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We started our study of the Cold War last week with a video called “Pretty Much the Cold War.” Imagine Napoleon Dynamite narrating Dr. Strangelove and you get the picture.

After watching the video, students chose three Cold War topics to research and interrelate in a student-designed project.

What I love about student choice is that teachers and students together discover new ways of showing off students’ learning. Here’s one way a student decided to share what he learned:

• First, he chose to interrelate the Cold War, ICBMs, and MAD, as did many students.
• Next he researched the who, what, when, where, and so what of each topic in relation to the others.
• Then he programmed Scratch animations that illustrated each topic. While he already had a solid understanding of Scratch basics, he learned how to put a streaking star field behind an ICBM flying in the opposite direction to increase the speed of the missile relative to the background.
• After that, he discovered Google Sketch Up and its 3D Warehouse. When he finished browsing through the sports cars, he started work modeling his own ICBM. He got frustrated when he could only make a box for the missile’s body, so he learned how to make a cylinder. He got frustrated when he could only make a pyramid for the missile’s warhead, so he learned how to make a cone. Even when frustrated, he complained in the language of geometry.
• Next, he wants to import his model into Scratch as an image file and replace his “hand-drawn” missile sprite with it. He has already plotted its course using the X-Y coordinate tools in Scratch.
• While he works, he’s frequently called away to help classmates program in Scratch.
• He calls me over every day to show me what he’s figured out.
• At some point in the near future, as determined by his sense of completion, the student will finish his animations for the other topics and reflect in writing on what he learned by researching the Cold War and making his movies.

By picking his topics and the way he wants to show his learning, this student has shown me a new way to integrate social studies (the Cold War) with art (Scratch sprites and Google Sketch Up Models from online visual references), math (geometry and X-Y coordinate plotting), and writing (reflections on learning).

Moreover, he’s had fun learning. I’ve had fun watching him.

Andrew Barras, who writes and tweets on educational futurism as @CrudBasher, lent a hand in our work, as well. Andrew Skyped in to class this week to talk with this student and his programming peers. Andrew has a decade of experience teaching art design for video games and is currently a Master’s candidate at Full Sail University. We got to ask questions about the size of game design teams for titles on different platforms. We got to ask questions about free modeling tools and game engines and the ones that professionals use. We learned that there are more artists than programmers on AAA games. Being math phobic, I never would have guessed that.

Andrew was incredibly generous with his time and seemed like a natural with kids. I hope we Skype again soon. We had fun talking with him.

Andrew also said something that stuck with my students after we hung up: don’t let school stop you from learning about what really matters to you. Keep learning about what matters to you all day long. You can teach yourself all you need to know to do what you want.

With that notion, Andrew helped me set a goal for the Spring a next year: to blur the line between learning inside and outside school through student choice and personal meaning.

We’re also going to download Apple’s iPhone developer’s kit and see what else we can teach ourselves.

All in all, we’re pretty much having fun.

Why don’t we teachers let ourselves and our students do that more often?