After many years as a part time teacher, I’ve recently moved to a full time position.

As part of this move I’ve found myself in a very low edtech environment with not a lot of funds allocated to changing that.

As I plan my lessons for the year, I decided to not focus on what’s missing but on what I can do with creativity as my main currency.

I doubt I’m the first to use this, but I’m starting from Scratch. It’s free and works on the sluggish pcs that I’ll have to work with.

Also looking at some cheaper micro PCs as well as the new Raspi Zero is only 5$. Not sure if that is the right tool for us right now, but happy to start thinking about easy entry projects.

from https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/did-you-get-a-raspberry-pi-zero/

I’ve also stock piled some great cardboard….just need the right design challenge.

This Friday the 11th our third installment of the Maker Toolset after school club at Tokyo International School will begin. The theme is create Rube Goldberg inventions.

Full disclosure: I didn’t know what a Rube Goldberg contraption was until that viral Ok Go! video, actually the TEDx talk that summarized the process.

I was, however, quite familiar with ピタゴラスイッチ (pitagorasuichi) an NHK kids program that includes many short sections and usually including 2 Rube Goldberg contraptions. Its katakana for Pythagoras’ Switch, the math legend who came up with A2+B2=C2, but I don’t know the history and why it’s called that. It was one of the first tv shows I saw when I moved to Japan. It was love at first sight. I’m pretty sure that ピタゴラスイッチ now means RG machine.

What I am looking forward to is connecting the new digital and the analogue. ピタゴラスイッチ will sometimes include some electrical devices…but I haven’t seen any with programming involved. It seems to me that with some programming you could create some more complex and precise movements…really adding to the visual aspect of the RG contraption.

Looking forward to this installment!

After wrapping up our first session of the Electronic Arcade Club, two things stick out in my mind.

The first was that having the last session before Game Day as an optional extended period. What a great idea. We saw a lot of progress that day combined with a lot of playing around. Playing around is great, and we don’t want to create a strict environment, but in a 1 hour session, it’s easy to lose a lot of time to play testing.

Second thing, was watching the amount of time each team would spend playing their own game and looking for a link to how it fared on Game Day. The winning team, Candy Inc, was giving away chocolate to players, something that really impressed me as they obviously thought about empathizing with their target audience, but definitely a lesson learned and something to mention next time as we want the games to popular for their own sake’s…I mean, who doesn’t love chocolate? The second place team spent a considerable amount of time playing their own game. This either tells us that it was in fact a well designed really fun game, or that all the play testing helped make it better, or both. Win-win.