Pros and Cons of Homeschooling/Agile Learning

Now that I’ve been homeschooling/Agile Learning for over half a year, here are some of the pros and cons of the whole thing.

PROS:

Learning what you are interested in

When I homeschool, there are things that others say I have to learn, but for the most part, I get to decide. Because I can learn what I are interested in, my enthusiasm goes up, and I much learn better.

Learning at your own pace

A huge part of the value of homeschooling is that one are able to learn at one’s own pace. I am fast at some subjects, and I can speed ahead without worrying about having to wait for my slower classmates (they don’t exist anymore). When I am slow at other subjects, I can pour extra time on it however I want in order to get it done.

No travel to school

Last year, I spent an average of 1.9 hours each day just traveling to and from school. I spent around 14.25 days of my life each year on the bus. This year: 0.0. The nuisance and wasted time of bus rides, etc. is gone.

Customized schedule

Work better at 5 o’ clock in the morning, or at 8 at night? Need to sleep in in the mornings? Your schedule can be completely customized to your needs and how you like to do things.

CONS:

Social life

For me, homeschooling has not promoted any kind of social life. It is more difficult to make friends when I don’t have constant exposure to other people my age. This can be nice, I don’t have to deal with annoying/mean/immature people, but I also don’t get to hang out with as many with cool/nice/interesting people.

Frustration of doing things by myself

Teachers are one of the many things that you don’t realize are valuable until you don’t have them. It is a great privilege to have someone super-knowledgable to help you when you don’t understand something. Teaching yourself can get very frustrating. It’s a little bit of a paradox: you need to know stuff to teach yourself stuff, but you also need to teach yourself to know stuff.

Self regulation

Self regulation is a difficult part of homeschooling. Sometimes I think that I have not done enough on something, and then I over do it, putting too much effort into a thing with little or no consequence, and sometimes I don’t put enough effort into something when I underestimate its importance.

So those were some of the pros and cons of homeschooling/Agile Learning. I definitely like it more than my last years of “regular” school, but it has its tough bits.

Space Invaders on the Ceiling, and the Rise of Arcade Games

As soon as Geva, Timo, and Douglas came to Cloudhouse from MFS for a week, the spirit of making cool stuff was activated and a flurry of creation begun. The place was buzzing with activity and that made it seem so alive and happy that it got everyone making. Douglas started on his elaborate Rube Goldberg Machine, Timo coded games in BASIC, and Geva and I poured our  hours into an almost-bottomless pit of a project. We intended to cover the ceiling in a grid of RGB LEDs (LEDs that can light up almost any color).

3 days, 240 soldering joints, 320 wires stripped, 40 wires cut, 170 staples, 2 trips to the hardware store, 1 taken-apart PC, and 282 lines of code later, we had this:

This is a game of Space Invaders, played on a 4×10 pixel, 8×24 foot, full color screen, on the ceiling. More programs are to come, in the making is one that fades between different colors and shades, creating an ambient glow in the whole space.

Another interesting thing about the screen is how each pixel is really 3 LEDs in a row, so that the pixel your ship is in is actually 2 different colors.

On the topic of old video games, I recently enlisted Geva’s help to get MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) running on my computer, started dabbling in some classic games that my dad played when he was a kid like Marble Madness and Qix. Here’s a video of me playing Defender:

Post Script: I will now be posting a post every Thursday, starting after Christmas Break (I hope).

Things I’ve 3D Printed (So Far)

I’ve been doing a lot of 3D printing lately. Actually no. That’s an understatement. Here are some pictures of the things I’ve printed so far:

Little tiny Cloudhouse logos

Feather earrings for Abby (a MFS volunteer and Agile Learning Facilitator)

A gear-y cube (it doesn’t turn yet, but it will!)

A board game called Pocket Dungeons

A replacement button for one of my favorite shirts

May there be many more prints to come!

All of these designs (except the Cloudhouse logo) are not mine, but were made by someone else and put under the Creative Commons License.

Attributions: Feather earrings, Cube gears, Pocket Dungeons, Button

The Cloudhouse Space

Eric Bear and I are working on the space for Cloudhouse (in my basement). We’re putting up whiteboards for the walls! I really enjoy planning, measuring, and cutting the holes in the whiteboards, and then see them (sometimes) slip perfectly into place. Here is a time-lapse of the work we did: