My experience of creating and implementing a problem-based lesson.

So I just did a problem-based lesson plan with one of my colleagues from my TIE cohort program for National Louis. We called the project "A Octopus'Garden", because it involved creating a little underwater world with the programing world called EToys. The creating of the lesson plan was not as difficult as the actual implementation of the lesson. Etoys itself is a sort of self-contained program, therefor the keyboard shortcuts we all know and love are non-existent. The program takes some exploration before you can just jump right in and ask students to create something. We found that there was more prior knowledge of some of the basics of the program needed in order for the students to feel comfortable and really get all that they needed out of the lesson. There was also a few minor glitches in some of our directions for the project in part because of the strangeness of the program itself. This of course meant that we spent most of our time helping students try to figure out the little discrepancies of Etoys.
In a more ideal situation the lesson would have been given after a couple days of going through some of the tutorials in EToys to have the students better prepared for the actual lesson instead of struggling through the program. Also, the idea came to me that this lesson could be split up into two lessons so that there is less to do in one sitting. Overall though, I thought the lesson was a success and it seemed to spark interest in the students for some programing basics.