Pause Day

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Once a semester our school has Pause Day, a day where we hit 'pause' on usual classes, and allowed students the opportunity to catch up, relax, learn something new, and meet new people. As teachers, during our regular periods we would offer to run an academic support room, where students could catch up on work we could facilitate a workshop for students to try something new. It was fantastic as there were classrooms where students could play board games, knit, debate current events, sing karaoke, or play musical instruments. Some students took full advantage of the day by participating in these activities as well as getting some support with their academics.

For my two morning blocks I offered an introduction to Scratch programming workshop. I started with a quick tour of Scratch and then showed them some tutorials they could work through and I offered support where needed. A number of students from my grade 9 math classes came to the workshops, which I was quite pleased about. Some of these students were working through tutorials - pong and "create a catch game" seemed to be quite popular. But, there was one student who decided to create a program that was directly related to what we were covering in class - optimization.

 This student was creating a program that allowed a user to choose between optimizing three-sided or four-sided enclosures and then maximizing area or minimizing perimeter. A link to their program can be found here. When asked why he had decided to do this he said:
"We were introduced to scratch in math class so I tried to make a program in Scratch that was related to mathematics. At the time, we were doing optimization of rectangles so I made a program that optimizes rectangles."

 I was very excited that he had decided to take material we were learning in class and, on his own, create a program that directly linked to it. Granted this student is interested in coding, but it has now made me think of how we can provide opportunities for students to use coding to demonstrate understanding instead of a math test. Could we give assignments to students? Could we use the same structure as the Carbon Cycle assignment in Science, where students are given a starting point and then they have to modify the code to do additional functionality?

 Pause day gave me a chance to see students in a different setting, working on things they enjoyed, but when I saw this student's program, it made me reflect on another avenue to explore moving forward with this project. The idea of not only using coding and robotics for investigating and consolidating mathematical concepts, but also for assessing understanding mathematical concepts. Is this just a new type of "product"?

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