Turtle Blocks

I spent some time playing around on Turtle Blocks, and I am at the very beginning stages of doing so since I was having some technical difficulties last week since my mom broke my computer! UGH! Anyways I was trying to play around with the numbers until I got my turtle to make a star!! Which I sort of figured out by accident... so I am not quite sure what combination of entries ended me with this. But I think it looks pretty cool!

I was getting frustrated at first, as we all do with new technologies. But once I started using what I know about math to help me through it, then I felt more comfortable. I could see how everyone was really struggling with this platform during last week's session because you think that the turtle is going to end up in one place and then it seems to end up in another. (Unless that is just me that was happening to haha...) After I realized though, that the turtle was only going forward and right (DUH, i know) then I was able to better maneuver him in the manner that I wanted. I also realized that the preset was to repeat this method 4 times and that was why it was creating a square and if I were to change this, then the turtle would move in a different fashion. So I tasked myself with creating a star... and this sort of came together as an accident but I am pretty proud of myself! After I made the initial star, I wanted to make layers of stars on top of each other so I played around a little more until I came up with this...

Pretty cool right?! Or am I just a math nerd? IDK...

Anyways, I think this was an excellent learning experience with using new technologies. I think it is so important for us to understand what our students go through when we introduce them to new technologies quickly and then ask them to start using them. As we saw, there are many questions running through their brains and a lot of frustrations. If anything, I think last session was more successful than most of the classes I've been in because it is actually putting us in our students' shoes. Something super familiar to us like using google as a search engine or attaching a file to an email is something that may be super unfamiliar and uncomfortable to them. This shows us that sometimes we need to slow down and approach things in a calm and patient manner because not everyone will understand things at the same rate.