Tech evolves continuously, Schools lag behind

I argue that the relevant metaphor to build a successful tech group these days is “low floor, high ceiling, wide walls and open windows”.

This approach, promoted by Mitch Resnick at MIT and Yasmin Kafai (source), led to the tremendous growth of Scratch, from 2007. In April 2024, the Scratch team announced that one billion projects had been developed. See Footnote(1) for more of this history and explanation of the house metaphor.

After thought: I ought to mention too, my favourite article about the design of construction kits, written by Mitch Resnick and Brian Silverman. I wrote a summary of this back in 2019, with a link to the original. Their point 5: Simplicity works; their point 7: You can achieve a lot with a little.

All the technology has continued to evolve rapidly. It becomes cheaper and more user friendly. This applies to coding tools, design tools and making tools. Many of the tools are Free or Open Source (FOSS) which reduces barriers to access and attracts communities.

The 21stC making tools which are not free (eg. 3D printers - although some companies such as Prusa do have Open Hardware; laser cutters and more) continue to reduce in cost. One aspect of this is that 21stC making becomes more accessible to a wider audience. This should mean that a tech group should have no problem growing. School students can be part of this since schools are notorious for not keeping up with new developments.

I argue for a beginner’s courses accessible to Middle School students which then lead into more advanced courses (aka mechatronics, making devices which integrate electrical and mechanical processes).

Coding: With block coding, eg. Scratch, MakeCode, students can make something interesting with the process being transparent within 10 minutes.

Design: With Tinkercad you can quickly make 3D objects. This can lead onto more advanced design tools later (eg. KiCAD, openSCAD, Fusion 360)

Making: You can begin with cardboard and then move onto LEGO, 3D prints and laser cuts to make interesting constructions readily. Free designs are available at thingiverse, Printables and other sites.

Micro-controllers: The microbit or Circuit Playground can control neopixels, servos and communicate with each other. They also have A and B control buttons on the board. This can lead onto more complex controllers such as arduino, bread boarding and circuit construction / printed circuit boards.

Microbit or Arduino? I argue for microbit usage in the middle school (years 5-9) and then move onto arduino in the senior school (years 10-12). Start with the low floor and move onto the high ceiling will engage more students. See Footnote 2 for three articles, microbit versus arduino, which support my viewpoint here.

It should be acknowledged that the arduino was a revolution which began in 2005. Open hardware, low cost and easier to use than what came before. The thesis which kicked off the arduino was titled, “Arduino–La rivoluzione dell’open hardware” (“Arduino – The Revolution of Open Hardware”). Reference

Similarly, the micro:bit was a revolution which began in 2015. The floor was lowered further given more users access to microcontrollers. Reference

Project based learning: Many diverse projects can be made where an interesting or inspirational idea can be designed, made and controlled. This builds skills and whets the appetite for more. Once this pattern is established more complex design, coding and making techniques can be further developed.

This is a well established international educational trend beginning with Seymour Papert 50 years ago. LEGO Mindstorms was named after his book, "Mindstorms", written in 1980. He initiated a learning theory called constructionism. The 21stC Maker Movement kicked off in a big way around 2005 when Neil Gershenfeld built the first FabLab at MIT and offered a course called “How to Make almost Anything”.

Some schools are coming on board in Australia (especially Privates) because there is a recognition that STEM or STEAM is both important and engaging. But it is also true that many schools are locked into an ACARA curriculum tick the box model and so fall well short of utilising the full potential of the 21stC Maker movement.

Some brief additional information about existing groups, international and local:

Constructing Modern Knowledge (CMK). Gary Stager has been actively promoting constructionist learning in Australian schools for decades. His group offers workshops and books.

FabLabs: The Fab Labs grew exponentially around the world after 2005. See the map.

Paulo Blikstein has promoted Fab Learn Labs, a school version of FabLabs. Search this blog for some summaries of his outstanding articles.

Whittlesea Tech School, Melbourne PolyTechnic STEAM engine offer a range of courses to surrounding schools in Melbourne

Tech Explorations: Peter Dalmaris, Australia offers advanced online courses. mmm ... even if you don't go lower floor (eg. with the microbit), you can still go wider walls, as illustrated by the diverse options on Peter's site.

Adelaide groups: I am just listing Adelaide tech groups I have become aware of over the past year. I am not attempting to publicly evaluate their success based on the broad criteria outlined in this article, at this stage:

Maker Space
TechSpace Learning
Hackerspace Adelaide
South Australia Micro Controller group (SAMG)
42 Adelaide
Computer Science Education Research Group at Adelaide Uni run online courses in computing fundamentals and lend out construction kits to schools.

Footnotes:

(1) This tests the memory. The Logo language, which preceded Scratch was popular at educational computing conferences in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The educational rationale back then was, in part, to provide a more interesting and engaging way to teach maths. However, when the www came along that popularity died. Living then in Adelaide, Australia, I knew only one other Logo enthusiast. However, I used to participate in the Usenet comp.lang.logo group. Description by Brian Harvey; archive. I remember it as being down the bottom in the usage statistics of all the Usenet groups. However, with the advent of Scratch, Logo was transformed into a multimedia, story telling fun machine. With the conversion to block code (low floor), diverse project multimedia features (wider walls) and remixing / online comments and Likes (open windows) the Scratch version of Logo flourished again.

(2) Three article which argue that the microbit is better for beginners but that to continue the path to mechatronics, you can do more with the arduino:

https://mp.moonpreneur.com/blog/microbit-vs-arduino/
Extract:

Both micro:bit and Arduino offer unique strengths and benefits for DIY electronics projects. Micro:bit excels in simplicity, accessibility, and educational applications. This makes micro:bit a good choice for beginners and educational settings. 

Conversely, Arduino provides versatility, expandability, and a robust community support system, making it ideal for more complex and ambitious projects.

https://www.instructables.com/Comparison-Between-Microbit-and-Arduino/
https://picobricks.com/blogs/info/microbit-vs-arduino

The Conversational Framework

- A brief introduction
- the Diana Laurillard section is partly plagarized!!
- click on Diana's diagrams to see them more clearly
- bit of a preamble first before I get to The Conversational Framework.

I’ve been looking for some time, on and off, for a resolution of a problem I’ve had with learning theory.

Sometimes I am this teacher: just do what I think will work and also, as a bonus, is also interesting. Those things that might work vary from year to year depending on the school environment which varies a lot, school to school.

Sometimes I am this teacher: A teacher who has studied a lot of different learning theories and am still surprised about how little interested in learning theories that other teachers seem to be. Some staff and schools hardly ever discuss learning theory.

