Lesson 3: Providing Differentiation and Feedback For Your Students

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Hello and welcome back. In this lesson, we are going to talk about two topics that tend to work hand in hand in our teaching practices: differentiation and feedback.

Now, we know that differentiating our lessons is a great way to reach students where they are and help scaffold their learning moving forward. This is good teaching practice in all subjects, not just in computer science. We also know that giving meaningful feedback to students as they're working or after they share a project with us is crucial. It helps students articulate their thinking, think more deeply about their code, and enables us to assess how students are thinking about the various learning goals we're trying to accomplish within our classes.

It's not just about whether our robot gets to the end of the maze or if we clear all the castles. We want to consider many other aspects aside from just program execution. Do students really understand what the sensor is doing and how they're using that data in their project? Can they think of another way to solve this problem? What are some other ways students can be creative in their code? How can they learn from past experiences? There are so many different things to consider as we're teaching, and we can use differentiation and feedback in our classrooms to make the most of that teaching experience.

But now you might be wondering, well, that sounds great, but I don't have the time to create individualized lessons or challenges for all of my students. In this video, we will discuss how there are tools and features built into VEXcode VR that you can use to bring differentiation and meaningful feedback to life in your classroom in a simple and easy way.

First off, we're going to talk a little more about differentiation and how we can use some features in VEXcode VR to help us differentiate effectively for our students. One of the things I love most about these tools in VEXcode VR is that they enable me to differentiate students' experiences and learning based on their learning targets without the burden of differentiation being on the student.

What do I mean by that? It means that I know where everybody's learning paths are and the levels at which my students are working. However, for my students, they're all working on the same challenge with the same goal. Even if I have students at an advanced level versus those who are not, they're all working together to achieve the same goal, and I can assess them based on where they're at. The burden for the student is not in having to catch up to where the other kids are. It is in being able to use what they know, build on their learning to solve the challenge, and meet their particular learning goals and targets.

So how can we do this? Well, there are several ways. We talked briefly in a previous lesson about using the levels in VR activities. Each activity has multiple levels that naturally build in some differentiation. We're all working on the same activity, but Tyler and Susie are working in level one, this group over here is working in level two, and this group over here is working in level three. Yet, we're all sharing our knowledge and learning about the same thing.

Some other tools we have, aside from just the levels of the activities, are in the actual playgrounds themselves. So let's jump over into VEXcode VR, and I'll show you a little bit about what I'm talking about.

So there are some playgrounds within VEXcode VR that offer some customization or customizability, as I like to say, that enable us to then kind of scaffold students' learning within the playground itself. One of these is Castle Crasher Plus, right? So here's our Castle Crusher Plus playground. It looks really great. My students are gonna be very excited about crashing this castle. But if I want to differentiate within this playground, what you see here is the standard level of this playground. If I select the hamburger menu and then this icon, I can see that I actually have leveled options within this playground.

So I can start my students in level one. That's standard. That's what we see opening automatically by default. But if I have students who are ready for a level up, then I can have them solve this challenge in the level two version of this playground. So when I select level two, now when I look around the playground, I see that there are more features on the playground. There are more obstacles that my students are gonna have to avoid. They're gonna have to figure out how to deal with these trees and the additional rocks and things like that. So now I've just built in another layer to this challenge where again all of my students can be working in Castle Crasher Plus, but the ones that need and are ready for that additional challenge can have it within just leveling up the playground itself.

Another playground that has some great customization is the Wall Maze Plus. So here we can see, here's my Wall Maze Plus. Now I can have students use various different sensors on the Maze Bot in their projects, but I also can select this hamburger menu and I can upload and save various different mazes within this playground that are made specifically for what my students need to work on. So if I need to make this maze less complicated, I can just select that little edit icon and I can start on deselecting various features. I can add starting points, ending points. I can remake paths that navigate my students through a maze so I can really customize what my students are doing here individually.

So I can make three or four mazes that everybody's again, working on the same Wall Maze Plus but with a maze that meets their level. That's not going to be so challenging that it becomes frustrating or discouraging, but that isn't so easy that it becomes boring for them either.

So another playground that offers some great customization is of course the Art Canvas Plus playground. Now, we've shown a little bit about how we can use that playground in different ways, but within the Art Canvas Plus activities themselves, there are often for each of the levels three different images that you can upload. So in addition to creating your own images at any point in time, there are also leveled images you can upload and I'll show you a set of those right now.

