Riverside meets with software engineer through ZOOM
PLYMOUTH — Educators at Riverside Intermediate School, Victoria Christlieb, Kelly White, terry Dennie, and Stacy Dunlap facilitated a ZOOM meeting between Project Based Learning ( PBL) Humanities students and software engineer Peter Faulkner Monday.
Faulkner will be providing assistance as their computer programmer to the fifth graders as they design their virtual Native american artifacts Museum. “What do we want? We want people in our community, we want our parents, we want our friends, to be able to experience Native american Culture. We are a little hard pressed to do that with the current situation with the virus and what-not.”
He continued, “So we have decided to do a virtual museum. With a regular museum we have physical artifacts, we put them in a building, you visit the building and look at the artifact. With a virtual museum,
we represent your artifact with values, with data in the computer.
We represent in some way, the artifact in the computer. We create a virtual space, and we put that artifact in the virtual space in the virtual museum. And we want people to be able to come in and view the artifact.the way we are doing that is by putting the museum up on the internet, so that anyone with a connection to the internet can go to our URL and see all the artifacts.”
Faulkner explained to the students that his work can be described in many ways; including computer programmer, computer scientist, coder and “code monkey’. He said that “code monkey” is a fun term to describe his work, but computer programmer is probably the most descriptive. “Computer programmer gets at the heart of the work that I do.”
As educators and students continue to combat the barriers of in-person and virtual learning environments, they were not deterred by the extra layer of challenge.
He said there would be two components to the virtual museum; creating the virtual museum and putting it on the internet. He will be using UNITY software. “It helps us create virtual spaces and define how those spaces interact and do things.”
Faulkner taught students about how to communicate commands to the computer through technical language by writing a program. “A program is a sequence of instructions that a computer can understand and perform.”
He emphasized that writing a program for a computer must be very specific and actions must be written in proper sequence. “We use sequences of instructions for other things besides just computers.”
To prepare students for the ZOOM meeting, they were asked to write instructions on how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The assignment challenged students: “Do your best job to provide directions to someone else on how to make a Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich.”
Faulkner illustrated the need for specific and detailed instructions; even for a task as simple as a peanut butter sandwich. “To really illustrate this idea of a program; I have in front of me all of the ingredients and tools necessary to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.” He held up bread, peanut butter and, jelly.
Students thought they were being specific when they wrote the instructions, but as Faulkner demonstrated how a computer would interpret their instructions, he revealed gaps in command functions. He explained that we as humans communicate with certain assumptions that some instructions are clear without writing every detail. Computers don’t function that way. “Without a programmer, they (computers) are really, really dumb.”
Faulkner showed students a computer program, along with the line numbers that accompanied each text. “Programs are a sequential series of instructions for the computer. Each individual line does just one thing. There is a series of instructions and each one just does one thing. That’s basically a program.”
Faulkner wrote a program in front of the students commanding the computer to write “Hello
World”. He demonstrated each step; explaining terms including function, instruction and command. He demonstrated what symbols would be used to communicate with the computer so that the computer would yield the desired result. “Everything computers do comes down to data and manipulations.”
He explained that each step must be saved. When the module is run, the computer will complete each function in sequential order. Changing the “value” of the command changes the function and result.
After showing students how to write a program, Faulkner spoke with the students about how their virtual museum would be built, under their direction, and what their creative visual options were.
Students will have to choose whether they want to take photographs of their artifacts to display in the museum or create 3-Dimensional computer graphic images of those artifacts. “You guys are making physical objects. We need that to be represented somehow in the computer. We can’t just stick the thing in the computer and have it in the museum, that’s not how it works.”
Students can use photographs of their artifacts. “So the most simple thing to do is take a digital picture and then that would be a representation that the computer understands. Then I could put the picture in the museum. That’s the simplest way.”
Using three dimensional graphic images would be more challenging. “A much more fun way is to take a picture of an object from different angles. What you see in the museum will be a three dimensional object.”
During the question and answer session, Mason asked about viruses, “Is that something that can happen to our museum?”
Faulkner answered, “It is something that could happen to our museum. I think that there is a very low probability that it’s something that we have to be concerned about.” He explained, “So a virus is a malicious piece of software. It’s bad code. It’s a code that wants to do bad things to your computer. Viruses get on to computers when bad people put them on there. I don’t think any bad people know about the virtual museum. So I don’t think it will be a problem.”
He explained the dynamics of a computer virus to the students, “A virus is a very interesting concept. It’s bad code. It’s code that wants to hurt your computer. The really sinister thing about a virus is that it doesn’t just want to do all those bad things. It wants to do that to other computers. It wants to replicate itself and hurt other computers.”
If the museum does get targeted with malware, Faulkner said, “If it is a problem, the software that I am using to build the website has built in futures