For most teachers practice is primary. Find something that works. And then for those who try out different approaches – which seems necessary because students cohorts vary widely – it becomes apparent after a while that there is no magic bullet. There is no unified learning theory.

I’ve had a long time interest in learning theories which may have originated from the traditional teaching method – instruction based around a textbook – being so uninspiring.

Early on (the 1980s) I cottoned onto Seymour Papert’s Constructionism after reading his book “Mindstorms”. This got me interested in computers through the Logo coding language which promised to make maths more engaging. The challenge of Constructionism was for the teacher to create an engaging microworld where the student would learn without being formally taught. Turtle geometry was one such microworld. I’ve spent time exploring other microworlds and found some of them to be very successful, eg. recently, the Turtle Art tile project developed by Josh Burker.

Seymour did setup an ideological polemic of Constructionism (intrinsic learning in a computer generated microworld) versus Instructionism (traditional school based) and in his second book “The Children’s Machine” more or less called for the overthrow of traditional schooling.

This was fine by me and where possible I modelled my teaching along the lines he suggested.

However, when I taught at a disadvantaged school in the northern suburbs Adelaide (Paralowie R12) I found that many of the students had missed out so much from before they went to school that they needed lots of instruction to fill in the many gaps in their knowledge.

This created an epistemological crisis for me (a Skinner moment!) which after some agonising I resolved my deciding that teachers needed both Constructionism and Instructionism and awareness of when to use them. Walk the walk along the spectrum of learning theories.

So for years this went on. I would delve into different learning theories and extract what I saw as useful things from each of them. There are some great learning theorists out there IMO and many of them have valuable things to offer. Probably best to provide details of this some other time.

Recently, my interest in learning theory was reawakened. It’s shocking to say but in schools there is very little discussion of learning theories! But what happened in my school is that there was a problem with quite a few year 7s and 8 engagement. So the school hired a learning consultant to fix things up. In my opinion, the theories he talked about were often not the best ones. But anyway it did induce me to start exploring learning theories again.

I’m one of those strange people who reads conference papers and PhDs for fun. Luckily for me Diana Laurillard had been invited to present a key note to the Constructionist conference in Ireland 2020. I really liked her approach because she saw the distinctive strengths of Constructionism but also saw it as not the whole deal. It was part of the jigsaw, albeit a big part, with her whole learning jigsaw being made up of Instructionism, Constructionism, Social-cultural learning and Collaborative learning. We could call these the Big Four. There are others too but those four cover most of the ground I want to cover.

Her framework, which integrates these theories, is called The Conversational Framework. I think the way she presents it can be used as a guide for teachers to develop engaging lessons for students which covers most of the ways in which learning occurs. This could be a formal development process. There is an online website for doing that (see References). But I’m using it here as a self check that I’m offering all of these different ways of learning to students. And as a justification that my preferred ways of teaching are supported by learning theory. It's a big step up from "Walk the walk along the spectrum from Constructionism to Instructionism"

I won’t attempt a detailed explanation or historical origins of Diana’s whole framework (best to read her originals for that, see references) but rather introduce some of her marvellous schematics and argue a claim that my preferred way of teaching does cover all of the methods she recommends.

So the 6 Learning Types are Acquisition, Inquiring, Producing, Discussing, Practising and Production. All of them will be explained somewhere in this article.

learning through acquisition: the teacher (human, book, website, etc) communicates (one-way) concepts and ideas, and the learner reads, watches or listens

learning through investigation’ or ‘inquiry’: the teacher asks learners to explore or question the teacher's concepts (two-way). In this case they generate their own ideas of what they want to know.

learning through practice: the learner uses the learning environment set up by the teacher to create exercises for the learners. Ideally it includes a goal, the means for learners to put their concepts into practice to achieve it, feedback on their action, and the opportunity to revise and improve it.

Learning through practice may be guided, with extrinsic feedback, or unguided (after the teacher has setup the learning environment), with instrinsic feedback. Here's another of Diana's diagrams to help explain this:

"This is why Papert could say that constructionist exercises enabled learning without a teacher. The teacher, in the form or a person, or a computer program running a multiple choice exercise, is not needed to comment or inform. The microworld, like the real world in the right context, can provide the ‘informational feedback’ the learner needs"

Learning through Discussion: questions and answers including through peers (social construction of ideas)

However, learning through collaboration is more demanding than simple ‘discussion’ in the top right-hand corner, as Figure 4 shows, because the learners are necessarily collaborating on constructing something together: that is the nature of collaboration. It involves Q&A, shared practice, tinkering / debugging / repeated iterations. The teacher may play no role at all.

Here, each learner is learning through practice by using the learning environment. And at the same time, they are discussing and sharing that practice. In order to do that, they are necessarily also linking the two, which helps them develop both concepts and practice with each other. The teacher need play no role at all, and yet there is a lot of active internal processing required of the learner during this process.

Learning through production: Here the learner must connect up concepts and practice, and then produce an essay, or performance, or design, or presentation to show what they have learned. Throughout this process the learner is actively processing both concepts and practice and the integration of the two. This is akin to what Papert referred to as constructing personally meaningful and shareable artefacts, where the sharing is part of the motivation to construct a successful artefact.

The main issue for a teacher is to be aware of the full range, and the extent to which their teaching embraces all these different types of conversation, between teacher and learner, learner and peers, and on the levels of both concepts and practice.

Constructionism is represented best through four of the 6 learning types. Learning through acquisition, and inquiry are not a particular focus. The role of the teacher is still critical, however, as it is a real design challenge to generate and modulate the learning environment that could achieve learning without a teacher. Very few achieve that as most rely greatly on the teacher to provide additional guidance and feedback. The teacher will also be the recipient of the artefacts produced by a constructionist pedagogy, able to use these for judging the value of it as a learning process.

Putting all these pedagogic approaches together defines the superset of essential requirements for supporting the learning process, a ‘Conversational Framework’, as shown in Figure 5 (Laurillard, 2002). The full framework embraces all the elements prioritized by each of the main pedagogic approaches, and demonstrates the complexity of what it takes to learn: a continual iteration between teachers and learners, and between the levels of theory and practice. It is not symmetrical: the teacher is privileged as defining the conception and designing the practice environment to match. The teacher also learns, from receiving learners’ questions and products, as well as reflecting on their performance. But teachers are learning about teaching, rather than learning about the concept or practicing the skill.

REFERENCE

Diana Laurillard. Profile

Diana Laurillard. Significance of Constructionism as a distinctive pedagogy (2020)
In Constructionism 2020 conference proceedings (Ireland), pp. 29-37

Diana Laurillard. The pedagogical challenges to collaborative technologies (2009)
In Computer supported collaborative learning

Diana Laurillard. Teaching as a Design Science: Building Pedagogical Patterns for Learning and Technology (2012). This book was too expensive at $200! link, but then I found it at anna's archive.

