Turning lego into an AR experience

Wind them up and let them go

I have a bit of a reputation around school as the VR and AR guy (I don't know why?) so it was no surprise when a grade 10 student came to me asking for help with his MYP Personal Project. He was in a bit of a panic and sent me this email

He had created several Lego models of buildings in Kuala Lumpur in the Lego Digital Designer program. He has examples of old style buildings and new buildings. The problem was that the Personal Project Exhibition was fast approaching and he didn't have time to order the bricks and build his model. He was hoping he could turn his model into an AR experience.

When I met him I checked out his models (he had put a lot of work into them) then explained that I didn't have a clue how to turn these models into AR. 

We sat together and started searching online for possible solutions (it was a strong example of me being able to model my searching techniques and show me being a learner) after a rather tedious and long search, we came across this post AR augmented reality Lego. There were some sketchy details of how to do it.

We played and finally worked it out

• we had to open the .lxf (lego digital designer) file in the Mecabricks.com website
• download the file from Mecabricks as a .stl file
• on a computer download the edrawingsviewer app and open the .stl file
• save the edrawings version as an .eprt file
• download the edrawings app on an iPhone
• transfer the file to the iPhone (the files can be rather large) open the file in app
• using the downloadable mat from the website bring your model to AR reality

The effect was pretty cool, you could walk around it, zoom in and out, it was AR, while it took a while we did it. The only real issue was that is wasn't a colour version and we needed the mat. The student went away pretty happy. As the AR guy I was feeling pretty chuffed with myself, as per usual when you start getting over confident a dose of humility soon follows.

The best bit

A couple of days later I got this email from the student.

Hi Mr. Derry,

I have been playing around with the different formatting when exporting the files as I had found out that the .stl format takes all the colours out (which was the main problem). After looking through a few ways - I have successfully transferred both my buildings from the Lego Digital Designer, into AR, with colour (it doesn't even need a QR code!). I found another website which supports 3D modelling called Sketchfab, and uploaded the files through a .dae format from Mecabricks, and got Sketchfab on my phone as well, which allows it to be seen in AR and VR. I have attached all the pictures of how they turned out. 

I am very excited to show you everything in school soon (perhaps in innovation tomorrow right after break time), and would like to thank you for all the help you have given me. I wouldn't have managed to pull this out without it! 

Have a great day,

Jordan. 

On his own, he found another way to do it, a better way with colour and no need for a mat or a QR code. You could even go close up and inside the AR model and check out the interior, something you couldn't even do in real life. This is what I love about empowering students with technology, as a teacher I showed him a thing or two and showed him how to search and what is potentially possible. He then took this knowledge and skill and built on it.

I like to call this "wind them up and let them go" get them enthused and excited and watch what they create.

I love doing this with programs like Scratch and GarageBand, just the other day after showing all the grade 5 students live loops,  I had a grade 5 student say to me "Mr D I love live loops in garage band on my iPad. I can't stop playing with it, my parents don't believe I am making such cool music".

We are also doing this in a big way at school through our innovation time, which is 2 blocks per week (the same as every other subject) of passion project time in secondary school, we certainly are winding them up and letting them go. That is a whole other post and we have some great examples to share.

Long may schools and teachers empower students with knowledge, skills and the time to explore their passions.

Redesigning our learning spaces - the shark tank

Part 1 can be found here
Part 2 can be found here

What else can I say, the teams were

The be honest everything seemed a bit rushed, we asked the teams to meet in their own time and do some extra work, there was a weeks holidays and before we knew it the Shark Tank session was here. Would the groups be ready? Would their ideas be any good? What would the shark tank think? I know I was a bit nervous about the entire process.

To be honest I had nothing to worry about the teams were incredible, each of them had a different slant on their learning space, each of them did lots of work and they all presented their ideas creatively and professionally. One of the big pluses was that the teachers stepped back and let the students present.

The rules were as follows
The goal of the presentation is to sell your idea for your new learning space, remember we are trying to generate ideas for and there is every chance your ideas will be used.

There will be no winner, although if you want to claim bragging rights (and maybe be first in line for an innovative learning space) you will have to do a super job.

