An Educational Technology Journal--Or Is It?

         For those of you following this blog, then you (probably) know that last night I posted my first of many field experience reflections, which you can read here . In case you need a refresher on what exactly this series of post entails here is the required context:  due to the pandemic, I have not been able to complete any in person and/or synchronous observation hours. In place of that, my professor has kindly allowed me, and anyone else in the class, to use the presentations of various guests as field experience. I will be using these posts to reflect on my field experience by taking the concepts I learned about in the presentations and then thinking about how I might apply them to my own teaching. Alright, now that that little introduction is out of the way, let’s get to the reflecting portion of tonight’s entertainment.

         At the start of this computational thinking (CT) learning activity assignment, I’ll admit that I thought four for each concept   [ 1 ] was a bit overkill. At the time, I felt like I could hardly come up with one activity let alone four for each concept with the additional caveat that two are plugged and two are unplugged. Now that the process is over,   [ 2 ] while I can’t say I enjoyed the assignment, I do think it forced me to better understand each concept. The following summarization of how I completed the assignment will be short and sweet because, unlike Turtle Blocks, there isn’t an easy way to either show my progress or explain it since a lot was done in my head or internet research which isn’t easy to screen shot. When I first embarked on this harrowing journey, I thought I could go at it by myself, with perhaps a few questions   [ 3 ] sent my professor’s way. Alas, after some indefinite time of brainstorming with ...

Imagine, there I was trying to think of a less complex activity that taught students about the computational thinking skill of abstraction (a longer, in-depth post about that process soon to follow), when I stumbled upon a really awesome game!