in which people learn, something that Papert envisioned in his 1980s book 'Mindstorms'. I really see now, from reading that book and doing this project, that this is possible but that it takes imagination and stepping back from the ways I was taught when I was at school and in university (the first time round).
What this all means is that the better learning experience in this project was that that I, and we as a group, had. We said in our group reflection that we felt that giving the Lego parts to the student(s) and allowing them to build the elements and possibly to program them, would have been a better learning experience.
During this project, I sub-conscsiouly limited myself to thinking about how this could be used in working with children. A better appreciation, on my part, of how children think, work, interact and learn would have helped in coming up with ideas. I neglected to focus on what I do have some experience in, namely teaching third-level students.
Now what?
In my short teaching experience, I have taught a lot to the 'traditional ways'. I 'chalked and talked' alot in Ethiopia, because that was generally all that was available. But I did try to introduce student-centred learning and activities to my classes sometimes, when I had the time to prepare it in advance. The first time I did this with a particular group of students, they were a bit stunned, as their school experience would have been all chalk & talk and learning by rote; very much teacher-centred. The idea that I actually wanted them to move around the class, form groups and discuss something was new to them. I had to tell them that it was okay to speak at a normal level, that they didn't have to whisper. And those exercises usually worked well and gave me a chance to see what they already knew. My teaching experience here has been different in one respect - I now use a virtual learning environment to store. display and make accessible my teaching materials. Also, the students can access the internet during class. So in teaching web development, I can ask them to find reusable things on the web, for example. This simple and obvious use of the technology was easy for me to adjust to. But now I'm trying to think of more innovative ways to use it. I've seen some of those students messaging each other during class...maybe I could have them send questions to me using their messenger tools.
That last paragraph is me trying to get more 'creative' (thinking of new ways of doing things) in how I might apply the technology available to me in my teaching. I think a couple of robots and remote controls could be used to let students interactively understand programming concepts such as logical AND/OR/NOT, algorithms (such as that for computationally solving the Towers of Hanoi problem) or threading and the sharing of resources.
I'm glad that our group worked out well. There were no arguments, just healthy debate and perhaps a few grumpy moments when we were all tired and weary! But I do feel that I can be a bit lazy sometimes - when I know that others in the team are capable of doing a particular activity, one which I could learn about or from, I may leave them at it and stick to the bits I know best. Maybe I need to push myself more.
In conclusion....this was a good project to do; I feel relieved that it's over and look forward to not staying up late working on it; I feel we did a good job and I feel that I learned something about the differences between using technology for learning and learning with technology. There were times when I felt we wouldn't get there, that what we presented at the end would be somehow inadequate, but in the end it was fine.
Addendum - after all groups presented to the class
Having watched the presentations of the other groups in the class, I felt happy and inspired. Happy because it reinforced the fact that, despite some worries on my part, what we did was, most importantly, a learning experience in itself. It's made me think about more ways to get technology involved in learning. Inspired because there was a wealth of ideas there, from coorindiate geometry to role play to object matching. I was also really impressed with the way in which some of the primary teachers in our group used their ideas in class. Their skill and training showed, with lesson plans and connections to curricular learning objectives. I only wish I'd looked into teaching as a job earlier than I have done!
Constraints
These are some factors that I felt constrained us in terms of the scope and quality of our final product:
Time - we were all focussing on the research paper (the previous assignment) till it was submitted on December 4th. Then the Lego project was due on December 4th. Though we'd had the details a few weeks before that (about a month before), none of us really got into it till after we'd submitted the research paper. Then with all of us working full-time, we had to make time to meet to work on the lego.
Group Size & Logistics - the groups were put together in a haphazard manner and in a rush, at the end of a class one Friday afternoon. Mary and I live near each other so we teamed up (we both live around Dublin 3). Nicola lived 'northside' too - but in Drogheda, so not exactly close! But as most other groups had formed by then, we decided to stick together. Our different work locations meant we met either on Saturdays after lectures in college or on weekday evenings and also on one Sunday afternoon at my house.
Three in a group was ok - less possibility of personality clashes (indeed, there were none, I believe). But it also meant we had only 3 lego sets and lots of missing bits. I think the optimum group size would be 4; 5 might lead to disorganization.
Coming up with ideas - I found it hard to come up with good, original ideas for the 'learning experience' that the lego would provide. Being a programmer, I can see ways it could be used to teach programming concepts like conditional branching, loops and procedures. But that would involve the learner having to become familiar with the software and that would, I think, have been out of scope for this project. We did come up with some ideas that we rejected because either they'd been done by previous groups or they were introducing complications into the programming. Our mantra was 'keep it simple'.
Activity Journal/Continuous Reflection
(D represents D-Day - the day we were due to present; so D-2 means 2 days to go)
D-6: All three of us met at my house on Sunday afternoon, to try to pull together what we'd all been working on. We had divided the work into building the robot (Nicola), working on robot movement (Mary) and messaging between RCXs (me). We had a cool-looking robot thanks to Nicola. We spent some time discussing/brainstorming how we'd actually use it. I had gotten more into the programming and had figured out how to send messages between 2 RCXs, which I now labelled remote controls, one for the 'teacher' and one for the 'student'. But I felt a bit limited in what I could do till we had figured out what exactly the 'learning exercise' was going to be and how these two boxes would communicate with the robot.
D-3: Mary and I got together again in my house, with me having done some more programming and her having working on getting the robot moving between the lines. But we still hadn't finalised what exactly the final product would be - how the 3 RCXs would interact, what the learner would do, what the teacher would do. This was proving to be the most difficult part.
It was also frustrating to have to rebuild the robot as it had come apart during Mary's experimenting and was unstable.
D-2: All of us met again (at Lego central, my house) and we made good progress. Mary had done a lot of work on the movement of the robot. I had added a couple of bits to the remote control programs but couldn't really do much more till we had them together with the robot. We used email & discussion forums alot during that day, telling each other what we'd done and suggesting improvements to the maze game/idea. We refined these when we met. Our final game is modelled on the old TV quiz, Blockbusters. The robot moves a square at a time on a grid. The student has to answer an arithmetic question correctly to be allow to continue. We also had an instruction manual, of sorts, listing the steps involved for the Teacher and the Student - what they do with their RCXs and also what the robot does in response. This was originally intended as a guide for us to use for the demo but should be useful also as a user guide.
D-1: Still at it; Nicola was working on the web site; I was putting the final touches to the programs and writing my personal reflections. Then attended lectures (very interesting - Digital Video - never knew it was so easy to use MovieMaker) and spent an hour or so afterwards reviewing and updating our group reflection. I then went to meet friends in a pub, for a much-needed couple of pints (literally).
D-day: at last, it would all be over in a few hours, regardless! As group 5, we went 5th, which was good because we got to see some of the other groups first. This put our minds at rest that we were alright - it seemed groups had had similar issues to ours and we were reassured that our reflections would hit the right note.
And finally...
A dedication to my friends Tricia & Robin, who were staying in my house during the time I was working on this project. They tolerated bits of lego around the house and group meetings in the kitchen. And, most importantly, provided the dinners and the glass(es) of red wine when the going got tough!
