Scoot Activity in Computers!

I got the idea for a Scoot activity after reading some math blogs, actually. Apparently, some cool math teachers have come up with a "moving" worksheet type activity where you place flashcards or some math problem or activity at each desk and students "scoot" through them at intervals.

This sounded like something fun to try in my computer-based classes. And, in Photoshop, they've just learned selection tools, including how to add and subtract from selection. I thought this might be a fun way to practice. So, I put a folder of images out on a drive. They opened the background image, saved it to their folder, and then began selecting the first item from the folder to bring over to the background. After about 5 minutes, I announced SCOOT! They moved on, regardless of how finished the selection was, and scooted to the next seat. Then, they had to pick up where the previous person left off. When a selection is completed, they were to Refine Edge, bring it over to the background, and rename the layer. After the first long round, I used set intervals.

I used an interval timer online from http://www.intervaltimer.com and set it to no warm up and no cool down and just set a time of 120 seconds for the "high intensity" or work time and 15 seconds for the "low intensity" or scoot time. I'll do this again in my afternoon class and will probably adjust that a bit to 150 seconds of work time and 30 seconds to scoot.

I also threw in few kinks to change it up. A few times, I would announce specific instructions like:

• Double scoot (scoot two seats instead of one)
• Random scoot (like musical chairs, scoot wherever you want)
• Observation even or odd (so, that means if you are at an odd computer and I called Observe Odd instead of Scoot, you stand and just watch people if you are at an odd computer and provide feedback if you see someone doing something ineffectively or just watch and see how others are using tools)

It worked out pretty well. However, I did run across one problem at the end. A few students had NOTHING drug into their main image. So, not sure if someone deleted the selected items or if no one ever drug something over because the selections were never complete. I'll have to monitor that a little better when I try it with the afternoon class. A few of the items were really hard, so I might suggest some of the easier ones to be the first ones they do just to make sure everyone does finish something as part of the composite.

As with most learning activities, I don't take grades so no one was penalized if they got back to their computer and there wasn't much to work with. But, I did give them about 10 minutes back on their home computers at the end of class.

Students seemed to like moving around and the class period zoomed by. We'll see how it goes with some tweaking. But, I'm excited to try this sometime with my Web Design class in a coding exercise!