Applying the Conversational Framework using an online learning design tool
Diana Laurillard talks through how to use a free online learning design tool which applies the Conversational Framework to build courses using the six key learning types

Learning Designer
At this site you need to sign up and login. It then lets you design your own lessons using The Conversational Framework.

The gears of my childhood, again!

Lessons from the Gear Thinkers

I’ve been rereading Seymour Papert's Mindstorms. I thought I had understood it. But I needed the update. Recently, I’ve been part of a curriculum reform which overall has created waves. This was partly because of leadership errors (a mix of good and bad interventions) and partly because middle class parents complain when Schools depart from traditional structures.

Whilst I was writing my interpretation (here) of “The Gears of My Childhood” (Preface to Mindstorms) I discovered a bunch of other interpretations in Meaningful Making book 3 (free download!). Some of them I thought enhanced my interpretation of the "Gears" article. I’ll quote some extracts. Hopefully, this might encourage some to read the originals. Even though my main goal is to clarify my own thinking about what to learn from Seymour’s gears reflection.

Gears of Learning by Ridhi Aggarwal, p. 10

Children should be given the opportunity to explore their questions like babies explore the world around them ...

Children would learn by doing only when they make things that are answers to their own questions. Based on this idea, we started a Question Hour in which children could just share their daily curiosities about anything and everything. They raised questions and discussed possibilities, and then they explored the ideas by making things.

Papert reloaded by Federica Selleri, p. 14

As Papert said, we need to create and take care of the conditions in which the learning process takes place, because the creation of cognitive models is closely linked to the experience associated with them.

Therefore, it is important to pay particular attention to the context in which the experience takes place, and to design it in such a way that it can be about generating ideas and not about running into obstacles. This means thinking about the tools you want students to use, and trying them out for yourself to evaluate their possibilities, but listening to the students’ hypothesis about how things work and supporting their investigations.

What makes a project meaningful? by Lina Cannone, p. 16

I believe that a synergy between teacher and learner must be nurtured. We must abandon pre-planned activities and projects that ignore the participation of the learner. We must give way to the co-planning of activities

Finding my Gear at Twenty-Three by Nadine Abu Tuhaimer, p. 21

After graduation, I realized that my love for tinkering with objects outshined my love for programming,

At 24, I decided to take the “Fab Academy – How to Make Almost Anything” course. This is a six month long intensive program that teaches the principles of digital fabrication

Since then, I’ve been teaching in the Fab Academy program and trying to incorporate what I learned with the different educational programs I run at the Fab Lab where I work, the first Fab Lab in Jordan.

Making means heads and heart, not just hands by Lior Schenk, p. 22

Car child did not become car professional — he became a mathematician. He also became a cyberneticist and renowned learning theorist, responsible for both the 1:1 computing initiatives and the constructionist movements rippling across education to this day.

Gears were, he describes, “both abstract and sensory,” acting as “a transitional object” connecting the formal knowledge of mathematics and the body knowledge of the child.

This notion of knowing — what it means to know something, to learn, to develop knowledge formed the central thesis of Papert’s career. Knowledge is not merely absorbed through cognitive assimilation, but actively constructed through affective components as well. Papert would assert, in other words, that we learn best when we are actively engaged in constructing things in the world. Real, tangible things. Things you can hold, manipulate, and feel in order to make sense of them.

Papert’s successes, as he would ascribe, were not due to interacting with gears as objects — rather due to falling in love with the gears as more than objects, as a conduit across intellectual and emotional worlds.

As Dr. Humerto Maturana said, “Love, allowing the other to be a legitimate other, is the only emotion that expands intelligence.”

Time to Tinker by Lars Beck Johannsen, p. 28

I believe that we need to help our students discover their own gears, and help them channel it into their projects whenever possible. I also believe that it is a teacher’s task to help students develop new gears. Another task is being aware of the way you learn. If something is easy to you, it is natural to believe that it is also easy for everyone else, but that is not the case. We need to help our kids to discover their strengths!

There are a few things that could make this happen. One is knowing your students! Not just on a factual basis but also on a more personal basis. How would you otherwise discover, what makes them tick, what they love, who they are?

I strongly urge all the schools I work with to make time for more project based, constructionist, student-centered learning. The after-school programs, which most kids attend because the parents are working, also need to be a more inspiring place to spend your time. A place to tinker, do what you love, make stuff together with other kids, and have fun!

Between the garage and the electronics workshop, by Mouhamadou Ngom, p. 33

To conclude, I would say that the most important part of learning by doing is careful observation. My secret as a specialist in electro-mechanics is to take careful notes. For example, before disassembling a mechanism, I mark the intersections between the different gears. This is why I ask learners to observe well, to listen well, and to document their work.

Find your unique gear by Xiaoling Zhang, p.35

Dr. Papert’s experience makes me think that it might be a natural human instinct to love fiddling with objects as a prompt to explore the world around us. By building and playing with things, we are also building the connections between ourselves and the physical world. When it happens frequently and reliably, then it becomes a way of thinking. It makes it easier when we see consistency in the world to believe that there are laws behind seemingly superficial phenomena and to discover even more possibilities.

… every child or every person has their own unique “gear.” But can everyone find their gear? Or can we help them to find something that THEY love and can be applied as a bridge to understand more abstract ideas and the world. It seems that unique gear can’t be cloned or taught, but must be discovered

SUMMING UP, the lesson from the Gear Thinkers:

• Children should be given the opportunity to explore their questions
• We must give way to the co-planning of activities
• Listen to your students; pay attention to detail
• Be a trail blazer! Setup the first FabLab in your location
• Knowledge is actively constructed using hands, head and heart
• Love is essential for optimal knowledge growth (of the objects we work with as well as human-human)
• Know your students, personally
• Everyone has to find their own gear. They might need help with this
• Observe everything carefully

Quadratics software evaluation

This was originally written in 1996. I also wrote an accompanying reflection at the time which I now think needs to be updated. So, I'm republishing this one with my new reflection, which is titled, "My Skinner Moment"

Paralowie R12 School
November 1996

I don't like drill and practice but it works, for some things

This year while teaching a Year 10 maths class I programmed my own Quadratics software in logo for student use.

The impact on the class was immediate and positive. Many students in the class had previously been bogged down in substituting negative numbers into quadratic expressions and getting nowhere fast. Suddenly, for them, things began to fall into place. Freed from the requirements of doing many rapid substitutions and calculations (generate table of values, draw graph, then start looking for patterns) they were suddenly able to see the relationship between the 'a', 'b' and 'c' values and the variation in shape of the parabolic curve. Rather than having to concentrate on the computation they could begin to concentrate on the patterns. By the 'a', 'b' and 'c' values I mean the values in this equation:- y = ax² + bx + c and how changing 'a', 'b' and 'c' will effect the parabolic curve.

