While I am enjoying designing a lesson of my own I am partially sad that this will be the last project of the semester as no matter how challenging any of the projects were I thoroughly enjoyed making them. Once again I have decided to put a lot of pressure on myself and challenge myself to make a project that would not only be beneficial to students but is something that I can use afterward.

My plan is to design a lesson that combines learning a language, in this case, Korean, with a student made Scratch game for them to practice anything that is challenging them about what they are learning in their class. I chose to focus on the basic vowels and consonants, there are combined ones that finish out the alphabet but I have not learned those yet, as those are characters and sounds that I know how to pronounce and write. This way students would have a guide during the beginning of their Level 1 Korean class while also getting to make an interactive notebook to use in class.

I chose to make my teacher examples reflect students who would be in different places of achievement in the class. Developing, competent, and proficient. This way I could always shape my expectations or lesson around the abilities of the students and directly reflect the level of work expected in my rubric section of the lesson. This way I would also be able to imagine and depict what students in different grades, with different levels of skill and maturity, would be able to do when presented with this project.

For me, the first step was designing the notebook(s), I had to go through the Design Thinking Process in order to figure out exactly what would be included in the project’s final design as well as which grades I was going to design this project for.

My first thought was to take simple circuits and then program light patterns through attinys on different pages of the notebook. I ended up going back to basic simple circuits afterward because not only would all of my programming have to be done on a computer that was not mine, limiting the amount of time I had to finesse the program, it would also be very complicated for students not in junior high or high school to do as well as potentially running into a budget problem. So I decided that I would focus on simple circuits, teaching students how to solder the LEDs in to the notebooks carefully and then figure out how the layout of the notebooks would be so when demonstrated to the class, people understood what was being covered not only in my art class but in the language class it was paired with.

Afterward, I went on to Scratch and began messing around with the codes and how to animate the letters I wanted. I tried using the codes that allowed one to work with Google Translate for access to Korean before realizing that that would not allow students to record themselves and actually practice the characters in the game. I drew the first prototype all in Scratch so that I could see what a student, who may face a lot of struggles in taking their hand-drawn images and bringing them into Photoshop might due in order to complete the project. Afterward, I worked at my house over the break and worked on computer drawing and hand-drawing all the characters very carefully so as to represent a mature, older student’s work or the work of a very careful student trying to copy the characters exactly as the teacher taught them. I began recording the sounds for the different characters but unfortunately got ill when coming back from Thanksgiving break and so have been unable to finish recording all the sounds so that they are clear and understandable.

Afterward, I moved on to designing the next two notebooks in class which is when I came up with the idea to make the different teacher examples represent different levels of student ability or success in the project. I ended up making one of the projects look very different from the others to exemplify going above and beyond in the project as if I was a student working on this project and wanted to be very neat and careful with my work.

The Design Thinking Process, while not at the forefront of my thinking when approaching this project has popped up multiple times as I work on, then scrap, edit and remake aspects of my project. Additionally, every time I talk with one of my classmates I am able to share my project and get feedback that has helped me find different resources and ways of designing my project.

Below are some of the resources I have used so far and will continue to refer to as I finalize this project:

https://scratch.mit.edu/ideas

https://scratch.mit.edu/

http://www.nexmap.org/light-emitting-diode-led

Simple Circuit Tutorial