Each team will have a maximum of three minutes to pitch their idea to the shark tank, you will have access to a data projector, anything else you want to include (dance music, lifesize 3D models, treats) you will have to provide yourselves.

The shark tank will then have 1-2 minutes to deliberate then another 1-2 minutes to give feedback.

Each presentation and feedback will take 5-10 minutes, that way we should be finished by 4pm.

We will use a random draw for the order of presentations.

Team 1

The Drama room

Highlights

light and sound system
flexible seating
curved bench

portable stage

mirrors

chill out / cave areas

Team 2

Level 7 Design Room

Highlights

a stressless environment
sofa, bean bags - comfortable areas
air freshener
laptop tables / trays
standing long desk
basketball bin

Team 3

DP Lounge

Highlights

hands on interactive paper presentation

flexible multipurpose space

glass concertina doors

blinds

portable data projector 

effective use of space

Team 4

Level 6 Common Spaces

Highlights

flexible furniture

no clear path through the area

use of corners as social areas

TV / data projector to practise presentations etc

sound system

laptop charging cupboard

plants to look good and improve air quality

add extra ceiling fans for more natural cooling

have the same set up in two areas of the school

Team 5

Science Corridor

Highlights

turn the science hallway into a learning space

for many students it is the first part of the school they see every day

how can the hallway be brought to life

add nature to the hallway - fish / plants / incorporating art

find plants that need low light

a series of fishtanks where fish can travel from tank to tank in tubes like a series of cells

seating so people could hang out here and get some nature

What now?
The response from the Shark Tank and the other groups was overwhelming positive. The big questions everyone is asking is where to now? What is happening with these super ideas?

The Leadership team is very keen to move ahead with some of these ideas, their only question was how much consultation was done? Who was included? and Who else needs to be included?

So that is our next task, exploring some of these ideas and then consulting with more users and budget holders and then hopefully improving some of our learning spaces. It all looks very positive and lets hope is remains this way.

Of course once we have these super new learning spaces I will share them here.

Redesigning our learning spaces part II

part 1 can be found here

In teams of teachers and students, we have been working through a process of collaboratively redesigning some of our learning spaces.

This is a five week process using the Stamford Design Thinking Process.

Our five steps / lessons / stages are

1. Introduction to the Stamford Design Process

2. Revisit the Process focussing on empathy and creating a problem / challenge statement

3. Work in teams to ideate a new learning space

4. Prepare the presentation / pitch of the new learning space

5. Pitch the learning space to a panel of peers and stakeholders

We have now completed stages 1 and 2 with most teams having created a challenge statement and sharing it on our shared Google Doc. The Challenge is to keep the energy flowing and the the good ideas bubbling to the top.

Week 3. Ideate a new learning space

We started by recapping what it means to work in a team, or more accurately asking the teams what are some of the things that need to happen so that their team works effectively. We used this video to start the discussion comparing good teamwork vs bad.

We spent some time explicitly addressing the power dynamic, i.e. a teacher leading or being part of the group and how could we overcome this so that everyone in the team had equal input. We also again went over our three metaphors for learning spaces and reminded everyone to focus on empathy and really listening to what people wanted in a learning space.

I provided the teams with a heap of resources and encouraged the teams to add their own resources.

Some of the resources included

Videos of how other schools have changed their learning spaces,WAB, Shekou and this playlist.

Links to schools to look at and tips for redesigning spaces

Then there is this great Flipboard Magazine from Tricia Friedman at UWC

Then it was time to work ideate, teams started exploring, playing and listening. I would have loved to be a part of every conversation and discussion. I did get the chance to flitter between groups and loved what I was hearing.

One group completely changed their plan for the science corridor after speaking to the science teachers. They wanted worm farms and other live animals, but they didn't think about who would look after them, now they want fish and plants, low maintenance and they clean their own tanks. It was so refreshing to see teachers and students listening more than they spoke.

