Episode 227: Classroom Volunteer John Titus Changing Lives with His Love for Students and Learning

Anthony Godfrey:
Hello and welcome to the Supercast. I'm your host, Superintendent Anthony Godfrey. She says working with him is like winning the lottery every single day at Fort Herriman Middle School.

On this episode of the Supercast, we take you inside teacher Kimberly Mendenhall's classroom, where a volunteer by the name of John Titus has become a priceless part of instruction. Mr. Titus spends every minute he can helping to change the lives of students with his love for learning. Despite being retired, John shows up for students and Mrs. Mendenhall almost every single day.

We're here in Kimberly Mendenhall's classroom at Fort Herriman Middle School to learn a little bit about what you're doing here. But let's start off with an introduction of your long time dedicated volunteer here in the class.

Kimberly Mendenhall:
You bet. So this is Mr. Titus. His name is Jonathan Titus and I will actually let him introduce himself.

John Titus:
Hi. I've been volunteering here now for probably five years. I came down and just made contact with Kim Mendenhall and have enjoyed the experience immensely. It's a great school, great staff, excellent teacher. My background is actually in science and chemistry after college degrees. While I worked on my doctorate, I used mini computers at the time, small microwave-sized computers or refrigerator-sized. And I found that I was much more interested than that than chemistry.

Anthony Godfrey:
Yeah.

John Titus:
So my brother and I started an electronics consulting firm and designed and built electronic equipment for people. We also did a lot of writing about electronics and computers, wrote a number of books. And then I went to work for a publishing company. I became the chief editor of two electrical engineering magazines.

Anthony Godfrey:
Wow.

John Titus:
And then retired and we moved out here.

Anthony Godfrey:
Now tell me what year you started working with small computers.

John Titus:
Probably '71 or '72. So that's back a ways.

Anthony Godfrey:
Wow. Way back in the 1900s.

John Titus:
Yes.

Anthony Godfrey:
And that's-- so you've been in on the ground floor of this for a long time.

John Titus:
That's true. Yes.

Anthony Godfrey:
Well, it's such an incredible opportunity for Kim to have you as a resource in the classroom and for the students to have access and the chance to learn from someone who's been a part of computers from the start, really.

John Titus:
Well, thank you. I just enjoy it immensely working with the students and working with Mrs. Mendenhall. I just enjoy being here and enjoy seeing the progress that the kids make.

Anthony Godfrey:
Tell me about Kim Mendenhall as a teacher.

John Titus:
Outstanding. She loves the kids. She really does. Even when they're acting up, she loves them through and through.

Anthony Godfrey:
Through and through.

John Titus:
I can't say enough good things about her. I really enjoy working with her. And I think we make a good team, volunteer and teacher.

Anthony Godfrey:
That's obvious that great things are happening because of the work you do together.

John Titus:
It’s fun. I enjoy it.

Kimberly Mendenhall:
And he's being very modest. When John says that he has dabbled in the computer electronics world, he actually has one of the first personal computers sitting in the Smithsonian. So something that I have in my classroom that he has lovingly gifted to our school is a plaque. So this is one of the magazines that distributed early information about computers. It's called Radio Electronics. It's from July 1974. It's the cover of it. It also has one of the very first personal microprocessors.

Anthony Godfrey:
Wow. And you had that in the Smithsonian. I was so distracted by Fonzie's leather jacket and the ruby slippers that I missed that computer.

John Titus:
Well, you wouldn't see it because it's in the archives. If you're a researcher, you can go look at all the material. You can probably take it out and take it apart and look at it in the Smithsonian.

Anthony Godfrey:
So it's stored in the archives of the Smithsonian.

John Titus:
Yes, it is.

Anthony Godfrey:
And it was on display at a certain point.

John Titus:
They had an information age display back in the '80s, maybe early '90s.

Anthony Godfrey:
I was there in the '80s. Maybe I saw it.

John Titus:
Maybe you did.

Anthony Godfrey:
But now, to see it, I would have to go back. It's like in the Raiders of the Lost Ark–

John Titus:
Yes.

Anthony Godfrey:
–at the end, where you go through all the wooden crates.

John Titus:
All those dusty boxes.

Anthony Godfrey:
Yeah, OK. It's somewhere in one of those. OK. Wow, so impressive and such an incredible opportunity for students to have access to someone who's worked with computers for such a long time.

John Titus:
Well, I'm happy to share what I know with them.

Anthony Godfrey:
Now, we're standing in front of two tables put together with about a dozen trays that each have an experiment here. So talk me through some of the basic experiments that students may go through.

Kimberly Mendenhall:
Yeah. So I teach computer science classes, Python, computer science investigations, computer science principles. And one of the elements of that class is trying to get them into something that's more hands-on. There's very few items that allow us to do that in the computer science world without making it yourself. So these experiments were mine and John's idea to try to bring to life real things.

For example, one of our experiments is a traffic light simulation. So this traffic light simulation has two boards. And the boards themselves are little electronic circuit boards that John has customized. They are also open source. You can get them and use them as you would like. But you send out for the board, you have to solder on the LEDs and the resistors and then connect it to what's called an I/O board. And that I/O board then connects to what's called a microbit.

Microbits are very common and they're tiny, maybe a 2 by 1 and ½ square that has buttons on the front, an LED 5 by 5 screen. And then you can program these microbits to do many different tasks.

The microbit is the brain. It's like the computer that you're programming. So by connecting this to the breakout boards that we've done with the traffic light, students then are able to simulate a north, south, east, west style traffic light that they can then literally see when they create a function that goes through a green light, yellow light, red light sequence versus a stay on red sequence. And then it swaps that they can see that happen in real-time and in real life.

Anthony Godfrey:
So the programming they do on this small board, which looks like what you'd find if you tore an old calculator apart, means that they program this and they connect it to these lights that Mr. Titus ordered and put together. Now they've programmed essentially traffic lights going in each direction and they program it to be sure that no theoretical traffic accidents happen.

Kimberly Mendenhall:
Correct. All of these experiments that we have, have very detailed step-by-step instructions with their goals, what we're trying to get them to do, how to help them see what each step of the process is doing. And then in the end, it gives them different challenges. OK, now that you've done this traffic light sequence, think of a different one you could try to program that you might see if it's in the middle of nowhere at night and you just have a flashing yellow. How does that look and could you create that instead? So that's the traffic light one.

One of the kids' favorites is this joystick. So it's like what you would see in an arcade mounted on some plywood. It has another I/O board connected to the joystick, which you then--

Anthony Godfrey:
The wire's running from the joystick to the I/O board.

Kimberly Mendenhall:
And then you take the micro bit and you plug it into that board. Now the beauty of this project and the reason kids love it is because there's little LED dots on the top of the microbit. And those dots can be controlled with the joystick, but they have to do the programming to connect to the dots.

So they are seeing all the stuff that they normally see either in their video games or on different consoles that they use, whether it's they went to the red box and they're using the touchscreen

and trying to make things work. They are seeing what's happening behind the scenes of that. Now where this project gets really fun is there is a radio element to it.

So the radio element is you have two microbits that have a radio capability incorporated onto the computer. And they can send a signal from one microbit across my room. Now my room is long, very long. So they could be 20 feet away plus. We've actually experimented with this.

Anthony Godfrey:
I'm sure you have.

Kimberly Mendenhall:
They have gone out into the halls around the school.

Anthony Godfrey:
Just to see how far back--

Kimberly Mendenhall:
Just to see how far this signal will go. Anyway, you could have a kid in this classroom using the joystick, and wherever the other student is that has the radio control option, it will send and it will put all of those little lights. It will control those lights with the joystick that's 20-plus feet away.

Anthony Godfrey:
Yeah. Wow. So even just with these initial experiments, they start to learn some rudimentary programming. They start to see the impact that programming has and the uses it might have in the real world.

Kimberly Mendenhall:
Correct. Yeah. So this one is super fun.

Anthony Godfrey:
OK. Tell me about this one down here.

Kimberly Mendenhall:
So Mr. Titus has cats. We also, at one point in time, did teach engineering. And we would launch rockets and 3D printing. So we took all of those concepts, kind of threw it all together into a single experiment. So we've got a 3D printed gear, which has been attached to a servo with 3D printed track rails that are attached to an old rocket.

When you turn the servo, the servo will ultimately push the item, meaning the gear that's attached to the track, and it will push out a cat treat from the micro bit that you can then control with the A button and B button. So this becomes event-driven programming.

Anthony Godfrey:
OK. So now what they see is I'm manipulating the physical world with the programming that I have done.

Kimberly Mendenhall:
Yes.

