Cheerio, Everyone :)

This past week my group mates and I have been working on finalizing our rubric for our block language and submitted an abstract. We were each given a portion of the “in-progress” rubric and researched on them.

The four parts of the rubric I got assigned to was:

• Attractive Text/Graphics/Video Sound, Navigation
• Deep Shareability - Computer Clubhouses
• Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors
• Creative Options

For each of the parts, we found two articles/journals from academic sites that backed our reseason, as to why they are essential in including in our rubric. Some of my findings were that choosing a harder text-font for students to read increases the chances of content retention. Which I found to be interesting, because while I find that true, I also think it may lead the student to focus more on the text-font then material. The article, from edutopia, stated that “the primary purpose of type is not really to be readable, but to convey information that is to be remembered. Surprisingly, readability might not always lead to the best information retention.” I will be researching this further to see if it something to include in our “Attractive Text/Graphics/Video Sound” portion of the rubric.

For the second portion of our rubric, we decided that a Computer Clubhouse would be a nice thing to include in our block language. But at the moment, we are going to incorporate deep sharabilty by using portability avaliable, this is because it is a goal we know we can accomplish.

For the part of helping users recogize and recover from their errors, I found research from Dr. Carol S. Dweck stating that many students are afraid of making mistakes, leading this to being afraid of not only trying something new, but also “of being creative, of thinking in a different way.” So in our block language, we want to make sure that students know that making mistakes is the best way to learn. Scratch also recognized this and allowed the place where your drag and drop to be messy, to represent that sometimes things can get messy but that’s ok. :)

The last part of the rubric I researced was creative options. I had a somewhat hard time researching this because I thought it was to broad of a topic. So this past Friday, my group mates and faculty advisor helped me better understand this and clarified exactly what we mean by allowing creative options in our block language.

Though we are very close to finalizing our rubric, we went ahead and put them into an order of importance. In addition we made a 3-Points scale for each of the components in our rubric and included a weight.

This week, each of us will decided on the points our part of the rubric deserves, as well as finish up reading the four articles assinged to us last week :)