I was so encouraged by this turn-around that I began to burn the midnight oil adding extra features to my software. This was an interactive process because I was perceiving students needs in lesson time and changing the software at night to meet those needs.

I hadn't anticipated that so many students in this "extended" class would have major difficulties with "basic" skills that "should" have been mastered in Years 8 and 9. Yet when I presented students with an equation like:-
y = 2x² - x + 3
and asked them to substitute x = -2 into it, then the success rate was not too high! So, one feature I added to my software was a drill and practice substitution into a quadratic equation. Students were given 'a', 'b' and 'c' values and an x value to substitute and required to calculate the value of the function, or the y value.

For example:
y = ax² + bx + c
if a = -1 b = 2 c = 3 and x = -1 then what is y ?

I found that the software released me from "lecture mode" and I was able to use much more time meeting some urgent needs of individual students while the others were happily occupied with the program. I could spend substantial slabs of time with a handful of students who really did need quite a lot of help. I could feel the mood changing in the class. Equations and parabolic graphs could be generated in seconds rather than many minutes. The students were able to concentrate on the structure of the parabola and how it was effected by changing a, b and c values without being tormented by their low skill level (in quite a few cases) in calculating the substitutions required to draw the curve. I did receive a lot of spontaneous positive feedback from students about the usefulness of the software.

Another thing I noticed was that the more able students in the class quickly mastered the program. They accepted it as a challenge to be quickly mastered and did just that. Then some of them would boast about it, "too easy sir", comments like that.

So, I began to add more advanced features to my program, to extend the advanced element further, to push out the leading edge. How do you find the axis of symmetry in all cases? How do you find the y value at the turning point? How do you find the x intercepts in certain specialised cases? We have not yet got to the stage of doing the full quadratic formula (that is part of the Year 11 Pure Maths course) but with the aid of my software I was fast approaching that point with the advanced element of the class. The leading edge was being extended, visibly.

So my program was catering for the needs of students across the whole ability range. It could do that because I was writing it and rewriting it on a weekly basis. I see that as a major advantage over a commercial product.

Some students were thrown in their pencil and paper work when the quadratic had a large 'b' value and they had mapped out a table of x values from +3 to -3 and the axis of symmetry might lie on the edge or outside of this domain. Lacking any knowledge of the overall structure of the curve (importance of axis of symmetry and turning point) their performance in mapping the correct graph was poor in quite a few cases.

My understanding and appreciation of this problem and other nuances of quadratics increased dramatically in the course of writing the software. For instance, initially I made the program draw the parabola by starting at one end and drawing to the other end. This created all sorts of problems at the limits because as the equation changed so did the limits. The effect was that some of my curves did not even begin to be drawn, I couldn't keep them on the screen. I eventually solved this frustrating problem by starting to draw the curve at the turning point of the parabola, drawing one side to the outer limits, then jumping back to the turning point and drawing the other side. This problem solving process reinforced in my own mind the central importance of axis of symmetry and turning point in the teaching of quadratics. The mechanical plotting of x values between +3 and -3 often just does not work in the case of quadratics with large 'b' values because the axis of symmetry has moved so far to the right or left.

All the signs of a class being turned around from just battling through to success were there to see. Students became more engaged in the tasks, they asked many more questions than previously, you could visibly see the confidence of many students increase, they became more animated and more positive in their relationship with mathematics and the teacher. Moreover, I felt that I could set more difficult and challenging questions in the program and subsequent tests than I would not otherwise have been able to do.

Looking in my marks book I can see that at least 7 students out of 27 have turned their results around from failing badly to pass marks and in some cases highly successful marks. I'll cite some statistics from my marks book to try to convince, you, the reader (who wasn't in the room to see the change) that a very significant turn around did occur. The Quadratics unit was a 6 week block. I did not use the computer software for the first two and a half weeks because I had not finalised it. In that first two and a half weeks I was mainly using lecture, textbook and homework mode. I also used one interesting activity from MCTP (Algebra Walk, pp. 213-18). In the third week I tested the students only on their ability to substitute values into an equation (two quadratics and one straight line) and plot the graph (first test). The results were poor, average class mark was 56%. I then introduced the Quadratic software and used it extensively for the next 3 weeks. In week 6 I tested the students twice. For test 2 they had to plot a quadratic again and also make predictions from other quadratic formulae about how altering 'a', 'b' and 'c' values would affect the y intercept, axis of symmetry and whether the curve was upright or upside down. This time the average mark for test 2 was 82%, a remarkable improvement over the first test.

For the final test (test 3) I offered students a choice - either do a pencil and paper version or a computer version. Nearly all students opted to practice for the test on the computer and 11 out of 27 choose to do their final test on the computer. One interesting aspect of this was that the computer test was set up for mastery learning. If a student got a question wrong they were invited to try again. They couldn't proceed to the next question until they got the previous one correct. Initially I had programmed it differently, that if a student gave a wrong answer, they got a "no" message and then the problem just disappeared and the next question appeared on the screen. However, when I was doing the test myself, I found this feature incredibly annoying, that when I got the wrong answer, I didn't have the opportunity to try again or to reflect on my mistake in any way. So I changed it. If the technology makes it easy then it seems silly not to use it.

So, conceptually, the final testing process for students who opted for the computer version was very different. They were being continually informed of their progress score as they went along. If they got a wrong answer they were required to persist until they got it right. In their final score this appeared as a larger denominator. If they did the test and didn't like their progress, they had the option of starting over again if time permitted. The program simply generated different questions (of the same type) each time it was run, so it was no difficulty for me to offer multiple chances for retesting.

There was some interesting discussion at the end by students about their reasons for which type of test they chose. Some high ability students said they found practising on the computer very useful but clearly saw it as risky to do their final test on the computer, given their established mastery of the pencil and paper medium. Other high ability students were confident enough to take that risk. Other students said they found it easier to solve the problems on the computer. Some made comments like "its faster". This was interesting because the same problems (actually the computer test had a greater variety of problems) were being set in both mediums but many students clearly felt that it felt very different and expressed preference for one over the other. Another factor was that doing the computer test was more public, less private. The room is set up with the computers around the walls so that all computer screens face towards the centre of the room. This made "collaboration" easier ("cheating") but also made mistakes more public.

