Back from a well-rested weekend, we jumped into frames and finished with our coverage of HTML.
Reid spent the afternoon teaching the first spreadsheet lesson. The students learned to use Microsoft Excel with mathematics in mind. A tutorial we had written ran them through the basics of Excel quickly, and within an hour we moved on to using Excel for more interesting purposes. Students used excel to make a model of a rabbit population, and in the process discovered the Fibonacci numbers. Many had seen the series before and knew its name through a phonetic Chinese translation, but they didn't expect to see it pop up in the context of rabbits. Students also used Excel to find out about how to sum the first n integers, and later the first n squares and cubes. As dry as this may sound, we were at least humorous when presenting it and the students appeared to be having fun, and more than 1 ½ hrs into it they said they wanted more. So before the day was done they had explored random walks and Pascal's triangle too.
Tuesday morning, we gave a brief introduction to Adobe Photoshop. Though many students have used it before (some of them knew a few tricks and one student could have taught us a few things), we showed them cropping, resizing, color-balancing, etc. We let the students practice their newly acquired knowledge by making a picture of Reid's head on Hesky and Roger's bodies. Then we ended morning classes early to take a field trip to the Shanghai Childrens' Palace, where we had arranged to use the Intel computers to surf the web and see some professional websites. After a quick lunch, we took an hour long bus ride to the center of the city, where Wang laoshi of Children's Palace set us up with the lab, LCD projector, microphone, and a technical assistant. We began by showing the class how to use search engines. For practice we wrote up a scavenger hunt where the students had to find various webpages-- air conditioning companies, a picture of a squirrel, a poem by Edgar Allen Poe, and others. While we were teaching, a reporter (of which publication we are not sure) came to take pictures. Hu laoshi, our JTHS teacher, explained to the reporter what we were about as the reporter scribbled away on his pad. We ended the day by having all the students register for a free e-mail account, with plans to start a pen pal program with Reid's alma mater high school.
Now that they had seen some nice pages on the web, we asked the students what they wanted on their site. We recorded the students' suggestions and broke the content into 5 sections,-student activites, student postings, news, computer education, and guidance. Then each student chose a group and they began planning the different sections and assigning jobs. The afternoon was spent on the second spreadsheet lesson, where students learned about functions, series, and limits.
On Thursday morning, after a game of musical chairs, students began writing the HTML for their site. The afternoon was spent on the final spreadsheet lesson of the week. Students were shown how to graph data and functions, and were asked to use Excel to figure out a series of problems. The final question of the day was to figure out the area under the curve of the function f(x)=x2 from 0 to 1. Many students worked out ways to approximate this integral with Excel, and from the approximations someone ventured a correct guess as to what the value actually would be.
We finished up the website on Friday. Realizing that a group of freshmen could not possibly know everything about the school, we just asked for a linked page and links to home for those topics the students hadn't been able to write. From the finished product we could tell that most of the students are more interested in the latest TV series, Hong Kong singers, and soccer players. We took some students around campus taking pictures for the school map. Reid tried Clay-Mation with the Sharp Camcorder, which turned out to be very appealing for the girls, who made some interesting films about diverse topics such as a person hatching from a chicken egg and the love life of Reid the Squirrel. Hesky and Roger left early during the afternoon class to pick up the Lego Mindstorm kits in downtown Shanghai.
