It's Time for Genius

A few weeks ago I introduced genius hour into my class.  Here's a quick introduction:

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Inspired

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Last night, I had the privilege of attending the award banquet for NCWIT aspirations in computing award winners.  24 high school girls were awarded at ASU in the Memorial Union Ballroom for their accomplishments and aspirations to change the world through computing.  Many have been active at their schools involved in engineering clubs, robotics, and computing classes and aspire to lead a tech company, find a  cure for pancreatic cancer, and study engineering management.  ASU faculty and NCWIT representatives were there to encourage the girls to pursue computer science no matter what they eventually decide to do.  I was there with Daisy, a student I taught when she was in 5th grade.  She was on the first robotics team I started and continues to compete at the high school level.  I continue to be inspired by her and many others to bring computing to the next generation of girls. One of the speeches by ASU faculty highlighted the fact that many of the ear...
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Colored Bits

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I'm moving along with CSDiscoveries and this week continued with lesson 6 called Processing with Bits.  This lesson was awesome!! My students really enjoyed going through all the levels and figuring them out in pairs.  They used the pixel filtering tool to explore how colors are represented using on/off options and combinations. I tried to make the connection to previous lessons ( L4 - what is a computer ?; L5 - representing with binary ) explicit so that students could connect what they did with the face up/down challenge to input/processing/output and representing information using binary in this lesson. I did not go into colors, binary, and computers, but just treated this lesson at face-value and had students go through the leveled puzzles that were scaffolded really well. The initial task of identifying the 8 colors along with their 'binary representation' was important and students could use that to refer to as they completed the subsequent puzzle levels. I ended up ...
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The importance of mindset

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I've been working on ways to have my students explore and reflect on the importance of mindset in the classroom.  To this end, they took Jo Boaler's course called " How to Learn Math " last spring.  It was definitely a highlight for many of my students. Many had never realized the importance of having a growth mindset and to not be afraid of making mistakes.  It was a freeing and empowering moment for so many of them. Image  link I really got to thinking about I address standards and practices (mathematical practices and science and engineering practices) in the classroom, but what about mindset?  So, to start off the school year, I returned to a series of videos from IDEO that I watched when I took a Human-Centered Design course.  It's a set of seven videos addressing mindsets that we must have as we design solutions:  learn from failure iterate, iterate, iterate make it empathy creative confidence optimism embrace ambiguity They can be found here. ...
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