Gardening MakerSpace
After looking into the MultiMedia Fair's past student work, I began to examine what applications students had used to create their art. This gave me the idea of using the Concepts app to create a digital garden.
Math TEK: 5.4(H) represent & solve problems related to perimeter &/or area & related to volume.
The student will create Digital Art of a garden that displays how many plants can fit in a flower bed in the Concepts app. This can be done on a tablet device and drawings can be done with a pen that is compatible with the tablet.
Concepts is a flexible vector-based sketchbook where the user can take ideas from concept to reality. This means that the creator can draw and sketch with realistic pencils, pens, and brushes. Concepts offers an infinite canvas with design tools such as grids, line smoothing, and shapes guides to help with real-world scale and measurements. Concepts is trusted and used by creators at Disney, Apple, Nike, PlayStation, and Illumination Entertainment.
For this activity, Concepts is a useful tool in that students can use grid lines to ensure a straight perimeter drawing for their flower beds as well as rows and columns for the plants or seedlings the students will choose to add into their project.
Below is an example garden that I did through Concepts.
This video shows the different features that Concepts offers. In My Garden Demo, I created a fenced perimeter with the dotted line feature. In each dotted perimeter I added either flowers, bushes, or a combination. In the video and for my final dotted perimeter, I added a tree. This was done with the "free features" offered. If students wanted more features, they can pay an additional fee.
With this Digital Art lesson idea, students can personalize their garden in size and plant details while working on perimeter and area. Students can also submit their work to this years Multimedia Fair.
For more information this years Multimedia Fair please click the Mulitmedia Fair hyperlink.
Standards
5.3.a Model and learn with students how to formulate computational solutions to problems and how to give and receive actionable feedback.
Students will get an idea from My Garden Demo, however, students will formulate their own computational solutions to problems as they create their own garden.
5.3.c Plan collaboratively with other educators to create learning activities that cross disciplines to strengthen student understanding of CT and CS concepts and transfer application of knowledge in new contexts.
My group and I will discuss perimeter and area to help students better understand the various CT and CS concepts while using the Concepts App to display the modeled lesson.
(commented on Jackie Prado's and Ellionna Coppage's Blog- this will not be in my blog post later)
Excellent idea for your activity Raeleen! One of the activities I plan on doing is similar to yours but focusing on the actual measurements of the garden beds they are building. The app you found is a great way to build their own garden bed. I am currently looking for a similar style of app so I am glad I was able to view your blog and learn about this specific app. That gave me an idea to search for apps that utilize a grid if I don't find the specific type of app I am looking for because the students could always use the square units as a form of measuring their garden beds. I was able to find some games online that were garden themed related to measurement, so I bet you could find some specific to area to incorporate into your lesson if you wanted to.
ReplyDeleteThis is a great application for creativity! Could students, families, educators also collaborate on one idea? Can you layer an image, such as MetroE's desired raised garden bed areas as a base to the drawings?
ReplyDeleteSharing such features for the collaborative community goal of having raised garden beds at MetroE will also produce more realistic parameters for your activity. The results could be sent back to MetroE for them to post and vote upon possible class design considerations to facilitate their conversations among teachers, students, parents, and Master Gardeners.