So this is the slide slideshow that's attached to the Constellation Mapper activity. And you can see here that the three different images for the three different levels get progressively more complex, right? So we have the blank images, and then we also have samples of what the path should look like for students as they are figuring out how to code their robot to complete each of these constellations. So again, we can now develop various different Art Canvas screens, really Art Canvas playgrounds for our students that have varying levels of detail, or alternatively, have students create projects with varying levels of detail in their code. So maybe they need to use more colors, or they need to create something that has five different shapes. So you can really kind of scaffold and level that playground to whatever your students' needs or interests are.

In addition to playgrounds with customization, if we also have students who are ready for that next level of challenge, the competition playgrounds within VEXcode VR are a fantastic way to really help students stretch their learning and to learn about how to code different kinds of robots to do many different sorts of activities. All of these virtual skills and competition playgrounds feature the virtual version of the Hero Bot from that particular game. Each of these playgrounds has a unique robot with unique features and functionality specific to that game.

For instance, in this particular game from the VIQC pitching in game, we've got Fling, our virtual Hero Bot, which has an intake and a catapult to enable it to intake these balls from around the field and score them by throwing them into various locations. Now, our students are not only in a very engaging playground and playing a unique game with different scoring components and aspects, but they also need to learn about each of these different components of the robot. How does the catapult work? How do I control the intake motor? How long do I have to spin the intake to intake one of these balls?

All of these different playgrounds enable you to level up students' conceptual understanding of the mechanics of their virtual robot and how to control all of those using their code, as well as build in a level of strategy and creativity. If the ultimate goal is to score points in the pitching in-game, there are many different ways to do that. Students need to blend what they know about coding the robot with what they know about playing the game to combine those things in a beautiful blend of computational thinking, strategy, and computer science to bring that to life in their projects.

Another playground that offers a high ceiling of coding capability is the Rover Rescue Playground. Rover Rescue is our most advanced VEXcode VR Playground. Rover Rescue, as well as the Competition Playgrounds, are not designed for introductory coders. These playgrounds require a base level understanding of how to code your robot and are designed to take students' coding skills and learning to the next level. You'll see a lot of things in Rover Rescue that you don't see in any other playground because this unique robot is equipped with AI capabilities.

The goal of this playground is to navigate your robot around in an open-ended exploration of this planet where you are attacking enemies, gathering food, and trying to stay alive as long as you can. To do that, students need to learn how to use these AI capabilities and explore how to use AI in their projects to survive as long as possible. Just like in the Competition Playgrounds, there are a number of different strategies and ways to make the most of your time here in this playground. You can be aggressive and start seeking out enemies, or you can try to hide from the enemies and gather up all of the minerals.

Once students begin to understand how they are going to approach the playground and how they're going to use the AI together, we get that beautiful blend where students can scaffold their learning and level up their coding skills to meet a goal that involves strategy as well as functionality.

So now that we've talked about some of the ways that you can differentiate and really level your coding experiences to meet your students' needs, let's talk a little bit about how we give feedback while our students are working and the ways in which we can use some tools in VEXcode VR and in VEX in general to be able to help with that.

We know that setting students up with the right level of challenge is an important part of the picture, but the feedback that we're giving to students as they're working to help them to understand that just getting to the end of the maze maybe isn't the only goal is also incredibly important, right? When we are creating learning targets with our students, we know that we want our students to not only understand what the distance sensor is on this robot and how to use it but also how to troubleshoot and persevere when their project doesn't go the way that we thought it would. How to navigate and use multiple sensors in a project, right? There are a lot of different learning targets and learning goals that we can have for our students.

So what are the ways in which we can really give feedback that helps guide their thinking and learning that doesn't just give them an answer and walk away? There's a really great VEX library article that I'm going to share with you that offers some prompts about having conversations with students as they are coding and working through a project. This article talks about facilitating coding conversations with students as they are working together on their code and working with a robot, whether it's virtual or physical. We always want to be cognizant together with our students of three things, right? Where are they? Where are they going? What's the goal of the project? How are they doing in terms of pursuing that goal? And where are they going next? Or how are they able to improve?

When we scroll down in this article, there are a number of different conversation prompts and questions that are designed for you to be able to elicit those kinds of conversations so that you are able to facilitate these conversations not only to know how students are functioning in the classroom, right? So you can help put out fires when they arise but also to be able to get some of these formative assessment questions answered for you, right? If I want to know how my students are doing just with surface-level understanding, I can just ask them simple things like, can you explain what you're working on? Can you give me an example of how you're using the distance sensor here? What's your plan for your project? What is the robot going to do first, second, next?

