homeschooling

In coding class today, the kids continued to build the massive Spinner Factory robot. But today I introduced them to a simple Kanban board to keep track of what was built. The instructions include 465 steps.

Over the weekend Mr. John saw a video from a young woman who studies robotics. Her advice on how to learn robotics was to tear things apart and then put them back together.

In coding class we finished the code for the ellaphants we built. The kids made a program that would use the robot keypad buttons to control what it did. Up button to make the elephant walk forward. Down button for backward. Left button for head tilt and trunk trumpeting. And right button for picking up an object.

For these two weeks, kids worked on an elephant robot. It is supposed to walk without wheels.

First week progress:

In today's coding class we started on a motorcycle robot. It will use the gyroscopic sensor to keep itself balanced on 2 wheels.  All they had for instructions was a video showing a working Lego motorcycle. No build instructions and no programming instructions.

The coding class finished programming their recent robot. They learned how to have multiple threads of program execution and how to interrupt one thread from another and how to use global variables as flags to send quick messages across threads.

利用multiple threads和program execution, 機器狗終於完成了!

考試這檔事對台灣長大的孩子一定一點也不陌生，不但是從小考到大，很多工作也是要用考的才會被錄取。考試似乎跟公平競爭畫上等號。我們每一科都考，連體育也考，所有的成績都要考試才能出來。

我這年代長大的，在台灣上學的，一定都經歷過因為沒有考到老師訂的標準，被老師打的教訓，當時可是有各種萬靈藥膏，讓老師打了比較不會痛。這年代的，為了考試成績，孩子們是各種的補習，評量是堆積如山，老師會用班費多買幾本，安親班更是多，國中生一天有七節課，可以考到九次試，這讓我覺得，這三十年來，好像教育沒什麼變，沒有跟著社會進步，沒有隨著變新而改變。這會造成什麼現象? 沒有考的，老師就不教、不聞不問，孩子們整天會為了複習，而死記知識，除了老師有教的，有考過的，其他就會認為不是該吸收的知識範圍了，其實，也沒時間去學別的東西了。

上週四，Owen and Ella的媽媽有機會在 讚聲大國民 節目裡跟大家分享一些教育理念，談了許多考試對孩子的影響已以及Owen and Ella 在家自學的情況，有興趣的可以撥些時間來看一下喔!

Kids and adults alike, every one of us thinks differently. Some people can think abstractly and conceptually, some think visually. Many people can understand easily and retain the information well by reading text and some need visual aids to help retaining information.

My daughter asked me the other day, "mom, what is the difference between 'c' and 'k'?" My heart was doing a somersault with joy!