A comparison between the final test results was also interesting. I offered 3 tests in total over 6 weeks of instruction (12 * 100 minute lessons), the first two tests were pencil and paper only but in the last test students were offered a choice (either computer or pencil and paper). Mainly due to high absenteeism only 17 out of the 27 class members sat for all 3 tests. Fortunately for the last test (test 3), this group of seventeen split themselves into roughly two equal groups, one group of 8 who chose to do the computer test, the other group of 9 who chose to do the paper and pencil test. For the previous two tests (tests 1 and 2) the percentage results of these two groups was roughly the same (71% versus 68% average). But for the final test (test 3) the group who chose the computer test scored an average of 95% compared with 68% for the pencil and paper group. Quite a difference !

I have explained above that the two tests were not really comparable (even though the questions were of the same type) because the computer based test provided instant feedback and monitored progress. Once again I would argue that it would be ridiculous not to incorporate these features into the computer program since they greatly assist in keeping students focused and motivated. This introduces formative elements into a summative test, which from a learning viewpoint is surely a good thing.

Here is an example of how students who did the pencil and paper test were disadvantaged. One question asked for the 'a', 'b' and 'c' values of this quadratic:
y = x² - 4

Two of the top students (averages in mid 90's for first two tests) in the class got confused on this question and made this elementary mistake:-
a = 1 (correct)
b = -4 (wrong, the answer is b = 0)
c = 0 (wrong, the answer is c = -4)

Since they made this mistake they also got wrong the y intercept, axis of symmetry and y value at turning point, losing 5 marks in total.

If they had been doing the computer test then they would have received instant feedback on their first error, b = -4, and would have easily corrected it (being in the high ability range), resulting in the loss of only 1 mark.

The program at this stage has these features as displayed in the main menu:-

• Practice number skills
• Vary 'a' value
• Vary 'b' value
• Vary 'c' value
• Do my own graph
• Work out the axis of symmetry
• Test
• Solve y = ax² - c
• Solve y = ax² + bx
• Solve y = (dx + e)(fx + g)

Final evaluation by students:-

I prepared a final evaluation sheet for students seeking their opinion of how they had learnt about quadratics. Twenty students successfully completed the final evaluation sheet. I asked them to evaluate 8 possible modes of learning according to this scale:-

1 = helped lots
2 = helped a fair bit
3 = helped a little bit
4 = didn't help at all

When I totalled the results the Quadratics software program came out on the top of the list: 10 students wrote that it helped lots, 8 said helped a fair bit, 2 said helped a little bit and none said that it didn't help at all.

"Indicate how much each of the following helped you learn Quadratics using this code. Write a number next to each statement below."

32 Quadratics software program
35 My own efforts in class
37 Help from friends, class mates
42 Help from teacher, one to one
49 Teacher explaining in front of the class
50 Doing lots of homework
54 Working through the textbook
71 Help from parents or other adults outside the class (eg. tutor)

APPENDIX: THE TESTS

Test 1 (end of week 3):

Average class mark = 56%

Plot these 3 graphs on the same set of axes. Show tables of values:-

y = 3x - 4
y = x² + 4x
y = -2x² + 2x - 1


Test 2 (week 6):

Average class mark = 82%

y = 2x² + 4x + 1
Find y when x = 1
What is the y intercept?
Calculate the axis of symmetry (Hint: AS = -b / 2a)
Is the graph upright or upside down?

y = x² - 2x - 3
Find y when x = 3
What is the y intercept ?
What is the axis of symmetry?

y = -0.5x² + x
Find y when x = -2
What is the y intercept?
Calculate the axis of symmetry.
Is the graph upright or upside down?

y = x² - 2x - 3
Calculate a table of values, eg. x = +3 to -3
Draw axes, plot the graph
What is the y intercept ?
Draw in the axis of symmetry.
Work out the x and y values at the turning point.
What are the x intercepts ? (there are two of them).

Test 3 (week 6) pencil and paper version.

Average mark for those who chose this test = 68%
Average mark for those who chose comparable computer test = 95%

y = -2x² + 2x + 1
x = -2
Calculate the y value

y = 3x² - x - 2
x = -1 Calculate the y value.
a = 2, b = 2, c = 0
Find the axis of symmetry.
a = -2, b = 4, c = 3

Find the axis of symmetry

y = x² - 4
Find the a, b and c values
Find the y intercept
Find the axis of symmetry
Find the y value at the turning point
Find the x intercepts

y = 2x² + 4x
Find the a, b and c values
Find the y intercept
Find the axis of symmetry
Find the y value at the turning point
Find the x intercepts

y = (x + 3)(x - 2)
Find the x intercepts
Then expand the brackets using FOIL and
Find the a, b and c values
Find the y intercept
Find the axis of symmetry
Find the y value at the turning point

my evolving mangle -> ethnocomputing

Harel and Papert (1) argue that some materials are better with regard to the following criteria:

• appropriability (some things lend themselves better than others to being made one's own)
• evocativeness (some materials are more apt than others to precipitate personal thought)
• integration (some materials are better carriers of multiple meaning and multiple concepts)

For many years, I've been working in, struggling with, three (at least) different domains. As a first approximation let's call them social justice, learning theory and computing.

All of them evolve, both in reality and my understanding of them. In this particular iteration I'll change the names significantly to indigenous culture, powerful ideas and tangible hardware / constructionist software. This matches my present context (Alice Spring / indigenous learners) and goals (to help facilitate their learning).

What is the mangle? This comes from a Ron Eglash et al article (2), which in turn comes from a 1995 book by Andrew Pickering (3). The idea is that science is neither a transparent window into truth nor a relative truth. It is somewhere in between. Culture, nature and technology combine in a never ending spiral to produce science. At every point there is resistance. Something doesn't work, tweak it to make things fit better. We tweak our cultures, we tweak our theories and we tweak our technologies to overcome the resistance.

So this is a brief overview of where I am at, how I got there and where it is heading.

Indigenous culture: Parts of indigenous culture (eg. dot paintings) can be represented with algorithms. Contemporary indigenous art is not the same as traditional art. It has evolved (4). Indigenous students are often more engaged when offered the opportunity to represent their culture using the computer (5). These themes can be deep, not dressing up the dog / trivial.

Powerful ideas: This was central to Seymour Papert's initiative (6). That maths could be restructured in both a powerful and engaging way and hence made more accessible to those who had missed out. This does require some considerable, thoughtful input from the teacher in designing a learning environment that works. Examples: Turtle Geometry as designed by Seymour and allies (7); Idit Harel's Instructional Software Design Project (8)

How has this evolved? As it turns out some of Seymour's claims, eg. transfer to other learning domains, were exaggerated.(9) Nevertheless, within more limited domains the ideas remain powerful. And in broader domains you can do a lot with a little. (10)

This requires a lot of work to sort through but I feel some authors and curriculum writers have come close. (11, 12)

Tangible hardware / constructionist software: The hardware has become smaller and more interesting (eg. the micro:bit, the Hummingbird:bit are two favourites amongst many to choose from) and spawned a new movement: The Maker Movement. The software has become more user friendly (block coding) and diverse. I think Sylvia Martinez and Gary Stager are on the right track when they identify three game changers: Fabrication, Physical Computing and Coding (13)

The evolution in the hardware/software area has been phenomenal.

PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

I've only recently discovered "Culturally Situated Design Tools" which do offer at least in part a way to make the transition. Ron Eglash is probably the key person here. He goes back a long way and I'm a little bewildered and sad that I didn't discover him earlier. So, it fits well too with the laws of ignorance, we don't know what we don't know (but someone out there might know).

TED talk: The fractals at the heart of African Designs
Legacy items: Teaching math and computing through culture

This approach could be adapted effectively to indigenous ed here in Australia. I've recently used Turtle Art to emulate a NAIDOC poster (here) and listed the skills and dispositions required / learnt.

It needs a lot more work. But it is a very rich area where three different forces are both evolving and intersecting: indigenous culture + STEAM + computer science as a discipline. I think it's doable, each of the 3 big areas enriches and feeds off the others.

REFERENCE:

(1) Harel, I. & Papert, S. (1990) Software Design as a Learning Environment. Interactive Learning Environment, 1, 1-32
(2) Eglash et al. Culturally Situated Design Tools: Ethnocomputing from Field Site to Classroom (2006)
(3) Pickering, Andrew (1995) The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency and Science
(4) McLean, Ian (Editor). How Aborigines invented the idea of contemporary art (2011)
(5) Indigenous icons activity
(7) Kerr, Bill. Papert's Ideas: Mainly from Mindstorms (1991)
(8) Kerr, Bill. Educational Software: Designed by Kids for Kids (1994)
(9) Tedre, Matti and Denning, Peter. The Long Quest for Computational Thinking (2016)
(10) How to evaluate construction kits: ten design principles
(11) Kafai, Yasmin and Burke, Quinn. Connected Code: Why Children Need to Learn Programming (2016)
(12) Karen Brennan, Laura Peters, and Alexa Kutler. Creative Computing Curriculum Guide (Scratch 3.0)
(13) Martinez, Sylvia and Stager, Gary. Invent to Learn: Making, Tinkering and Engineering in the Classroom (2nd Edition, 2019)

how to evaluate construction kits: ten design principles

update (July 8): The reason this article resonates so strongly with me is that nearly everything it says also relates to how to teach a good lesson, how to design a great curriculum and how to critique wooden curriculum guidelines such as ACARA's Digital Technology.

I think teachers need a guide to evaluate the enormous array of construction kits that have come on stream: Makey Makey, Arduino, Little Bits, Ozobot, Micro:bit, Chibi Chip, Circuit Playground Express, Lilypad, Bee-Bot, Dash and Dot, Sphero, Edison, Drones – add or choose your favourite

Some Reflections on Designing Construction Kits for Kids by Mitch Resnick and Brian Silverman (2005)

This is a 2005 article. In some respects the technologies have moved on. But it remains an elegant guide as to how to both choose and use technology construction kits for learning powerful ideas. I’ve thrown a few of my thoughts into this summary.

1. Design for Designers

Some kits are too finished and polished. With the best kits, the user can design a wide variety of interesting things, it is not finished or limited to a narrow range of functions.

2. Low Floor and Wide Walls

Seymour Papert put forward the slogan “low floor, high ceiling”. The truth is that with Scratch, under the leadership of Mitch Resnick, wide walls were given preference to the high ceiling. There are some things you can’t do with Scratch, that you could do with other, earlier versions of logo. This has provoked criticism (eg. I believe from Alan Kay commenting on Mark Guzdial's blog but I can't find the link right now) as well as other designs to put the high ceiling back (eg. SNAP by Jens Monig and Brian Harvey, watch this video).

Initially, my position was that I wanted it all: the low floor, the high ceiling and the wide walls. But the truth is that Scratch has scaled dramatically (40 million projects on the Scratch website in 2018) whereas other more powerful versions of logo or etoys haven’t. There are a number of reasons for this but its relative simplicity is one of them.

Since I’m now focused on inclusion for all, STEAM for the 99%, I can appreciate more Mitch Resnick’s argument that too many high level features create hurdles that discourage many users.

3. Make powerful ideas salient – not forced

“We have found that trying to teach powerful ideas directly is not very effective. Rather, our strategy is to provide opportunities for kids to encounter and use powerful ideas as a natural part of design experiences.”

This is a huge issue which I won’t try to cover in a shortish blog post. What are powerful ideas and how are they best taught? I think the approach advocated here by Mitch and Brian is one very good way to introduce kids to powerful ideas. I also think that they do have to be taught, even though that is hard, because by their nature they are not easily learnt.

Ask me for articles about this if interested, they were previously at Learning Evolves but this shut down when wikispaces was abandoned, unfortunately.

4. Support many paths, many styles

The authors here relate a story where one group uses the full features of LEGO-logo (their style is described as “patterners” or “hards”) while another group initially doesn’t (their style is described as “dramatists” or “softs”). The patterners were more comfortable doing the coding. The authors took a hands off, non interventionist approach.

“We worried that the students would miss out on some of the powerful ideas underlying the LEGO/Logo activity. But we didn’t interfere”

The way they tell it, it has a happy ending. The dramatists do end up coding their ferris wheel. But what would the authors have done if that group had continued to avoid the coding?

5. Make it as simple as possible – and maybe even simpler

“One reason (PROBLEM) is “creeping featurism”: advances in technology make it possible to add new features, so each new generation of products has more and more features.”

YES!! Personally, I find creeping featurism incredibly frustrating. It often gets in the way of me doing the task I want to do on the computer, not to mention cursing.

“We have found that reducing the number of features often improves the user experience. What initially seems like a constraint or limitation can, in fact, foster new forms of creativity.”

They then describe two of their designs, the first is a programmable brick with 4 motors and 6 sensors which is the size of a kid’s juice box.The second is a cricket with 2 motors and 2 sensors which is the size of a matchbox.

The simpler Cricket proved to be more popular!

“But once we had developed the scaled-down version, which we called a Cricket, people kept finding more and more creative applications for it, in spite of (or perhaps because of?) its apparent limitations. Over time, we shifted our research effort, making the Cricket the centerpiece of our new construction kits”

Once again the KISS principle wins. This echoes the point above about wide walls displacing the high ceiling.

6. Choose black boxes carefully

Black boxes are chosen to facilitate certain types of learning and to hide other types of learning. Three examples are given:

• building robots – facilitates the learning of gearing, feedback and control (and hides the learning of how motors work)
• turtle geometry – facilitates the learning of the geometry of polygons (and hides the learning of how forward requires trigonometry to implement)
• colour of LEDs – make colour as simply as possible (map it to 0-100) so as to integrate it with other things such as temperature.

7. A little bit of programming goes a long way

KISS works for the 99%

“We continue to believe in the value of everyone learning to program, but we are also well aware of the difficulties of learning to program. Many beginning programmers hit a plateau, able to write simple programs, but unable to go further. We have found that it is difficult to help kids get beyond this plateau. But, over the years, we have begun to realize that being “stuck” on the plateau is not such a big problem: kids can learn a great deal, and benefit a great deal, while they are on the plateau. We have shifted our efforts, trying to leverage what kids can do well, rather than focusing on what they can’t. Kids generally have little difficulty learning to use imperative (action-oriented) commands (like forward and on), simple control structures (like repeat), basic conditionals, and simple procedural abstraction. So we have been developing programming languages and contexts that enable kids to do a lot with those basic elements….

Our new Scratch programming language has similar qualities, enabling kids to manipulate rich media (sounds, music, animations) with simple combinations of commands.”

Once again, they are explaining an important reason for the success of Scratch. If as teachers we become too anxious about forcing higher level thinking then that often backfires and turns kids off coding.

We still want to teach higher level thinking. The challenge is how to develop environments which facilitate internal development of its need, rather than external forcing.

In practice schools just put it into the curriculum (ACARA) and it becomes a sink or swim exercise.

8. Give people what they want – not what they ask for

“Rather than asking users what they want, we have found it more productive to observe users interacting with our prototypes, and try to infer what they want (and don’t want) from their actions. Often, their actions speak louder than their words. It is usually easy to see when users get frustrated, even if they don’t articulate their frustration.”

I see this as a sophisticated and enlightened form of leadership which transcends both a top down preordained blue print approach and a bottom up populist approach. The teacher / designer / leader does know more about the educational goals which are desirable to be achieved. But they do have to pay close attention to both the abilities and desires of their students and factor that into their decision making of what to do next and how to achieve those broader goals in an interesting rather than formalistic manner. This makes teaching an interactive art form.

9. Invent things that you would want to use yourself

I’ve previously called this the “eat your own dog food” approach, a slogan which developed out of the open source movement.

“We aim to build not only new technologies, but also communities of people who can help kids learn with those new technologies. And we have found that it is easiest to build those communities if everyone involved (adults as well as kids) enjoy using the technologies.”

The technologies which I am currently promoting (eg. Scratch3.0, the micro:bit, the Hummingbird:bit, Turtle Art, Makey Makey, App Inventor) are ones that I do enjoy using myself. In the past when I promoted Game Maker I did build games myself with it and used them as part of my teaching.

10. Iterate, iterate - then iterate again

Curriculum guidelines such as ACARA Design Technology put too much emphasis on getting the planning right first before making a product. As the authors argue here it is better to have an idea, build a quick and dirty prototype and then continue to iterate.

“… we put a high priority on “tinkerability” – we want to encourage kids to mess with the materials, to try out multiple alternatives, to shift directions in the middle of the process, to take things apart and create new versions. Kids learn new lessons with each iteration. ...

In developing new technologies, we have found that we never get things quite right on the first try. We are constantly critiquing, adjusting, modifying, revising. The ability to develop rapid prototypes is critically important in this process. We find that storyboards are not enough; we want functioning prototypes. Initial prototypes don’t need to work perfectly, just well enough for us (and our users) to play with, to experiment with, to talk about….

We find that our best conversations (and our best ideas) happen when we start to play with new prototypes – and observe users playing with the prototypes. Almost as soon as we start to play with (and talk about) one prototype, we start to think about building the next….

This process requires both the right tools (to support rapid development of new prototypes) and the right mindset (to be willing to throw out a prototype soon after creating it). Too often, the software-development community seems to follow a paradigm of: plan ahead, design carefully, then implement once ….

We much prefer the paradigm proposed by our colleague John Maeda: imagine, realize, critique, reflect, iterate”

can the digital natives write?

This video has a clever lead in with a surprising Mothers Day theme.

Then he (Mitch Resnik) goes onto say that those who describe kids as "digital natives" haven't got it quite right. Using computers and phones fluently is like them learning how to read but not to write. They miss out on creating new things on their computers and phones. They are locked in to whatever is available in the apps store.

Along the way, a variety of Scratch projects are displayed.

It's fairly persuasive the way Mitch argues the case.

freedom is good, control is bad; control is good, freedom is bad

The Vietnam war protest movement taught me that rebellion was good and government bad, that freedom was good and control was bad.

In applying this principle to education, the methodology of behaviourism seemed to symbolise the main thing that was wrong with School and Education. That it was BORING.

edit (23/4):
Behaviourism and / or rote learning was a sophisticated form of child abuse, a denial of freedom.


The Vietnam war had a racist element to it. Moreover racism at home directed at indigenous Australians took the form of either genocide or assimilation. Assimilation was equivalent to cultural death, a denial of indigenous culture.
/edit

Seymour Papert taught me that computers could be used in hands on personal ways that empowered naive users in deep ways, that personal learning was good and rote was bad (1).

But the experience working in a disadvantaged school taught me that behaviourist learning had its place in education too (2).

Noel Pearson taught me that the most difficult problem of social inequality, that of indigenous Australians, could be analysed and progress made (3).

Peter Sutton taught me that the indigenous question still remained an incredibly difficult problem (4).

Zig Engelmann taught me how to scale learning using behaviourist educational design (direct instruction) (5)

Hence, I have gone full cycle, returning to my starting point and seeing the same issues with new eyes. That freedom can be dangerously misguided and control can be good.

 reference:
(1) Papert's ideas: Mainly from Mindstorms
(2) The place of behaviourism in schools
(3) Radical Hope: Education and Equality in Australia
(4) The Politics of Suffering
(5) Zigsite

scratch license disappointment

If there could be a synergy between free software and the best constructionist software then that would be so much better for the poorest children of the world ...

Unfortunately, the Scratch team at MIT Media Lab does not appear to support that. Very unfortunate because Scratch is currently the best available beginners constructionist software IMHO ... and Mitch Resnick is a great populariser of Scratch and has interesting theoretical ideas about learning (kindergarten metaphor, low floor wide walls)

However, I recently discovered (through Tom Hoffman), that the Scratch license has been changed from free to non commercial

The new license (1.3.1) says:

"Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and accompanying documentation and media files (the "Software") to distribute the Software for non-commercial purposes, including the right to use, copy, publish, or distribute copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so ..."

