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  05/05/2021 - Comments: Here's a video of our birdhouse building in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yqkcT7pUvo

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  11/19/2020 - Comments: We just keep wondering, which helps illustrate the process that scientists go through. Our original question "Are birds more active on a cloudy day than on a sunny day?" has morphed more than a dozen times. We started counting birds and realized our data sheets should say "visits" and not "birds." We defined where to count (on the bird feeder and the square meter below it). We discovered a weather website that reports cloud cover so that we can compare our estimates with the website's. We have refined "birds" to "chickadee visits, "red breasted nuthatch visits" and "other." Currently, we are wondering about the effect of our chatter. We observed that the first group of sixth graders has a significantly greater bird visit count than the second group. (1:25 pm vs. 1:35 pm). Does the sound of our approach attract the birds? We're never stopping, we're always wondering.

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  11/03/2020 - Comments: I'm wondering why I can't find more definitions/examples of abstraction as a step of computational thinking on line. When I google those terms, I get very scholarly articles which are taking me nowhere fast. On the other hand, my students and I did love Rhonda's question about cloudy days and bird activity. We have taken a week's worth of observations in order to examine our possible procedures and tweak them. At first, we counted all the birds we saw (on the bird feeder, on a nearby tree, on the roof of the kiosk) or heard (crow), Then we recognized we had outliers - how could one student count four birds in the same three minute interval that another student counted fifty-seven? We decided we would only count the birds that landed on the bird feeder or beneath it and we have marked out the area that defines "beneath."  Does this process qualify as abstraction? The ultimate abstraction is "How do abiotic factors influence the biotic?" but that may take us a while to arrive at.

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