Azita is a technology teacher at the Andrews Middle School in Medford. This is her computer classroom:

Kim, Akira and I visited with her today as she was introducing the MIT MoleMash tutorial to her students. They had previously worked on the MIT Paintpot tutorial.

Most of her students already had PaintPot working. Azita encouraged them to move on to MoleMash—if they needed to go back to PaintPot later, they could do that.

As with all of the other project classrooms, students were working in pairs.

The students had already been introduced to the Canvas in PaintPot. MoleMash introduced several new concepts—a sprite component inside the canvas, a clock component (which triggers the mole’s movements), and random numbers.

All four of us went around and worked with the students in small groups. Most of them were able to construct the interface elements for MoleMash. When I had the opportunity, I described the clock and random movement code to students directly, rather than having them copy it out of the tutorial.

I worked with two students in particular, Jamal and Raul, who were delighted when they got the mole jumping around! Then I encouraged them to explain their code to other students.