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This morning started off interesting. A tree fell on Professor Rodger's house during the weekend. I'm glad no one was hurt because she was at home with her kids. Last year, a tree fell on my aunt's house and damaged it a lot more. (I think it went all the way through the roof, right in the middle. But no one was home for that one. Thank God. Alot of the teachers could not register onto the network so they had to manually put in their hardware addresses. But even then, some of them couldn't get online. Henry told me it was because we were supposed to use the wireless 2 subnet (i'd told people wireless 1). Oops. Well, you learn new things everyday :o) For the rest of the day, I continued to help the teachers with their worlds and I worked on my descriptions.
Today Henry gave a tutorial on I/O with strings. The teachers really got a hit out of that. I agree that it's a very useful method. I helped Tom, Michelle, and a few of the other teachers figure out how to program some things they wanted to do. I really like helping the teachers because they ask me to code things I've never coded (or even thought to code) so I've learned a lot by showing them how to do thes ethings. Ruthie went over a light tutorial. Unfortunately, Michelle lost her world! And it was sooo good. I think that there was an error in her alice code, right when the world was being saved (so of course, it couldn't be compiled). It makes me really sad because she has a Mac and didn't have any backups I went over a tutorial of Henry's. It sparked an interesting discussion between me and Henry about the terminology that the Alice people have chosen and whether or not it increases a student's understanding of programming. Is the concept of object and class truly conveyed? I am continuing to work on my descriptions. They are becoming very long. I hope they're useful when I finish them.
This morning Charisma came to work with me. She wanted to eat breakfast, and work in the LSRC. It was really cool because Mrs. Parson told me that she has twin sons. So we swapped pictures and talked about our experiences. We had a short meeting with Professor Rodger as a preliminary for next week. I'm excited about working with the teachers and students. Right now it seems a little hazy about the actual set up for the summer camps. But I know it will turn out really well. I hope to finish these descriptions really soon. I prefer to use webpages because i'm not a fan of downloading powerpoints. But I think I'm going to have to convert all of my stuff to powerpoints/pdfs. So that's my plan for the rest of the week. And then I want to start developing new example worlds and continue filling in the tutorials as needed. The virtual heroes project was incredibly interesting. I'm so excited to see their simulation next week. (They'll show part of it next week because Maya wouldn't load today) I spent a really long time helping Jarrod figure out why a method for an imported object wasn't working. I used a few problem solving skills and discovered that when you change the ambientLightColor to no color - certain color changes are no longer visible. So the method was working, we just couldn't tell. I ended up working 9 hours today
Today, I mostly spent helping the teachers. I've really enjoyed helping them come up with ideas and improve their worlds. I've learned a lot about how to help teachers who are all at different stages in either their ideas, programming ability or creativity. I also worked on an example world about the different ways to ask the user questions. Once I finish making the world I'll add it to my growing list of descriptions to be finished.
Today was the last day of the teacher workshop. The teachers gave us a giftcard to starbucks. And Elaine gave each of us a gift card to the Duke University store. I really appreciated it. I have to say this has been a wonderful experience. I always enjoy meeting new people and developing relationships. But working with the teachers also expanded my ideas for the materials that we will continue to develop. Many of the teachers demonstrated their work today. Every world was so unique and very good. I don't think very many people stayed to watch Seema and Jill's worlds at the end, but they were great too. I look forward to working with everyone again during the summer camps.