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Learning in Schools: What We Say We Do vs. What Students Actually Experience
Schools regularly point to learning theory as justification for instructional practices, but the way those theories are used in classrooms rarely reflects how learning actually occurs for students. The gap is not about teachers misunderstanding theory, but about schools attempting to layer multiple theories at once without creating the conditions that make any of them…
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Automation: Making Thinking Visible
Unit 6 shifted my focus to automation, and it immediately felt relevant to students’ everyday lives. In my first activity, I brainstormed examples of automation my students already experience. Their computers log them in automatically when they scan a QR code. Math platforms adjust difficulty levels without a teacher intervening. Google Classroom surfaces commonly used…
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Seeing What Matters: Abstraction in Art and Computer Science
For my final creation in Unit 5, I designed a lesson titled Seeing What Matters: Abstraction in Art and Computer Science. My key takeaway from this unit is that abstraction is about identifying what truly matters and setting aside the rest. When we understand the essential features of something, the bigger idea becomes clearer. The…
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When Abstraction Breaks…and Then Works
This MakeCode project was focused on abstraction… and it humbled me. I went into it thinking it would be a quick build. My plan felt simple: instead of donuts subtracting points, I wanted them to add points. I also wanted one type of donut to be worth more than the other. Conceptually, it made sense.…
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Abstraction, AI, and Seeing Patterns in Real Time
This week, I explored several AI tools through the lens of abstraction and computational thinking, and I had an absolute blast! I started with Quick, Draw! and immediately went down a rabbit hole. After a few normal rounds, I began testing the limits. I tried drawing the most abstract versions of objects I could, just…
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Abstraction Through a Mad Lib
For this activity, I started with a detailed story about a doe and her two fawns. It was specific. It had setting, tone, personality, and imagery. Then I abstracted it. I used the WordLibs generator from The Word Finder to build and test the abstracted version of my story. I removed the specific nouns, adjectives,…
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What Abstraction Reveals…and What It Hides
My next unit focused on abstraction, and it pushed my thinking in a different direction. In our first activity, I examined everyday examples of abstraction and identified what each one highlights and what it hides. That framing helped make abstraction clear. A graph of a knight’s tour highlights possible moves but hides physical proximity. ORF…
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Patterns, Generalization, and Discovery
For my final creation in unit 4, I created a mini lesson on multiplicative thinking focused on patterns and generalization. The objective is simple: students observe patterns in numbers and use them to make predictions. We begin with a familiar sequence, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, __, and ask not just what comes next, but…
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Iterating Through Pattern Matching
This week, I created a game in MakeCode Arcade focused on pattern matching. While I enjoyed building the mechanics, what stood out most to me was the music. In my previous projects, I had only discovered how to create custom sounds using solfege. I thought that was the extent of the music features available. In…
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Training AI and the Problem of Bias
This week, I experimented with training a simple AI model using Code.org’s Oceans activity. The task seemed straightforward. Train the AI to recognize fish based on the examples I provided. I felt confident I had trained it well. And yet it still allowed an apple into the fish category. That moment was eye-opening. It forced…
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Alexis Flanders 