I have a feeling the results are going to be great

Week 4

Preparing the pitch

We had plans to bring in an expert on presentations and share something presentation zen like, giving our students some tools and ideas. We ran out of time and to be honest couldn't find the right expert. Looks like we will just have to trust that our teachers and students have the right stuff when it comes to a Steve Jobs Style pitch.

We also wanted to maximise the time that the teams had working ideating their redesigns. We also guided / suggested / instructed the teams that they would want to probably meet again before next weeks Shark Tank.

Every team was so into the process that they were happy to meet in their own time, even after school and this is in a busy time of the school year, exams, athletics etc.

We have had lots of positive feedback about the process and most of all students and teachers appreciate being listened to, the big challenge will be to ensure that once we get these great ideas that something actually happens. It would be a disaster if all this collaboration and listening didn't lead to action.

Next week the Shark Tank, where our teams pitch their ideas to a group of critical friends.

Parent Workshop April

Link to the presentation

Useful Resources

www.commonsensemedia.org

Popular app guide for parents and teachers
Web of Trust - safe web searching and browsing
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Australian Government - Parent Portal Staying Safe Online
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Redesigning our Learning Spaces

Our Learning spaces at IGBIS need an update

 Even though we are a new school many of our classes still look like a classroom from 20 years ago. We don't have any really innovative teaching spaces. Some of our rooms including the library and art room are very cool, functional and flexible. 

Some of them are just plain drab and boring.

Learning spaces are something I have been thinking about a lot lately.  I have lots of ideas, I read lots of articles and have visited (and photographed) schools with innovative and cool learning spaces. hopefully we can  move forward with getting some 21st century learning spaces at IGBIS. The new boss is very receptive to looking at our learning spaces, after chatting with him we thought any redesign should be a collaborative process, including all stakeholders.  The challenge was how to go about collaborating to plan new learning spaces.

I attended a workshop at Learning 2 last year led by Victor Boulanger on using the Stanford Design Thinking Process in schools to solve problems. I also attended a session at Deep Learning (KL) on using the Design thinking Process to design curriculum. I also would have liked to attend this session by Sarah Phoenix at Deep Learning on learning spaces, but circumstances didn't allow it. While talking to a few people at school, we thought we would try using the design process with a group of students and teachers to plan some new learning spaces.

We invited interested staff and asked them to nominate two students each to form a working teams to redesign a learning space in the school. It could be a classroom, hall way or common area. We sold the process as a brainstorming process that could actually happen. We then planned out five sessions / workshops / working times

1. Introduction to the Stamford Design Process 

2. Revisit the Process focussing on empathy and creating a problem / challenge statement

3. Work in teams to ideate a new learning space

4. Prepare the presentation / pitch of the new learning space

5. Pitch the learning space to a panel of peers and stakeholders

These sessions are to be held during school lesson times and after school.

So far we have completed part 1 and 2

Session1

I gave a bit of content on what to look for when thinking about learning spaces including the three metaphors for learning spaces

For a more detailed explanation see this document from Thornburg campfires in cyberspace

Then using the crash course guide from the Stamford Design Process website, we worked through this document  in pairs with participants designing a new learning space. Participants had to pair up with someone who was not from their team.

It worked really well, this is the second time I have used this crash course with staff and the first time I used it with students, both time I was impressed with the response from the participants. I empathised the importance of the empathy stage multiple times. 

People really like being listened to and having just 3-4 minutes of someone really listening to you and focusing on your wants and needs is very empowering with lots of positive feedback from teachers and students.

We didn't finish the design process (we ran out of time) but the participants had a good introduction and got a feel for what was coming up.

Session 2

Revisit the Process focussing on empathy and creating a problem / challenge statement

Here we split into our teams one teacher and two students per team and used the same document to work through the design process.

We then revisited the three metaphors for learning spaces.

Each team chose a learning space that they wanted to change, they worked through the first two steps of the Design Process, Empathy and Define.

Here teams interviewed each other and then chose a few other people (outside of the team) to interview with the intention of really empathising with the client (person they were interviewing). We gave them a list of open ended questions and emphasised the point of telling stories and listening. They then had to generate their problem / challenge statement and bring it to the next session.

