Digital Makerspace Exploration Activity

 Digital Makerspace Exploration Activity

CT Standards

2a: Nurture a confident, competent and positive identity around computing for every student.

3b: Apply effective teaching strategies to support student collaboration around computing, including pair programming, working in varying team roles, equitable workload distribution and project management.

4d: Create CS and CT learning environments that value and encourage varied viewpoints, student agency, creativity, engagement, joy and fun.

    Today I explored a website called Maker Education (Maker ED) which offers a transformational approach to teaching and learning that attends to the real and relevant needs of learners and humans. Once I was on the website, I clicked on Tools and Materials and then filtered it into open source software. I decided to click on Chrome Experiences and choose a program called One Million Stars. One Million Stars is a program that visualizes nearby star data with real astronomical data, allowing you to fly by and visit the named stars of the stellar neighborhood. As I was flying through space I was able to learn about a lot of facts about space, stars, stellar neighborhoods, and galaxies. An example of a fact that I found interesting is that the start closest to us in our stellar neighborhood is Proxima Centauri and it is approximately four light years away.

 The Sun

Tour of One Million Stars

Stellar Neighborhoods 

    This is a perfect activity to allow students to use technology and programming in a way that allows students to visually see and "fly" around space to learn things that we can't see with our naked eye. An idea of an activity is having students go outside and just looking up at the stars. Have them answer questions such as what do they see, where are specific stars/constellations located, and what specific facts do they know about space in general. Then I will have them look at One Million Stars to give them the feeling of what being in space would really feel like as well as gaining factual information on space as they fly around. 

    The standards I chose were 2a and 3b that I thought fit well with this activity. Standard 2a states to nurture a confident, competent and positive identity around computing for every student. In order to conduct a successful activity, I need to make sure I nurture a confident, competent, and positive identity for every student. Standard 3b states to apply effective teaching strategies to support student collaboration around computing, including pair programming, working in varying team roles, equitable workload distribution and project management. In order to do this, I want students to explore One Million Stars together and share the experience and information learned with one another. At the end of exploration, students can write down three facts that they learn and share that with their classmates.