Switching rooms for hardware

Mon, Aug 9, 2010

The class had hands on experience with dismantling and assembling the hardware components of a computer in room B109. Now, we're in room B207 with AJ revealing the function of each hardware starting with the power, how other hardware communicate and the versatility of a computer through the use of the motherboard. The analogy AJ is using to describe the function of a computer is the central nervous system of humans. Such as, the spinal cord connects to the brain. The revelation from AJ, he stated that rats can laugh if a person tickles it!! That one came from left field :O

After the rat thingy, AJ informed the students about the different regions of the motherboard. Such as, the low level control (BIOS), north bridge, processor socket, RAM, South bridge, Serial ATA for hard drives and PCI controller Interface, and IDE for disk drives. Oooohh! Bus is another word for a connection.

How would you describe the main purpose of the motherboard? versatility - hard drive can run different programs at the same time. Like a house, say a person wants to view the tv but everyone in the house is watching it in the living room. So, that lone person can take the equipment to the basement and plug in the components to an outlet and watch a tube, there we have it.....versatility.

Why do computer have to prioritize processes? Take keyboard for instance, it is highly prioritize because if people are able to type on the keyboard of a computer while the computer process other programs, it makes people happy since they don't have to wait to keep working.

The north bridge has direct access to the CPU. What else is connected to the motherboard on a computers. Everything! :)

Cristina continues the lecture with the SATA drives, optical drive, CPU, PCI slots, Graphics card. Then it was right to the mighty compatibility exercise! And she was not playing cause she wanted all of to the student to pass the test for tomorrow, also, she reminded the class to open the attachment to her emails. Because students have not been opening their attachments to the emails.

Now, we're back in room B109 and Ann has the students go over a quick review game of jeopardy on the power point program before their Permit Road Test. All the students have their thinking caps on while taking the test.

Many Uses of Computers: Hardware

The day begins! Cristina introduced the class to the basic outline for the day and then invited Elizabeth to introduce herself. AJ went around and had each of the students introduce themselves and then zoomed off into a lesson on the Motherboard and hardware.

AJ likened the motherboard system to both the human nervous system and city structure. A memorable moment was when AJ explained one difference between the nervous system and a computer, in that a computer won't know when something's wrong with it, it will just keep working and trying to make it work. He said there were certain viruses once that would disable the fan on a computer, so the computer would keep working, working, working without a fan . . . and eventually it would start on fire! Josh in the back joked about how crazy it would be if we just exploded when we got sick . . . he also kept insisting his name was "Thorax the Impaler" or "Doom".

Soon followed a fun discussion - why would someone create a virus? We talked about people using it for advertising and stealing personal files, what a trojan horse is . . . Viruses, viruses, viruses! It was great :)

After introducing a comparative computer parts exercise and then explaining that she would send further information this evening in powerpoint form.

After a very short break, the students found themselves in B109 for an hour of taking apart computers! Maddie covered:

North Bridge:

• CPU
• RAM
• the video card (kind of a part of the North Bridge)

South Bridge:

• The optical drive
• The hard drive
• SATA cords
• IDE cords
• The floppy drive
• the power source
• the heat sink

Great job Maddie! That's a lot to cover! Everyone had fun trying to figure out how the pieces came out of their plastic/metal racks and how to put them back in. Yeah! By tomorrow everyone will be a pro and pass with flying colors on their permit test

After returning to their own room, Cristina did an optional review of powerpoint during break (clever use of time Cristina!) Then AJ introduced the permit test and everyone took it for the last half hour of class, when they were finished writing their blogs. Yeah hardware day!

Meeting B109 with Cake!

The class began with an introduction of B109's intern, Keke (even though she's been in their classroom for the past couple of days, some of the students didn't know her name yet), so it was a good refresher for the B109 class.

After Cristina's introduction, Chou stated his name ... about three times.. and as he was doing this, Ian raises his hands, gets called on, and says, "Can I call you Chou-baka?"

"I get that a lot, so sure," replied Chou.

