Teacher Storyboards

Sometimes tossing out the agenda and responding to the surroundings on a given day yields great things - and today was one of those days. I went in prepared to run a dry science brainstorming session, consisting of me up on stage for several hours writing core science topics on the board. But when we entered the focus group room, we saw the teachers already at the computers, working with the physics applets we had showed them yesterday! So we let them continue for a while and re-formulated the plan.

So instead of starting the whiteboard session, I asked them for their thoughts on the applets. They showed us some ones that we had on the computers but hadn't had a chance to show them, so it was great that they were exploring. After discussing some of their favorite applets, we showed them the optics applet and had them work with it.



As they worked on the applet, it dawned on me that we basically knew the core science topics at this point, but the central issue was that I was having a hard time visualizing how our storyboards would ultimately look. So we came up with the idea of having them design their own storyboards for the optics applet. They did an amazing job! Using a series of panels and instructions, they outlined on the whiteboard how they would modify the optics applet so that it was more adaptable to the classroom. Great presentations and everyone was very attentive.





In the afternoon, we employed the same strategy of having teachers storyboard new applets, but this time for magnetism, electricity, and heat. I presented a few of our overly complex Java applets and they arranged themselves into teams, by subject area. They then worked with the applets and began storyboarding. We let them work for a good deal of time, and the quality of ideas and dialogue in the room was incredible. They really seemed to enjoy it.



When they went up to present, they gave us panels outlining what each stage of the applet would look like, and in some cases presented instructions. They also gave us some real life scenarios that lend themselves to animations.





At the day's conclusion, we showed them the seasons applet and the shadow mapping video, as the teachers had asked about shadows and seasons earlier, so they seemed to like that as a nice tie-up. It'll be very interesting to see what they put on their feedback forms.

The new strategy today helped us get a firm idea of what we want the storyboards to look like, so in that vein it was a success. We look forward to a student focus group tomorrow, which should also yield some interesting results.

That's all for now!