Hello, Guardians.
As the 2023-2024 school year has just begun, we’re filled with enthusiasm to document our educational personal projects and work we have done so far which has sparked plenty of creativity in our minds.
Unleashing Creativity in Minecraft Education.
From 9/2/2023 – 9/11/2023, we began slowly dipping our feet into ‘Minecraft Education’. Minecraft Education is a game-based platform which is equipped in teaching technical skills, coding, math, and chemistry (which uses real chemicals and elements). During the duration of our time using this platform, we had taken a quick overview of basic program concepts as well as getting to know each other better. One of the final projects we had completed in Minecraft Education was a competition against each other at which our goal was to make the best dance by block coding. Brooks Keller, the winner of the dance contest, got many votes from all of the students for his extraordinary work within a given time as shown below:
Creating Online Portfolios.
Our goal for creating online portfolios on a platform called WordPress, is to be served as a way to let our minds lose. In addition, its purpose is to store our career and educational materials, as well as weekly journals to grasp what we have done over the week. Mr. Klins, our teacher, shows great excitement for the future of our portfolios saying, “I’ve never done this so soon with my 1st year students, but I believe this will be an amazing reflection in the future”. Down below, is a portfolio created by a student named Holly Goodwill;
Writing in Visual Basic (.NET framework).
Moving forward from Minecraft Education, we have introduced basic writing in Visual Basic (.NET framework) Console applications in Visual Studios. Visual Studios, created by Microsoft, is an integrated development environment (IDE) which is used to develop computer programs, including web apps, web services, mobile apps, websites, ect. So far, we’ve created amazing progress in covering things like; printing to the console, reading from the console, and some basic string functions.
Creating GitHub accounts.
After creating programs in Visual Basic (.NET framework) Console applications in Visual Studios, you may wonder where we store all of our fantastic work. GitHub, an online software development platform, used for storing, tracking, and collaborating on any software projects is a critical platform to have access to for students since Visual Studios does not automatically sync projects into different devices. Since this is important, we have had all students create a GitHub account in order to complete and look at their work anytime and anywhere.
Career and Portfolio Development.
As we have only just begun our journey in code development, we have also started to learn about new opportunities and preparing for the future. On 9/29/2023, we went on a field trip to Gannon to tour the college, get a bigger insight of college life, and to dive deeper into potential majors our students could be apart of in the future. While at the college, all students were given questions to answer in order to reflect on within an article later on which, they created themselves. In addition to this, we have a career and personal project wall which every student takes apart of. This is a very crucial piece to our classroom because we are able to keep track of big goals we have in the future which Mr.Klins deeply wishes us to have.
Creating personal Projects.
In addition, to our code development in Visual studios, we have expanded this growth into personal projects for each and every student. These personal projects must be approved by Mr.Klins before being worked on to be sure these projects are going to be a educational growth for the students as well as being a project that the student would enjoy. Mr.Klins finds this very important because not every lesson we learn together will be something that everyone enjoys. Already, two students, Ben Hedderman and Brooks Keller have made interesting creations. Ben Hedderman had learned and written a javascript piece to automate an online cat playing the beginning of the song “In the End” by Linkin Park with instruments.
In addition, Brooks Keller had created a custom ‘run’ button in a game-based-platform called Roblox.
Questions?
As the 2023-2024 school year has just begun, we’re filled with enthusiasm to be able to document our educational personal projects and work to show you. If you have any questions, please email jklins@ects.org .