After a moment of silence, Cristina stated, "You know, in Japanese 'baka' means 'idiot.'"

And the class burst with an "ahhh-I-see" face and a little laughter.

After Chou, came AJ's introduction which started with an, "I watch Star Wars all the time."

Next came, Rodney, who the students knew pretty well already.

When the instructors were done, the students re-introduced themselves and then AJ officially began the day's lesson... Yes, baking cake again!

Like yesterday's blog for B207, AJ went through the PowerPoint and worksheets.

Meanwhile...

--------------------------------------------------------

As Keke was working silently on her blog post, Ann comes knocking at the door asking for Keke's assistance. Ann looks at Cristina and asks, "Is Maddie with Michelle all afternoon because we're going to be needing an intern." With a confused look, Cristina replied, "Shes.. supposed to be with you." Ann didn't see Maddie that afternoon, but about 10 minutes later, Keke comes knocking at B109 with a relieved look, "She was with Michelle."

The lost Maddie had bumped into Michelle who decided to check up on her internship!

Thanks Michelle for clearing things up down in the labs! We were worried that Maddie had disappeared!!

--------------------------------------------------------

As the instructors and interns were falling into place, the students in B109 began working on their worksheets... silently.

Day 3: Baking Cake? At ITA?

AJ started the class with each student playing something from Youtube... simultaneously~!
He stated, "It was interesting to see what all of you guys were playing all at once," or something of that sort =)

Next, they had a moment of silence...

Soon after this, AJ began answering various questions about the past few days.
Most of these questions regarded Blogger... how to organize their blogs... how to upload images to their blogs, and just... where is the picture of me?!

After he answered all of the questions, AJ started making cake.

In a web site, the recipe is the website, the codes are what you follow, and the finished cake product? That's your actual website!

AJ then proceeded to "dip [his] little pinky" into HTML codes with the students.

Somewhere along the line, Josh stated that, you need more [of something], but AJ cuts in, "Just one." Nevertheless, Josh stuck to his statement just to hear, "Just. One." From AJ once again!

"You just need one.... You'll see in a bit" Said AJ as he moved through his lesson plan.

As AJ went through his PowerPoint, he asked the students to point out attributes, tags, properties, and values.

The students moved onto doing "the easiest but most helpful" worksheet! ... As the instructors went around the room to see how they were doing the worksheet, the students seemed... to think they were doing it wrong! Most likely because it really was an easy worksheet! =)

Even as they were doing it perfectly right, there was something in their mind (you could see it on their face) that told them that they weren't... As instructors walked around, the student would stop and look up for a confirmation. They were indeed confirmed.

They (Chou and AJ, who AJ stated that, "combined, we have been teaching web design for over 15 years!") even had the students stare at the tags for ... about 10 seconds. Just to get it stuck in their heads.

As AJ was going through the PowerPoint, he said, "Raise your hand if you think this is totally boring," and Sterling's hand went up.. without hesitation. After a "heh," AJ told Sterling to stand up for the next slide.

After AJ finished explaining HTML, he moved onto CSS.

As AJ explained, "Control Vs. Reach," he moved one person side to side, this was lots of control, less reach. Then he moved the whole first row, this was internal: less control, more reach. Finally, he moved the whole class side to side (external: way less control, far more reach!).

AJ's finishing sentence as he moved on was, "You guys are all web pages and this whole room is the site."

When it was time to work with links, AJ changed his first link, "Batman 1" to black. As he did this, he said, "Batman is black," which lead to a bunch of laughter bursting in the room. Vicky goes, "that's what I was thinking too!" As Kursat said, "What? I don't get it...."

Like Kursat, AJ had stated that he didn't get it either... or rather, he didn't think it was as funny as the students thought it was!

[The whole scene in general was just funny i.e. everyone's laughter and expressions as the scene unfolded.]

AJ then went through his Thailand website and when a picture of him pop up, the students stated..."You had that much hair?!" Which was pretty funny because everyone else who knew AJ would've probably said, "Where did your hair go?!"