This was a shortened session, but there was a lot of passion and energy once the teams finally picked a learning space (one team we had to guide and offer suggestions for their learning space). We could have done with more time but teams really started to get a feel for what sort of things   

Next week we will be researching and working in our teams to start designing our new learning spaces.

We have made lots of progress and the design process is working well, it gives us a structure and a way to collaborate where everyone is an equal (can sometimes be hard when students work with teachers) and gives us focus for our end product.

How we do Activities (the 2016 version)

The way we have been running our school activities and athletics has been evolving over the past two years.

We started with a paper system in 2010 but quickly started using Google Forms, Sites, Docs and Sheets.

Since then we have learnt a bit (A LOT) and made a few changes, used a few different apps and add ons, improved some things and simplified others. We have new staff, some staff have left. Our process isn't perfect and it still has scope for improvement. It seems like this little project will always be in beta, which is fine, better than fine, it is important to always be in beta.

So what has changed? How are we doing things now and how are we going to do things in the future?

We still have an activities Google Account 'activities@igbis.edu.my' that all sites, forms and documents are created through. That way the resources are not tied to a teacher but to a role. It also means any emails that are sent are sent from activities@igbis.edu.my. We forward all emails sent to this address to our actual activities coordinator. This has been very useful because in three years we have had three different activities coordinators and this year the role has been shared.

We still have our activities Google Site which has now also turned into out activities and athletics blog

We still have a page with all the activities and sign ups using a Google form embedded into the page.

How has the process changed?

This is what we do now.

1. two to three weeks before student and parent sign up, teachers fill out a Google form letting the activities coordinator know what activities they want to be a part of. The activities coordinator uses this information to create the student / parent Google form sign up. They also use the data 'using the save as doc Google sheets add on to create a list of all available activities. This list is posted on the site as an embedded Google doc, that can be modified

The site is sent to parents and is available on our school splash (launch page) which is available from the school website.

2. The Google form is embedded on the Activities site and students (secondary) and parents (elementary) can sign up for their activities. Each day and time (morning, lunchtime, afternoon) has a drop down menu to prevent students from signing up for multiple activities on the same day. For a while the form had four pages (one for each section of the school) this made sorting the data complicated. We now have two pages (Elementary and Secondary). Next we will probably go back to one and make sure we are careful about how we name our activities on the Google Form.

3. We used to use Ultradox trigger to automatically generate emails to the students and parents, now we use 'Form Mule' to automatically generate the emails. It is free, easier to use and allows us to send more emails per day (up to 1500).

4. The form has two pages, one for elementary activities and one for secondary. There are also multiple options on days with before school, lunchtime and after school activities. To generate a summary of what each student signed up for on each day I used the concatenate function in Google Sheets

This gave us a nice summary column for each day which made the email to parents and students easier to create. We have a one page template which contains a table.

It is very important that we are careful and deliberate about how we name the activities. If the activity is in both secondary and elementary they must exactly the same name. If an activity is on multiple days this needs to be indicated in the name (usually the day of the week in brackets after the name "swimming (M)". We also need to label paid activities. All of this labeling is very important when we start sorting and organising the data.

Warning from now on some parts can get a bit tech heavy. This link takes you to an example Google Sheet where you can play along or copy formulas.

5. In Elementary the parents sign up themselves, so they know what their children have signed up for. 

In Secondary the students sign up and we wanted a way to let the parents know what their kids have signed up for. In the past we asked students to add their parents email address, this was problematic because there was no consistency with email addresses (people didn't use their school email) or the email address was typed incorrectly. 

To solve this problem we used the VLOOKUP function, I have another google sheet (downloaded and modified from Managebac) with the student email addresses and parent email addresses. The function below will search my other sheet 'list of parents and students' looking for the student email address (this came from the form automatically as the students had to be signed in to complete it) it then returns the value next to the student name (which is the parent email addresses)

Then I use the concatenate function to combine the student email address and the parent email address into a single value in a new column. The comma allows multiple email addresses to be used at once.

This new value is then used by Form Mule as the email address to send the personalised email to. This personalised email uses the data from step 4 in a table to give the students and parents a summary of what has been signed up for.