John Titus:
Exactly. And they also measure things in the real world, too. They can measure light intensity and then their program can do something based on the light intensity. And also, they can measure temperature. They can do remote control with an infrared push button control, like on a TV. So they really get a sense that computers connect to the real world. And this is how they do it.

Anthony Godfrey:
So they start to get a sense that, hey, these things I'm learning could actually help people. And now I understand kind of the basics of how my TV works and how I can make my cat happier.

John Titus:
That's right.

Anthony Godfrey:
OK.

Stay with us. When we come back, more with Kimberly Mendenhall and this valuable volunteer who takes time in his retirement to make a difference in the lives of teachers and students.

Break:
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Anthony Godfrey:
The pet feeder, the traffic lights, all of that leads to– kind of creates the basics for now some other programming of their own that they can go beyond. And you talked about block programming.

Kimberly Mendenhall:
So they have block programming, but in Python, that's considered line programming. So I had a student send me an example of one of the programs we did in Python, where he's using conditionals. He's using loops. He's using variables. And he has basically created a choose your own adventure game that is decently involved.

So he called this the peeler. And the peeler is a goblin who is coming to battle with a bunch of different enemies. These enemies that he has created vary in their strength. And so he's used a randomizer in there as well. And you have a set--

Anthony Godfrey:
To randomize the strength of the creatures that you fight?

Kimberly Mendenhall:
Mm-hmm.

Anthony Godfrey:
OK.

Kimberly Mendenhall:
And he has made it so that when you are up against a specific creature, he has five different options to choose from to attack this other odd creature. We're doing a Merlopian at the moment and it says you can pick fireball, dusk blast, aquarium storm, thunder blitz, or stab.

Anthony Godfrey:
OK, a dusk blast?

Kimberly Mendenhall:
Oh, dusk blast.

Anthony Godfrey:
Is that like some kind of crepuscular weapon of some sort?

Kimberly Mendenhall:
I wish I knew.

Anthony Godfrey:
Just like, OK, ‘Nighttime!’

Kimberly Mendenhall:
Yeah, why not?

Anthony Godfrey:
OK.

Kimberly Mendenhall:
Sure.

Anthony Godfrey:
A dusk blast might be me falling asleep on the couch. I don't know.

Kimberly Mendenhall:
The creativity of students, it's amazing. I wish I knew.

Anthony Godfrey:
Wow. Thunder blitz. I need to talk with this student and understand these weapons a little bit better.

Kimberly Menenhall:
He's fabulous.

Anthony Godfrey:
This is really cool. It's amazing. So they learn the mechanics. They learn the programming. And now that opens up a whole world of creativity where they get to make some things of their own.

Kimberly Mendenhall:
Yes. And so this particular game has no graphics at all. It is completely coded with just words. And the output is just text at this point. So we're trying now to go– we have these real-world step-by-step experiments. We've now taught you some of the very basic fundamentals of line programming with Python.

Anthony Godfrey:
Kind of like a choose your own adventure as the result.

Kimberly Mendenhall:
Yeah. And then now they're trying to now take it to that next step where we do incorporate the graphics side of things. And a fast way, one of the fastest ways to do that, is with these little– they're called kitten bots or meow bits. It's similar to--

Anthony Godfrey:
Kitten bots or meow bits.

Kimberly Mendenhall:
Help me, John.

Anthony Godfrey:
And Python named after Monty Python. Engineers have a really good time naming things.

Kimberly Mendenhall:
They do. They love it. After things that they enjoy.

Anthony Godfrey:
I'm in. It's great.

Kimberly Mendenhall:
Kittens. I mean, that's right up Mr. Titus' alley.

Anthony Godfrey:
There you go. That's right. It's all coming together.

Kimberly Mendenhall:
Yes. OK, so this game-- and I'll try not to reset it. But this particular game on a kitten bot. Now, a kitten bot is about the size of my palm. And it has a look similar to an old school Game Boy. Has an up down left right AB button on it. It has a little LCD screen. It's basically a more advanced version of a microbit. But it only deals with what's called the MakeCode Arcade. It's a Microsoft product that you can code on.

They have block-based programs, my students created this game in my seventh period today, where they have targets that are going across the screen. Your goal is to try to move the ball that's in the center to try to hit the target. There is a bar at the bottom that decides how much energy the ball has to then be able to launch at that target. So now they're taking the skills of the conditionals, the loops, the randomization and they're seeing them applied to something that they can physically now see and interact with like a Game Boy.

Anthony Godfrey:
So this goes beyond the choose your own adventure to a graphic game that is based on their programming.

Kimberly Mendenhall:
Yes.

Anthony Godfrey:
Over here in this part of the room, you have the two consoles, the arcade consoles. And this brings back a ton of memories for me, even though right now it's just raw wood because I spent a lot of time playing video games in arcades. In junior high, I will say, I would take my lunch money - and this is in the 1900s-  I would run back downtown because I was at a school downtown on a university campus. I would run to the arcade, spend my lunch money, and run back and make it just in time, not having eaten anything but playing Tempest until I beat the final screen. So this is bringing back great memories. And to me, it's very worth the time, very much worth the time that you spent over the summer creating these consoles. Because you're not saying, well, this is kind of like you could even play your game in an arcade. This makes it real for the kids.

John Titus:
Right. Because they are the ones who are contributing the games.

Anthony Godfrey:
Yeah. So you've created the shell. And they get to fill that with their own creativity.

John Titus:
Yes.

Kimberly Mendenhall:
Oh, yeah. So first of all, these arcades are like six feet tall. They look like what you would go into if you were going to an old-school arcade like Anthony described. This is just plain wood. But we were talking about making it into something that may be a collaboration with our art teachers or potentially vinyl sleeves for them even to get them to pop a little bit more.

Right now, they're still just, again, nothing fancy raw wood. But they look like a traditional arcade system with joysticks and buttons and a screen. And the students can come in with their Python games. Or we've talked to code.org, we talked to Scratch. We are trying to get in touch with the MakeCode Arcade to bring all of the different options for students to be able to create and bring their creativity, game-making skills, programming skills onto a real-life arcade. There's two of them. And they're run by a Raspberry Pi.

You didn't get to see this. So the brain thing of this, you know old computers are just a board. Well, our board is maybe the size of my open hand. I might- 4 inches by 2 inches. It's just this little Raspberry Pi, which is fitting for Thanksgiving.

Anthony Godfrey:
Yeah. Wow

Kimberly Mendenhall:
But yeah. So over the summer, we took the time and plans from– I want to say it's MakeCode.org– where they had an arcade layout. We took the dimensions that were there and John came up with a plan for the design. Then I, with the help of my principal, was able to order all of the plywood to be able to create real– it's not a desktop. This is on caster wheels that lock. It is taller than I am. I'm 5'5". These are 6'5", maybe. And you can stand up next to it, hit it if you need to when you're frustrated. And it's not going to go anywhere. They're really sturdy, strong machines.

Anthony Godfrey:
So are you woodworkers on top of everything else?

Kimberly Mendenhall:
One of the classes we did was engineering. And we were trying to show an engineering design process, fail or not. And this is what came of that. John's more of the engineer than I am. But I do know how to work in a shop.

Anthony Godfrey:
That's impressive. And I would say you didn't cut corners. But you cut a lot of corners. Which, getting these shapes requires a lot of cutting. And like I said, you went all in. You did everything you could to make this as realistic as possible.

John Titus:
That was the goal. Yeah. That was the goal. So the kids would really take to it, rather than, as Kim said earlier, just a monitor and a keyboard and a mouse. This is it. This is a real arcade.

Anthony Godfrey:
Yeah, this elevates it in a very meaningful way. Thank you so much for spending time with me today. But more than that, for creating this unmatched experience for students. What an incredible environment for them to learn in. And what an incredible opportunity.

John Titus:
Well, everything that I have done is open source. Any teachers within the district and outside the district are welcome to take advantage of what we've put together. And credit Mrs. Mendenhall for the opportunity to do it, and also the encouragement to do it.

Anthony Godfrey:
Well, the two of you are such a great combination.

Kimberly Mendenhall:
Thank you.

Anthony Godfrey:
I wish I could go back in time and take this class myself. Because it's just lighting all kinds of circuits in my brain. So people who get to take your class. So thank you very much for everything you do.

Kimberly Mendenhall:
Yes, thank you.

John Titus:
You're welcome. Nice meeting you.

Anthony Godfrey;
Very nice meeting you as well.

Thanks for listening to another episode of the Supercast. Remember, education is the most important thing you will do today. We'll see you out there.

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