TED Talk

 As I do not feel comfortable putting my face/voice on the internet in an unprotected way like this, I have shared my TED Talk Transcript below. 

Follow along using the Product Page on this website! 

You can find the link on the left, or here. 

Hello and welcome to my TED Talk. When I started this blog in September, it was with the intention that I would be able to teach myself the coding language of R for the purposes of sharing that knowledge with my colleagues so we could integrate coding into our Grade 9 Destreamed Math courses, as per the new curriculum. However, that is not exactly where I ended up. Here's my journey.

Coding has always been kept at an awkward distance from me. If you had met me as a child, the adults around me would've said programming was something I was great at and could find a career in. This was mainly because I spent a lot of time on my family's computer, on Microsoft XP, and I figured out the basic functions, and some of the more advanced features. But for whatever reason, around middle school I plateaued. Some of my friends went on to do interesting things with software and build their own computers, but for some reason I couldn't get over that hump. I think the reasons were financial and being too shy to ask. And that's where I still am with software like Python. I don't know the language and I don't know how to begin. People say it's easy, but for me it isn't. 

That story of my past parallels directly with my experience in this Genius Hour. I felt like I needed a teacher. A real teacher, not just internet tutorials. I got as far as I possibly could in the time restrictions handed to me in R, but at a certain point, I needed to create something that I could use if I had to do it all on my own. And that's where Scratch came in. 

Scratch is an intuitive, fun, amazing coding language developed by MIT that is used by kids from elementary all the way up to high school. And since it worked so well for them, I figured it could work well for me, and it did. I had a lot of fun in Scratch, quickly learning that gamifying learning is an excellent way to problem solve, iterate, and get familiar with coding languages. Even though Scratch is a silly kids tool, you can do a lot of powerful things with it, including have objects move, interact, count, sense, and tell a story. 

That's when my mandate for this Genius Hour switched. I went from trying to learn something on my own, to problem solving potential ways to facilitate learning for students. Giving them simple tasks that can be elevated, followed by a framework where they can explore, get creative, and not feel limited by the direction their brain goes. All while learning how to code and implicitly applying the skills of Grade 9 math in the background.

The final chapter in this Genius Hour arrived when I realized I wanted to bring things back down to solid ground and out of the clouds. Namely, going directly back into the math curriculum and helping students solve clear and direct problems digitally and visually. That's where Desmos came in. The Desmos Teacher database is an excellent resource for teachers to find visual math demonstrations, student-led learning opportunities, and problem solving practice for many different problems in algebra. 

While R and Scratch are great tools for exploration and fun, I struggled to find how they were helping students understand the concepts they should be learning. I sort of found coding to be an extension tool rather than a learning tool. What I'm saying here is not the be-all, end-all, nor is it experimentally sound. It's just one person's experience after exploring this world on their own. 

That said, I hope that the series of lessons that I developed -- in particular the early R and all the Scratch lessons -- are useful to someone. My code in R was very messy, and my tasks in Scratch very silly, but maybe it's a jumping off point. 

Coding languages are here, they are vital for the next generation, and they're very powerful. I just hope I can get some professional development in order to facilitate and usher that next generation along.

Thank you for reading my TED Talk.