Resource Room Dot Net Blog

Animation career

xiousgeonz — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 03:29:09 +0000

I was asked on FB whether animation was a new career direction.
I love it when writing finds stuff out.

I’d posted the animated movies we’d seen that day, which were, for once, a total diversion from “balloons attack!” or “White guys make rude body noises and we all laugh!” To wit: http://www.nfb.ca/film/sand_castle and http://www.nfb.ca/film/black_soul/ — a delightful distraction

My answer:

Sort of. In 19 *** 98 I left the classroom with the idea that I could serve learning better (and never forget my lesson plans ) by creating educational resources using computers… since there is/was all this unmet potential in using computers for more than “here! now you can read the textbook on a screen!” and “click one of the choices” exercises. (In 1977 I dropped my computer science major ’cause I knew I was too much of a “people person,” however introverted, to go that route — I’d taught too many people to swim to go back inside…)

Welp, I’m glad to be back *teaching* in a situation where forgetting the lesson plans doesn’t matter, but… geezo, the learning stuff on computers is *****stilll***** reconstituted lecture and textbook.

The absurd irony is that I *love* lecture and textbook; it’s my native mudwallow. When I “draw” it ends up being text and symbols.

The next course in the sequence of “the stuff you take to make computer games” classes was animation…and it is making me ponder. I have long cringed at how postsecondary education, especially at the community college, has tunnelvisioned to “will it get you a job?!?” and … nobody talks about … liberal arts, learning about the world and people who think differently than you.

However, because this is at a community college and not a “Microsoft’s How To Program” deal, I’m getting all this artsy stuff Today’s was even LIBERAL Hmmm…. is it this visual stuff where the human voice and heart are still managing to invade and infect droll, dull “skills for employment”?

California math blues

xiousgeonz — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 01:05:10 +0000

“Not as Easy as 1, 2, 3″ seems Butte College is talking about its issues with math. They use terms like ‘momentum’ so it sounds like they’re reading the same stuff we are.
Now to flipping my conference…

oh, my exploding brain :)

xiousgeonz — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 22:26:31 +0000

Next project?
Make a math lesson using stop motion pictures of people, clay, whatever.
Think: Claymation, perimeter.
And, in the “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature!” category: it is really a challenge for me to think visually… which means that I”m less likely to make things visually complicated, and that’s a good thing. Yea

I’ve told the student who was most industriously attempting to figure out the conceptual difference between perimeter and area today that I’d try my project on her… (note to self: beta tester does sound better than guinea pig, doesn’t it )

claymation math, here I come!

xiousgeonz — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 16:29:33 +0000

I have no idea whether this will go anywhere or not, but our next project in my 2D animation class is to make something with pixillation. Instead of *drawing* things in frames and making a digital “flip book” in Flash (where, just as in olden days, I draw the frame a little further along each time to “create” movement), we are to take pictures of things that change from picture to picture, and thus appear to be moving.
Oh, and I get to do something educational. The actual assignment had other structures that would be fun…we were to animate an interaction between human and object(math book ) … but I will have *much* more fun bringing perimeter to life… or, perhaps the CLoak of Divisibility. must get clay today ;0

And now, to start schooling myself in How To Travel Light To Conferences…

Forgot My Magic Pen

xiousgeonz — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 16:53:01 +0000

I left my Echo Pen at home. That’s a bummer because a math teacher and I just colluded and came up with what I suspect will be a nifty way of helping students understand square roots.
We were recognizing that students don’t attribute meaning to the radical square root sign of my cute animation project (which I got an 88% on but is not shareable yet)… and I mentioned that I had sometimes described “square root” as a special kind of division where the answer had to be the same thing as you were dividing by.
So he draws a radical with the 16 inside… and then draws the four and four as if they were the long division problem. ka-ching!
Okay, I’m going to gimpify it, anyway. Image comin’ up!

“I’m getting better!”

xiousgeonz — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 02:22:41 +0000

Ya know, I think I might be getting a little better at the affective part of this job… seems to be the week for hearing students say self-affirming things. Okay, the guy who expressed that he felt better about math than he had in years hadn’t been working with me — but had simply dropped the hybrid course using ALEKS (entirely procedure-based and hard to navigate) and had taken up using Modumath during the time he would have been in Math class… but there have been lots of good things happening.
I have made a Flash animation for my 2D animation course that I think I am going to turn into a real lesson.

