LaurenandLloyd.com
where our wasted time becomes your wasted time
Our previous previous art teacher at Lincoln Lutheran, Donna Willet, always had a little cut out of the Mona Lisa peeking over one of the bulletin boards in the art room. Donna’s retired from teaching about four years ago and the cut out came down. I got tired of not seeing it and finally got around to doing something about it.
There are lots of famous paintings and lots of classrooms at school. I’m thinking about art bombing the place. Anyone have suggestions?
I’ve had a head cold since Sunday. Lauren has been nursing me back to health by leaving me alone. I stayed home from school on Monday thinking that I would do that at the start of being sick and see if that got me well sooner. I felt better on Tuesday, so I went to school. Then I felt worse on Wednesday, so I went to school anyway just to throw the cold for a loop. I’m feeling a lot better now.
My voice was really shot on Wednesday, so I hooked a lapel mic up to the speakers in my classroom and I didn’t have to make hardly any sound at all. But it was kind of annoying when I coughed.
Anyway, that’s not what I wanted to tell you about. On Tuesday, after I got home from school I took some medicine and went to bed. When Lauren got home she yelled at me because I was suppose to take the medicine with food. Then she brought me chili in bed.
She’s a keeper.
Dear ******,
It was nice to speak with you during last week’s Tech Crawl. I was the teacher working on gamifying his high school programming class. I was also the guy who handed out the flyer full of typos. How embarrassing.
My students are starting to get into the spirit of gamification and it’s interesting to see that there’s not just one thing that’s motivating them. Some of them are interested in being near the top of the leaderboards. Some of them are interested in leveling up and getting to pick perks from the “perk tree.” Some of them are interested in the idea of getting loot when they level up, and some of them just seem to like the idea that programming class is going to be different from the rest of their day.
As you might recall, my mission was to find Nebraska tech companies who were interested in promoting the creation of more home grown Nebraska programmers. At the university level they are telling us that they don’t have as many students applying to the Computer Science program. My goal is to encourage high school programming students to excel at programming by gamifying our programming class.
One part of this gamification process is to provide loot to students as they “Level Up.” Would ****** like to provide some loot? Loot could take many forms. Here are some ideas that occurred to me, but I’m more interested in ideas that you have:
Again, just some ideas. I’m open to anything.
How much do we need? I have 20 students (that’s 10% of our student body), so if there is something you want every student to have we would need 20 of it, and we would offer it as loot at a relatively low level. Anything in smaller quantities -and smaller quantities are fine- we would offer at higher levels. I would be happy to pick things up if that makes it easier on your end.
Thanks for anything you care to do to help encourage students to excel at programming, and if you have any questions or suggestions, I would love to hear them.
If you want to check up on our class, you can find us at: http://programming.
At this point there are new leaderboards, achievement, perks and so on being added every week. There’s also a blog if you’re interested in how things are turning out.
You actually have two of my former programming students working for you now: Derek Guenther and Rees Klintworth.
Lloyd Sommerer
teacher/technology coordinator
Lincoln Lutheran High School
Friday was the last day of school at Lincoln Lutheran and for our “Finals” period we watched the videos that the students had been working on for the past 5 weeks. They were pretty good, given (a) the time constraints, (b) that it was their first attempt at editing together a video and (c) the fact that it was the end of the school year.
But after Ben showed his, the whole room erupted in applause.
This is probably the best stop motion animation that anyone has ever done for one of my classes. Some of the ways he uses those legos is really inspired.
I completely neglected to report on two important milestones, so let me tell you about them now.
Last week I passed a quarter of a million miles on the Honda Civic. I knew I was getting close, but for some reason I switched to the trip odometer and missed the actual event. Except for the times when the car was stolen, those are all miles driven by me or Lauren.
I also forgot to mention that I’d been at Lincoln Lutheran for 10 years. I missed that one by almost exactly a year. As my good friend Ferris once said, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”
I guess we’ll see if the Civic makes it to 300,000 and if I make it to 13.
iPad presentation smallIt’s late here; it’s been a long day, and Lauren is too tired to write a post. Our Gala dinner and auction fundraiser for Lincoln Lutheran High School was last night and I was in charge of the presentation where we asked our supporters to donate $36,000 to buy iPads for all of the teachers. I was supposed to give a $36,000 presentation, but I only delivered $35,000.
Rather than me bore you to death with details, ask me any question about the evening that you want and I’ll answer it.
UPDATE:
Lauren here with some photos. Note, I really needed a flash, so they are mostly blurry.
Lloyd and Curt behind the centerpiece:
Lloyd’s display for the iPad project. We borrowed the display boards from the nice local Apple store.
Charles photobombing:
Bob was the emcee. He said he was a little nervous, but he didn’t look it one bit.
I am sad this didn’t turn out better. Charles and Deborah looked great!
I was curious how the golf-ball-patterned butter balls were made. I asked the wait staff and it turns out they don’t make them on side. They arrive as bags of butter golf balls, to be shaken out onto little plates.
UPDATE UPDATE:
Here’s the presentation: small presentation (PDF ~3Mb) large presentation (PDF ~30Mb)