A lot has been learnt from our Learning Environments and Technology class. I especially gained many new insights on how advanced the current development of Web 2.0 tools in the field of education particularly. From cloud service, digital storytelling, game along with different kinds of digital realities until the last (and personally most complicated) theme which is robotics and circuitry, I consider everything useful for my future career as an educator. That is why I think nothing goes wasted in this course. Now that I think about it, my favorite part would be the educational game designing. As mentioned in this entry, I am now considering to have game or gamification as the topic of my thesis. I also base the academic poster from the Entrepreneurial Mindset course on this topic together with my groupmates. The topic of game is always the most fascinating, at least for me that I was willing to spend days just to toy with RPG maker and eventually create my own.
Speaking of the final assignment, I also enjoyed it a lot. The first phase was quite challenging since I and my other team members were kind of blind in the realm of maker learning. We had to research first in order to sufficiently understand it before further designing the curriculum. Luckily, the instructor provided us some useful articles which helped us a lot to build the foundational concept in each of our minds about what actually maker education entails. Specifically, the idea of ethical hacking captivates me because I had not experienced nor learned it before in my prior education. At the same time, I was also challenged because to apply this principle means that teachers have to provide an example so that learners can learn in a sort of reversed engineering fashion.
The project, talking from my individual perspective, went very smoothly thanks to my cooperative crewmates. In spite of the very few synchronous meetings due to different time zones and college schedules (we were from different countries and study programs), the tasks could be shared equally and responsibilities carried out. All of us agreed to have indoor urban farming as the context of our maker learning, and the first step was to decide the "skeleton" of our example design before further development. Once it was settled, we also divided the circuitry tasks and curriculum documents. I got to craft the LED light embedded with a light sensor for the garden tank, so that even during bleak and dark winter consumers can still farm merrily in each of their homes. To begin learning how to code was also a whole new experience for me but by dint of Adafruit in Makecode, I eventually comprehended a bit how to make a very simple set of programs. Regarding the curriculum which was easier than circuiting, at least for me, I prepared the one for students using Google Classroom. In a nutshell, this project is quite demanding yet worthwhile for I was given opportunity to delve into this new trend of maker education.