Scooping it again ;)

xiousgeonz — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 21:29:51 +0000

Yes, htere’s still a lot of spam (I think the *majority* of which is generated at the $40 version of what you can get for free for learning subitizing) but there are gems among the clutter, including http://rebecca-robbins.com/2012/01/25/your-math-homework-is-not-a-hungry-lion-strategies-for-cultivating-math-skills-and-curiosity/

Last week was crazy-hectic but I’ve got my Tuesday project done and handed in… except that yes, it’s creative so … I really “need” to go in early tomorrow and tweak it.
This has been a week of appreciating just how necessary encourage ment … as in constant, steady, stick-it-in-between-everything encouragement… is for the people who sliiiiide down the negative train of thoughts track…

cut and paste :)

xiousgeonz — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 16:15:13 +0000

… this is from my “parkland” blog — that I’m going to dedicate to Parkland specific stuff.

I think I rather like this activity for REALLY learning slope: http://larkolicio.us/blog/?p=787 – pulling off the getting the watches and the setup ready would be the challenge for moi

http://engagingideas.net/frcc-student-learning/math/ describes discovering that 10% of the students in pre-college math courses weren’t able to put whole numbers on a number line between 1 and 20 in spatially appropriate ways. I have been trying to figure out a way of assessing student concept development in math, and this sounds like a good start.

http://www.statlit.org/pdf/2009CarnegieFoundation-Developmental-Math-CC-Students-Understand.pdf

(I’m not directly linking that for people like me who might impulsively click and *then* realize a significant file is being downloaded… but its’ very worth reading.)

describes more research into just what developmental students think about when they’re donig math problems. A quote: “…It is clear from the interviews that students conceive of mathematics as a bunch of
procedures, and one often gets the sense that they might even believe it is inappropriate to
use reason when memory of procedures fails. Roberto, in our case study, asked at one
point: ‘Am I supposed to do it the math way, or just do what makes sense (paraphrased)?’
He appears to think that the two are mutually exclusive.
… But there also is some good news. In every interview that we have done so far, we
have found that it is possible to coax the students into reasoning, first, by giving them
permission to reason (instead of doing it the way they were taught), and second, by
asking them questions that could be answered by reasoning. Furthermore, the students we
are interviewing uniformly find the interview interesting, even after spending well over
an hour with the interviewer thinking hard about fundamental mathematics concepts. This
gives us further cause to believe that developmental math students might respond well to
a reason-focused mathematics class in which they are given opportunities to reason, and
tools to support their reasoning.”

So… What I am Doing On My Winter Vacation is exploring how to do that…

Oh, yea, the thing that started this was http://www.ncsall.net/?id=481 — for the link — http://www.ncsall.net/fileadmin/resources/fob/2008/fob_9a.pdf is the actual file.

implied motion

xiousgeonz — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 00:36:44 +0000

Links to my pictures for Tuesday, CSC 186:
Green Sign Go

Monday Night Ride (cues: two wheels and upright, familiar thing that moves, eyes forward and/or on others in scene

Step to it! (cues: lack of balance, interaction with others in the image)

Hauling Logs (cues: sweat & exertion on faces, imbalance, and presence of road)

Slow Motion (clues: change)
into the storm (Clues: it’s a road, depth of horizon and those rocks on either side)

Parkland Bluster (cues: suspended flakes, drifts)

Scraping along…

xiousgeonz — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 14:45:13 +0000

I gotta say the Google Gargantuan isn’t impressing me these days. There’s just something about a link to an “article” about math anxiety that has big fat google links on top and the barest skeleton of a web page template… oh, and there are three more of the same article with slightly different templates, and if you grab a sentence instead of the title and google, you find somebody’s legit article deep in the webs. http://www.austincc.edu/math/documents/Coping_With_Math_Anxiety.pdf is the real thing…
… and there are generally several “new” articles *each day* linking to the forty dollar (except that it’s free if you go to the real site) product to help you with your dyscalculia. And no, there’s no “hey, click here to tell Google somebody’s passing off others’ content as theirs.”
The other trend (no surprise) is that the U.S. has less information about math education than other countries.