Fall Colors and Talking Leaves with Preschool

 The school I teach at starts in junior kindergarten, or preschool. Students are four years old when they start the school year. This presents many challenges for designing projects. Students are so young when they start. The beginning of the school year is focused on students adjusting to the structure of school, transitioning to different spaces and learning about the library space. For the first several weeks of school, the library is a more traditional storytime and time for the students to find books to check out. Once the junior kindergarteners are more settled into the school year, I introduce projects connected to what we are reading and learning that take several class sessions to complete. This year, I started with a project connected to fall colors, seasons changing and talking leaves!

The project started with reading several books that talk about the changing seasons. We read: Leaves by David Ezra Stein, Hocus Pocus It’s Fall by Anne Sibley O’Brien and Old Bear by Kevin Henkes. With each book students shared what connections they made with the story including noticing the leaves changing colors around the city, activities they do with their families during fall like apple picking and pumpkin carving and what they know about how animals start to prepare for the winter. Junior kindergarteners also made connections with the colors and pictures in the books. The illustrations in the book all had the colors red, yellow and orange, all colors that they see around the city and the neighborhood during the fall.

After reading the books and making connections with the topics and what they see in the world around them we moved to the project. In my library program, we focus on weaving technology in and finding ways for students to see technology as a tool to share their voices and knowledge. When students are so young, technology is introduced sparingly and with intention taking their developmental age into consideration. For this project, the app Chatterpix was shared. This app is a simple and fun app that allows users to add a mouth to a picture and then record their voices.

Each student picked the picture of the fall leaf they liked the most, red, yellow or orange. Then they drew a mouth on the leaf and recorded their voice saying “My favorite fall color is _____.” The junior kindergarteners giggled and laughed so much hearing their voices come out of the leaves! After each student recorded their talking leaf, the videos were uploaded and a QR code was generated. The final step was printing out the QR codes and attaching them to a leaf. Then I created a “JR Talking Leaf Tree”! I attached the leaves to a fake light up tree and displayed it in the school hallway so that students, teachers, families and other community members could scan the QR codes and hear all the leaves talk!

This was a great first project from my youngest students. The junior kindergarteners were able to engage in a project and make connections with the information they learned and shared over several weeks. Students were also able to use their own voices with a new piece of technology to start to make connections with the idea of technology as a way to share their ideas and knowledge. The final project share out was a public display that highlighted the youngest students in the school’s work.

Game Building with Scratch, MakeyMakey and AI Images

 Artificial Intelligence is such a big topic in education right now. Should students or educators use it at all, what are the guidelines and rules that should be instituted? How do you talk to students about AI, when should you start? As the technology becomes more accessible it feels more and more important to start talking about and sharing the positives and negatives of AI with younger students as well. When students are in middle and high school they will have a better understanding and foundation on how AI works and how it can be a tool for them to use and when it is the appropriate time to use it if they have a foundational understanding of AI. With my fifth grade students I found a way to weave AI into a current project and give students the opportunity to play around with the tool and have some experience using AI.

In the past I have done a design and coding project with students using Scratch and Makey/Makey to make a video game and working game controller. There have been different themes that students have been given over the years, based on the big overnight camping trip they go on every year, designing a game for first graders connected to SEL topics and more. This year, I decided to make the connection to using the AI tool in Canva.

I started out the project asking students what they know about artificial intelligence and how it works. Many of the students had a basic understanding that AI is machine learning, that the program learns more as it collects data. We talked about the benefits of AI and using it, how it is a tool that can be helpful with planning, understanding materials and structures. We also talked about the limitations and negative aspects of AI, how it can be biased and racist. When computers learn from humans the program can learn positive aspects of humanity and all the ugliness of humanity as well. Then I introduced the project and how we would be using an AI tool to help with our project.

I shared that students would be making and designing video games using Scratch coding. The theme for the games would be random picks! In one basket I had an animal or object and in the second basket I had a location or place. They would randomly pick from each basket and that would determine the ideas that would need to be included in their video game design. Each student picked from each basket and had themes that include mushrooms and Paris and hotdogs on the rings of Saturn and elephants at the pyramids. Then I introduced the Canva AI tool. My school has an institution subscription to Canva, students are able to login with their school email accounts and use the Canva AI image generation tool.

The Canva tool allows you to input different words and descriptions for the image you want to generate. Students played around and tested it first, seeing that the more descriptive words the more detail was added. They also noticed that no matter how many times or how many different ways they tried to describe what they wanted the image just did not come out the way they wanted, this helped them to better understand some of the limitations of AI. Students used their keywords and the Canva AI tool to generate images for their backgrounds and characters for their Scratch coding games.

Next, students logged into Scratch and started a new program. We walked through the different types of games they could code, including a chase and avoid video game or a capture video game. I shared with students how to upload their AI images and edit them in Scratch to be their backgrounds or their characters. Students had some Scratch coding experience, as the project progressed, they learned more code blocks and built their knowledge of how to make their games work. Students had several class sessions to make their games work, adding code, testing and debugging their code to make their games.

The next step was to connect the Makey/Makey and build their game controllers. Students were reminded how a Makey/Makey works, that they need to complete a circuit by using conductive materials, wire, alligator clips and a human to make their controls work. Students then designed and built their game controllers. Some students designed their controllers to connect to the theme of their games, others were inspired to make theirs look like real game controllers. Fifth graders tested the controllers, made sure their wires and connections worked and made any corrections they needed to get their game controllers up and running.

The final step was the whole class sharing out! Students set up their games and connected their controllers and they were ready for the 5th grade video game share out extravaganza. Students went around the room playing their classmates games and offering positive feedback on each other’s games.

Overall this was a wonderful experience and project. Fifth graders were able to use AI in a setting and experience that allowed them to explore the technology in an authentic way and use the work that was created within a project that was their creation and creativity. They also continued to grow and expand their coding skills and reinforce the idea of ideation, prototyping, testing, and then if something does not work going back to ideation, prototyping, testing again.