Anyways, as he got to the "Puppet's Page" it was missing! AJ told them that they were going to make it for him!

There were many responses from the audience... "Noo.." came right out of Vicky's mouth as soon as AJ reminded them they were going to make a webpage!!

The day ended smoothly with all of the students working on either the Thailand website, or making their own site.

Day 2: Room of Silence

All of the students came to class at 12:30pm. They went to work on the To-Do-List yesterday finishing their Google Presentation, adding labs on their G-mails etc. Ann started off the day going over the Learn@UW Quiz. There are still five students that do not have access to Learn@UW, their names are listed on the Google Doc.

Some surprising results from the quiz:
* All of the students have PCs
* Only one student didn't check their e-mail yesterday
* The students did not remember Cristina or Chou

Afterwards, Chris began the introduced the Photoshop activity. The students were all engaged in looking at the Photoshop examples. A part of the reason the students was engage was because of Chris enthusiasm and love for Flash.n After going over the main slides on the Photoshop and Illustrator PowerPoint, he went over the To-Do-List PowerPoint. Chris went through every part of the to-do-list and then showed how to use the tools in Photoshop. The entire instruction took about 22 minutes. The students then had 18 minutes to work. ** Note for next year, shorten the lecture and allow them to work longer ** When the students were working, about 6-7 students (Aaron, Dale, Roxana, Tatiana, and Josh) had issues with using the rectangle tool to fix the board. They couldn't remember the steps to use the rectangle marquee, click the move tool, click alt, then move the selection. Once that problem was solved, at the end of 15 minutes, the students were able to work independently.

After break, Chou introduced the illustrator activity. From 2:10 - 2:25 he went through the examples on the PowerPoint slide and then demonstrated how to make one penguin. Some concepts that Chou illustrated while doing this:
* Grouping
* Transform
* Symbols
* Send to Back
* Clicking the space bar to move the stage
* Tools and triangle at the end to show other tools
* Creating a new symbol
After the students immediately started clicking and dragging body parts to the screen. All of the students were working in silence for Illustrator. It was very eerie because the class was so silent. A lot of the students went beyond what Chou taught them. For instance, both Ian and Aaron drew their own symbols. Natalie did her own artistic filters. The total time the students had to work was about 40 minutes.

During the 20 minutes of free work time, 9 people worked on the PacMan activity and 6 people worked on the Penguin activity. Chou taught the students how to Save For Web. Each student saved both their Photoshop and their Illustrator project. Rodney introduced the blog for that day. He expanded off of the questions and explained the importance of writing in a paragraph form.

Hurray Hurray! It's the first ITA day!

And so it begins! The first day of the freshman camp began with both classes in the room, overflowing onto the floor. Everyone introduced themselves, to cheers for their prospective schools (La Follette High School all seemed to end up on the floor while East was all on the left of the room . . .) Afterwards, the class played the 'drop the blanket game in order to quiz the students on one another's names.

Ann began the lecture overviewing the camp schedule, talking about the basics of approaching new technology. What questions should one ask? She also asked the students to share their first memories of technology or to think of where they use technology in their daily lives.

Chris explained file organization and the importance of naming things correctly. AJ dropped in for a minute and explained that we don't use spaces when organizing files because, if we want to upload them to the internet, the spaces create confusion for web addresses.

The class finished off the day by blogging - Ann and Elizabeth went around and filled in empty spaces on the class excel spreadsheet and helped the students get pictures up on their blogs - all in all, a great first day!

After a brief break, the class came back for the "To-do" list of the day. The students worked to set up a gmail acount, to sync their wiscmail with their gmail, to create a blogger account and write a blog. A few students had to call the helpdesk to reset their passwords.

Chou kindly came in to get the second break started as all the instructors were running around helping students and didn't notice. This was our monitors off break and everyone went out to the hallway to talk and buy food.

Ann explained the need to be back in the room at the right time at the end of this break. Chris explained the PLC (Professional Level Certification) Program. And then Elizabeth set the class a bloggin' for their first two blogs at ITA!