But if I want to be focusing a little bit more on something like problem-solving, the prompts and the questions that I'm going to ask are going to be a little different, right? I might ask students what's working well in your code so far? What is the problem that you're currently trying to solve? What is a solution that you could try? Why do you think that solution would help? The idea here is not just when my students say, oh I have a problem, not just giving them the answer, but asking them to come up with a solution or guiding them to a solution and then having the students articulate why they think that solution will help them.

All of these conversations then get at this idea that our coding and our computer science learning is yes, about getting our robot to do what we want, but also about these larger conceptual things that are going on as we are learning computer science as well.

So in all of these coding conversations, not only are you able to give students good feedback and have really great conceptual conversations with them, but you're also getting feedback from students about what it is that they understand, where their challenges are, and what their misconceptions are. You can then use that feedback to plan your activities to meet students where they are. This feedback goes right into differentiation, right? If I'm getting good feedback from my students and I'm giving feedback, then that allows me to differentiate to figure out which students are ready to go to the next level of Castle Crasher, or what maze I should try to figure out to help my students understand this particular concept a little bit better. They're getting to the end of the maze, but I don't think they're a hundred percent sure. So how can I create a maze that really helps them to figure that out? Differentiation and feedback work hand in hand.

Another tool in VEXcode VR is the share feature. Okay, so here we are back in our Wall Maze, and I've got an example project open here. When my students share this project with me, they will use this share button right in the corner up here. So when we select share, what are the things that our students can now enter? Well, they're gonna put their names in, they're going to put the assignment in, but then there's also this notes field. This is a fantastic place for students to write about what they accomplished in this project, the challenges they faced, and how they think they've met their learning goals for this particular lesson or activity. What are some questions that they still have? Because maybe our students started to get into these conversations with us one-on-one, but our notes can also give them a great place to continue those conversations or initiate them on their own. We will see all of that when we get that shared project from our student.

So now, when my students share a project with me, I not only get that project file that I can download and run, but if I don't have time to download and run every single project, I also get this fantastic PDF that shows me the student's name, their class, their class code, the assignment that they typed in, and any notes. For example, this project used the front right distance sensor to navigate the maze, but this is the place where students can also write about, "My partner and I were really challenged to figure out the parameters for using the right distance sensor, but through trial and error, we got there." They can ask questions like, "How can we do that without trial and error?" They can respond to things that you talked about in your coding conversations and about their learning goals. We think we met this learning goal really well because we got our robot to the end of the maze. But when it comes to this other learning goal about problem-solving and collaboration, we really struggled with that today. Maybe you can help us with that tomorrow.

The PDF shows you the playground, the project name, and all of those good features. The first thing that you get in an image form is where the robot is, an exact snapshot of the playground at the end of the project. So if we want to know if our students got to the end of the maze, cleared all the castles, or what they drew on the art canvas, we can see that right here in a quick, easy snapshot. So now I know, oh, okay, they did get to the end of the maze. Great, now I want to know how they got to the end of the maze. If I could scroll to the next page, I now get a PDF printout of their project. They added a note that will be in here as well. So again, I don't have to download and open up every single project. I can look here and read the code with my students.

Thank you for your attention and dedication to enhancing student learning through coding. Your efforts in providing feedback and fostering meaningful conversations are invaluable. Keep up the great work, and let's continue to support our students in their learning journeys.

I can write on this if I want to and give it back to my students with some feedback. This is a great way to be able to use student projects as example projects to talk about this code in your classroom and use student work as examples as well to be able to highlight kind of what are some of the exemplar things? What are some things that this group did that were really creative or unique?

The bottom line with all of these features is that it gives us ways to assess students beyond just did the robot get from point A to point B? That is just part of the picture, right? We know that we want our students to have agency and interest and creativity in their learning. So what are the ways that we can use differentiation, feedback, student self-assessment, and all of those things to be able to really foster that? Well, by being able to assess more than just, okay, did the robot get there? Did I score the most points? Right, that's part of the goal, but it's never the entire goal.

So being able to have notes, have conversations, see student projects, see where the robot ended up, it enables us to look at the big picture of what students are doing and learning within VEXcode VR. That then helps us to differentiate further, to shape our teaching further, to shape the kinds of feedback that we're giving to be able to know how to interact with our students to really make the most of their time in our class.

I hope this video has given you some helpful tools and some helpful inspiration for how to use differentiation and feedback in your classroom, and I look forward to seeing you back here soon.

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