I was fortunate enough to be given the opportunity to teach at an experimental International school in Taichung with a great facility. I was part of a team to foster STEAM education for students who will study abroad in the future post high-school. We followed the American Common Core Standards, yet we had the flexibility to create a curriculum to better accommodate the students. Students not only had to study the curriculum that was not in their native tongue, but also continue to study courses in Mandarin including Chinese Literature, additional mathematics, and history. Here I learned many things about being a better teacher, designer, and really saw many overlaps between design and delivering good experiences.
Although there were a myriad of great assignments and projects from students, here are two highlights that I am particularly proud of and enjoyed.
This was an assignment I assigned for a parents open house for the math section called "Figure me Out". Students had to create a 4x5 puzzle board and for each puzzle placement, create their own math problem based on concepts we learned during the semester where the solution for each problem was an answer to a biographical question about themselves (ex. My age is: 2x + 2 = 28). The answer to each question was written on the back of each puzzle piece and the student's parents would then have to complete the puzzle revealing a surprise.
In this assignment, students applied what they learned about binary and hexadecimal number systems and image files to encode their own pixel art. Here they learned how meta data, image size, and color in an images are created.
