I completed the initial draft of my project over the weekend, and now I am going through the painstaking process of making revisions and finding all of my mistakes. I am now concerned with consistency across Hyperstudio stacks and cards, and the presence of relevant sounds and images. I spent a few hours yesterday editing some video, and I think I may need to shoot some more footage of my ferrets in action. The hardest part about editing the video was keeping the size of the files manageable. I had one file that, after it was edited, was over 100 megabytes and only about 10 seconds long! Needless to say, I quickly figured out how to compress and utilize other features of my video editor to control file size. I had someone sit through the Hyperstudio presentation and give me some suggestions for improvement. Now I must implement all of the changes.

What is funny to me is that I know how much time and energy I have put into making this presentation, but it doesn't look like there's that much to it. The same thing is true for what I did on my service project. I created several web pages for my school's Future Problem Solving program and spent well over the required 10 hours, but when I look at it, it doesn't seem that complicated. I guess that most people don't think about all of the functions and commands that a designer must add to a program to make it interactive and to look good. When it comes down to it, computer programs are very simple in some ways, and it is up to the designer to make them look more interesting. When I think back to some of the computer projects that I had my students create this past year, it all makes more sense. I was frustrated because the students had spent hours and hours on their projects, but their final products didn't seem to reflect the amount of time spent. Working on this Studio project has made me more understanding of the time issue involved in creating a major project, and I will most certainly remember to be a little more forgiving next year when my students do computer projects.

Another thing that I will take back to school next year for my students is what I learned about in chapter 7 of Constructionism in Practice. This chapter gave me my first exposure to Programmable Bricks. I found a lot of interesting and useful information here, and now I am really interested in learning more about the Brick and how to incorporate it into my gifted science classroom for next year. One of our science themes is Simple Machines, and I can see how using a Programmable Brick could fit into this curriculum nicely, especially with gifted and high achieving students.

Somewhat related to the Progammable Brick is the TI-83 graphing calculator and Computer Based Laboratory. I just learned about these items in my other class. The CBL comes with probes that measure temperature, voltage, pressure, and a variety of other things. I think having tools like the CBL and Programmable Brick would be both educational and fun for students. These tools would also facilitate meaningful, relevant learning for students that they will carry with them for a lifetime.