Darren Michalczuk is used to spending his time in a classroom in front of a smart board, not in his kitchen in front of a smart phone.
But the Westlock man has chosen to do just that. He’s taking a one-year sabbatical from his position as a Grade 5 teacher at Westlock Elementary School to bring some high-tech teaching tools to a high-tech generation.
Instead of spending his day in front of a smart board, he spends it in front of a smart phone developing educational iPhone apps.
“I’ve only been doing this for a couple month, but it’s exciting, the possibilities of what you could do,” Michalczuk said.
While he will be the first to admit that here’s learning how to code these apps on the go, he has produced an impressive array of apps in a few short months.
The two he’s most excited about are called Magic Dots and Magic Numbers, which teach the basics of addition/subtraction and multiplication/division respectively.
The principle is simple, he explained. If you ask kids to multiply eight by nine, they’ll count on their fingers, trying to add eight plus eight plus eight, and so on.
“By the time they come up with their answer, their mind’s full. It’s painful to watch,” Michalczuk said. “By Grade 5, only one in three kids get it.”
The key is in putting words along with the pictures to help with their ability to recall the information.
For example, multiply eight times nine. An eight-legged spider is hanging in a window that is then shattered into nine pieces. The answer, 72, also has corresponding pictures: There are two drapes hanging on the window, and the peak of a house is shaped like a seven.
“You tell them these stories, then it’s fun,” he said.
Michalczuk is also working on an app to apply this concept to music theory. On a picture for the treble clef, for example, the lines are represented by power wires. Each note has an image corresponding to it, like somebody hung up an apple on the wire representing the A.
The images help provide a way for kids to quickly recall which lines represent which notes.
Of course, he has had some skeptical reactions when talking about this method with other educators, particularly those who favour a more traditional approach.
“When you go to teachers and say here’s another way of teaching math, teachers will sometimes take it,” he said. “But if they’re old-school they’re not ready for that yet so the kids miss out if they’re still struggling with math.”
But Michalczuk has seen this method work time and time again, even with students who have struggled year after year. After spending a little while with the app, their skills improve.
He has been visiting classrooms around the province showing students and teachers alike how to do it.
In one visit to what was essentially a remedial high-school class in Calgary, a student the teachers had all but given up on was able to pick up the app and start learning some of the basics of multiplication.
“You see it over and over again,” he said. “That’s why I’m doing this program.”
Indeed the biggest motivator he has is the satisfaction of helping somebody learn something new — not surprising for a man who chose education as a profession.
“That look on a person’s face, when they think ‘I can’t believe a person just showed me this. That’s the biggest thing,” he said.
While seeing the app helps kids to learn is a very satisfying experience, Michalczuk said the reward is as a much a personal one as anything; he relishes the challenge of learning the programming language to make apps for touch-screen devices and is even looking to do some post-secondary training in the spring.
And he’s not limiting his scope to just the educational apps, either.
He has developed a first-aid reference app, a couple of digital scrapbooking apps and is even working on a couple games.
“It’s not exactly Angry Birds yet,” he laughed, “but I’ll get there.”
