2021-22 Homeschooling Projects

  I modeled freezing, melting, evaporating, condensing, and absorbing. I wasn't able to do animations because animating cant work well in many situations. I have included sound; I included a "pop" when the water appears, and I have added a glug sound when the water gets absorbed. I have also added the ability to move up and down when in cloud form and ice form respectively. I will add more movement options later.

This post is for friends who are considering homeschooling this year due to covid. This is what I have settled on, and Eric and Kyle are handling it well.  1. You will need to apply to your school district, following whatever details they require, probably including a written letter listing your curriculum, your qualifications, and how you plan to report their schoolwork (this blog and our tool's test scores will be how I report "grades"). In Billerica, homeschooled kids don't take the MCAS, but we could have arranged iReady testing if we had wanted. I sent the letter certified, so I had a signature that it had been received, and the district sent back a letter saying I was approved. 2. Since we plan to send the kids back to public school next year, once the pandemic is under control, I am following the Mass DoE's grade-level requirements, found at http://www.doe.mass.edu/frameworks/current.html. Open each document (blue headings), find your kid(s)' grade leve...

Snake Food Calculator A friend needed a spreadsheet to calculate the amount of food she needed to purchase every three months for her 20+ snakes. Eric and Kyle created a spreadsheet in google sheets, based on her requirements. They experienced the development process (requirements gathering, prototype, collaboration, review, debug, update), with me working as project manager. Images: submitted version vs initial prototype.   Eric: I really liked coming up with ideas and figuring out how to implement them. Learning about editable lists was a really fun part of the project. I didn't think editable lists were possible without changing the code every time you added or removed a item. I found making it user friendly yet functional very hard because I was trying to make it overly complex, so I had to simplify. Kyle: It was fun to make this spreadsheet in school because it was different from the usual droning on and on about numbers and formulae and I was helping real snakes and not this ...

This week we have been parkouring (PE, Heath), and built a marble track which will require a few tweaks to get working smoothly (Art, Engineering/Computational Thinking).