Form mule is then set up to send the email on form submit.

Students sign up via the form and an automatic email is sent to them and to their parents letting them know what they have signed up for.

Organising the data

6. Once the sign ups have closed, the activity coordinator then needs to organise the data and decide what activities can run and what can not.

We used to use a query to send the data to a new sheet, we still do this to generate a list of students who need bus transport

Making 50 new sheets for each activity is time consuming, so now I

use this Array formula function to generate a list of unique values from my form responses, which is a list of all the activities that have been signed up for.

Then using data validation I create a drop down menu in a new sheet

I then set up the new sheet with the headings I want.

Using this following formula combines a query with the drop menu, so now you have an interactive list where you can select the activity and then it returns a list of all student who signed up for the activity. Decisions can be made about the activity runs or if extra space or staff are needed. It is interactive and updates as new responses come in (if the form is still open and sign ups have not closed)

The activities coordinator can then copy and paste (making sure to paste values only) to a new sheet to create any list of students signed up for activities that he or she likes.

We then do the same thing for grade level so teachers or admin can search for students in their grade and see what they signed up for.

An example spreadsheet with all the formulas can be found here so you can copy and paste and create your own magic.

Sending out a final confirmation email (and invoices)

7. If students need to be removed from activities because the activity is not running, they change their mind or the activity is  over subscribed, they can be taken directly out of the original form responses sheet. This then creates our master list of all activities that are running.

This master list than then be used with the above drop down menus to make an interactive list for teachers.

The coordinator drafts an acceptance email that tells students and parents which activities they have been accepted in and any fees they have to pay (for paid activities). This includes links to sport websites, agreements or attendance guidelines.

We have some paid activities and the email acts as our invoice. To generate the amount students need to pay I copied the list of activities and then did a find and replace to replace the name of the activity with the amount, then by summing up the amounts we had a total column.

When then use Form Mule again using the acceptance template to send out the final acceptance email. This time we use the send conditions and have two separate templates. One for a student who has paid activities and owes money (condition is total amount column is null) and one for students who don't have paid activities (condition is total amount column is not null). This allows us to personalize the email even further.

These emails can be sent in bulk rather than being sent on form submit with the press of a button.

8. The activities coordinator then created attendance lists in Google Sheets (by copying and pasting from the drop down menus) and shared this with all staff and put it on the activities website (in the past we asked staff to create their own) that way anyone who has viewing or editing rights can see at a glance who is at activities.

Teachers are encouraged to make a repeating calendar event with a link to the attendance sheet. That way they get a pop up reminder (on their computer / iPad / Phone) that reminds them they need to take attendance with a direct link to the attendance sheet. One click and they are ready to take attendance.

We haven't used the awesome table on the site any more because we now have the interactive sheets and they weren't used that much.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Thats_all_folks.svg

We have improved and changed how we do activities but we still have room for improvement. I am really happy with the way the process has evolved and survived three different coordinators.

The three major changes from 2010 are

• using Form Mule instead of Yet another Mail Merge, 
• the introduction of email invoices and interactive sheets
• automation of adding parent school email addresses to the student email addresses in secondary. 

In my last post there were a few things I wanted to change

here they are in blue below

Some improvements that we already know we need / want include

• parent Google accounts to allow them to log into our domain (Done)
• links on the school web page / creation of a splash page for students / staff / parents (Done)
• a workflow / diagram so all parties know the procedures including dates for each stage of the process (Done, this blog post?)
• a streamlined attendance function (Maybe, still some work to do)
• an automated email gets sent to the activities coordinator when students are marked absent. (Not yet)
• a way for students / parents to find out what activities they have signed up for (Not yet, maybe we do need the awesome table although we don't want parents to see other kids activity sign ups)

The other improvements we still want to see include

• a drop down list for bus locations
• a simple form (a single page with no repeating questions) to make the sorting of data easier
• generation of email lists so teachers can easily email all the students in their activity
• a link in the email allowing students or parents to modify or edit their sign ups (so they can do it themselves.