Hello Everyone!
I just wanted to share my thoughts on the activity of creating a Piper Computer; how it tied into other aspects of computational thinking, how I think it could be beneficial to students, and how I personally felt about the assignment (spoiler- I loved it!)
A video about a mom and daughter assembling and reviewing the Piper Kit:
My group began by opening the box and examining it’s contents, we pulled out all the pieces and set to work reading the instructions! By reading through the instructions and proceeding in order, we were using algorithmic thinking, but because the pieces were so well labeled and we had previous experience (Abstraction and pattern recognition!) we were able to work without constant reference to the blueprints. To work more efficiently and make sure the entire team was doing something to contribute we all found one part of the project to work on ourselves and bring back together at the end. Unfortunately, as you can probably guess, forgoing the instructions halfway through and working on separate section resulted in mistakes. Namely we assembled the entire thing (assembled the monitor case and bottom case) before realizing that we needed to install the hinges! So we had to take apart the monitor in order to fix it 😥… Which I think is a great example of collaborating to solve a problem that was caused by poor communication (and planning). We were so confident in our ability to piece it together with no guidance that we had to almost start over- hard lesson learned that instructions are there for a reason, and that algorithmic thinking is just as valuable as the rest of computational thinking.
After the computer case was complete we played the Piper Minecraft game, and worked together to put all the electronics together, and we made sure that we were all able to watch and participate- because that is one negative to this project. The technical aspects are difficult to have multiple people doing at once, only one person can use the mouse and only they can do most of the interaction on screen. This could make it difficult for students to work in groups or pairs, some may feel left out with having to do less. There is also a learning curve if students haven’t played Minecraft or video games before, but fortunately the game has instructions and is simple to understand.
But overall, the project was a really fun way to learn programming, team work, assembly, and computational thinking! The aspect of computational thinking I felt my teammates and I really found in this project was essential attitudes, despite us messing up more than once with assembly, we were still able to have fun and learn from Piper! In the future I will continue to use this knowledge about Piper and Computational thinking when coming with the solutions to problems for myself and my students.
I think Piper could benefit students because it’s learning in a way that comes naturally to most of them- children like to learn through play! I personally have been playing video games my entire life, and with technology easier to get then ever, I would reckon that most young students have been too! This would also be an assignment that teaches children problem solving and acceptance that even if you mess up you can always try again- which is something I know that children really need to hear, both to help them be confident in themselves and help solve problems better. Here’s a video explaining that in depth 😊:
Steve Carr the Global Head of Marketing at Premier Farnell said: “Learning to code, which was added to the National Curriculum in the UK in 2014, and physical computing, which includes learning to build with electronics, can help teach these skills.” about children learning computational thinking skills in the future and now! So it helps students learn computational thinking skills in a fun way, that can help them learn through failure and success. 😁 (Plus they can be reused from year to year with no issue!)