Teacher Feature: Deb Dixon

Our next teacher feature of the month is Deb Dixon! She is a Library Media Teacher at Winter Hill Community Innovation School in MA. She has been an Unruly Educator from the very beginning and is always stepping up to the plate by looking for new, fun, and engaging ways to incorporate Splats into the school curriculum!

1. What’s the most surprising use for Splats you’ve seen 👀 or done yourself? 

I’ve really enjoyed using the Splats Ice Breakers and SEL games to build community and resilience with my students. We are having fun and playing games and getting to know each other and how to work together to have the most fun!

2. What has been the most helpful in building your confidence using Splats?

I’ve enjoyed going to the bootcamps and other workshops that show us how to use a new game or activity pack and talking to the amazing Unruly Splats team who are always so quick to help both at a workshop or an email looking for help.

3. How do you see Splats helping students develop an understanding 💡 of coding?

I think it has been really meaningful for my students to be able to immediately interact with their code by pressing their splat. Sometimes they notice that they’ve selected the light LED block instead of the light Splat 1 block and can see right away on their splat what the difference is. The Splats are also super fun to play with. I let many of my students have a day to just explore with the Splats and love when they create something fun that leads to another coding concept like how to add a repeat block to get their farting rainbow to keep on going.

4. How has bringing Splats/coding into your existing curriculum ✏️ (math, ELA, science, PE, music, etc.) changed the way students engage with the curriculum?

Something fun that I’ve been playing around with is using Splats to create interactive read-alouds for my students. I’ll use the sound effects on the Splats or record my own sounds and have the students press the Splats and different parts of the story we are reading in library class. My students of all ability levels absolutely love doing this. It makes the story so engaging when they can trigger a special sound effect in the middle of the story.

5. If you could play Splats with anyone famous—dead, alive, or fictional—who would it be and what would you play?

I’m just a little bit obsessed with the childrens’ book author, Mo Willems. His is silly and ridiculous just like Unruly Splats!! I think he would love to play just about any Splats game but if I had to narrow it down to two, I think I’d have to pick my favorite SEL game, the Found Art Scavenger Hunt, just to see what kind of crazy objects he would find for each color and what “unruly” creation he would build from them. And my absolute favorite Splats game to play both before and during the pandemic is Red Splat, Green Splat. My silly students have been having so much fun coming up with fun things to do at their spots instead of running and stopping. We’ve been sitting, standing, spinning, dancing, humming, and selfie posing our way through so many rounds and I know Mo Willems could bring us to that next level of unruly silliness.

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