[[update (2nd December 2008): The Scratch binary license has been changed to allow commercial use]]

The previous license said (wording obtained from the folder containing my old copy of Scratch):

"Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and accompanying documentation and media files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so ..."

The right to modify Scratch has been taken out.

[[update (2nd December 2008): There are two Scratch licenses, one for the binary and another for the source. The source code license does allow modification. See comment by Mitch Resnick in response to this blog]]

This will effect the distribution of Scratch on Sugar, the software originally developed for the OLPC and now being ported to other platforms, to Debian at least and other Linux distributions. See Debian Bug report #471927

Tom Hoffman wrote in his blog on October 14th:

"Since it is un-free software it cannot be put in Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat, or any other free software distribution. Can it be shipped on the XO? This license significantly restricts the distribution of Scratch to children around the world, and to what benefit?"

I posted my query to the Scratch forum and received this reply from Andres Monroy-Hernandez of the Scratch Team at the MIT Media Lab:

There has been some discussion in the Scratch Team about this. Overall our concern is to avoid forks. In general forks are good because bring diversity but since Scratch is a tool for beginners we're worried about having multiple versions out there. This happened a little bit with Scratch's predecessor LOGO, there were a lot of versions, some of them incompatible.

I am an Ubuntu user and I appreciate the choices I have for every element of the OS, but I do spend hours trying to figure out between apt-get and aptitute, Compiz vs no compiz, KDE vs Gnome vs Xfce, etc, etc. In some ways, Ubuntu has been able to succeed by providing something that works out of the box without forcing users to choose.

I think we are going to change the license of the binary distribution to allow for commercial use but we're uncertain about the source. What do you think about forking in Scratch?

This issue was then discussed on the IAEP (Its an education project) list and here are some of the responses:

Tom Hoffman:

Scratch is, or should be a trademark. Only MIT, or people they give permission to, can use it. Anyone else can fork their code, but they can't call it Scratch without permission. An example of this is from the Apache License:

6. Trademarks. This License does not grant permission to use the trade names, trademarks, service marks, or product names of the Licensor, except as required for the reasonable and customary use in describing the origin of the Work and reproducing the content of the NOTICE file.

Mozilla has very strict terms for trademark use -- so much so that it is called Iceweasel in Debian: http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/trademarks/

I suspect Scratch would want to find some language which says "you may only call this Scratch if you have not modified the source." Ultimately, IANAL, and I don't know *exactly* how to do it, but it is in this ballpark.

Me:

I'd like to see the widest possible distribution of the current or up-to-date version of Scratch to the children of the world. This includes distribution through the OLPC and Sugar (which are no longer the same thing and Sugar is now being ported to various platforms). From my understanding this will not happen if you keep the new non commercial license since some Linux distributions will not include Scratch under that license. Ironic voice: The Scratch team has forked Scratch by changing the license.

I don't follow why Scratch is special because it is for beginners.

It also seems to me that FLOSS has a far bigger and more influential footprint now than when Seymour Papert / LCSI went commercial with LogoWriter / MicroWorlds and you need to take that into consideration. Thanks, of course, to the hard work of FLOSS advocates

Comparison with LOGO: Well, the versions of LOGO that are going out on OLPC / Sugar are Turtle Art (cut down, developed by Brian Silverman) and Brian Harvey's logo (powerful but non intuitive user interface last time I saw it). It's the Open Source versions which will go out to the poorest children of the world. In that sense it's very fortunate that there were forks in logo, that the commercial versions were not the only ones.

I love logo and used it for over a decade as a school teacher, mainly LogoWriter, then MicroWorlds, ie. commercial versions. Eventually I stopped using Logo because it wasn't free and another free (but not open source) alternative came along (Game Maker) which had a great UI and a lot of appeal for many students (but not as good in terms of its deep educational philosophy). But now I have stopped using GameMaker, partly because it went commercial, and now use Scratch (which I see as a version of Logo and has the best UI yet) as my main introduction to visual programming for students. Teachers will chop and change like I have. In general they are committed to easy to use software and are not tuned in to complex legal arguments about licensing and its implications.

However, as a teacher I would like to be able to use the latest version of Scratch in Australia and use the same version if I decided to travel to a developing country to work on the OLPC project. Another hypothetical: It would also be great if African kids in refugee camps working with XO's were working on the latest version of Scratch before they came to Australia.

More and more people, teachers and youth, are using Open Source and nderstanding the politics of Open Source more. By changing the license as you have you diminish the enthusiasm of some of those people for Scratch. People chose software for a variety of reasons. The perception of support for freedom being one of those reasons.

Pamela Jones:

If you are trying to avoid forks, why would you want to allow commercial? That inevitably results in forks, with some code going dark.

Have you thought about LGPL? It allows commercial entities to use the code without worry while protecting the codebase.

I would strongly suggest you speak to Software Freedom Law Center. This is exactly what they do. If you want an MIT-style license, they can help you with this too. It's ultimately up to you, but doing a license without a lawyer never works.

This was weeks ago now and the response from the Scratch team is ... silence

Tom Hoffman has been arguing for a while now on his blog that MIT does not lead when it comes to software license issues. For example, this post about the StarLogo TNG License (October 17, 2007):

That MIT would choose such a license is not surprising. The failure of US universities to not only not lead in this area (particularly wrt K-12 ed-tech), but to not follow the commercial or increasingly governmental sectors is unfortunately quite evident. Fine. What they do with their IP is their business. However, this project is funded by an National Science Foundation grant. I don't understand why the NSF allows grantees to limit the distribution of software written with public funds in this way. It is a waste of my tax dollars.

What a pity. If there could be a synergy between free software and the best constructionist software then that would be so much better for the poorest children of the world ...

Constance Kamii on teaching maths

Questioning assumptions with Constance Kamii

This is a brilliant blog post by Sylvia Martinez, reporting on the ideas of Constance Kamii about teaching mathematics to young learners. Sylvia has done a great job in putting the theory and then illustrating it with some fairly detailed practical tips, all based on a presentation by CK. She concludes with references and links to books by Kamii

This has the unmistakable appearance of a beautiful, fragrant flower shining in the desert of information overload and systemic separation of theory and practice.

towards a fingernail definition of constructionism

I've been thinking about a thumbnail definition for constructionism (with an N, not a V) but when I write it down it keeps growing.

It's a very interesting word. One issue is that the constructivism word flirts with idealism in breaking with behaviourism and in this respect the discussion should remain unfinished - because we don't actually know how the mind works and the issue of representation remains controversial, although it is part of constructivism

Here is my effort, but it is more like 4 or more fingernails than a thumbnail:

internal, meta, interactive, scaffolding, mentored bit - mental modelling, self and others: Constructionist students and teachers create mental models of their own and others knowledge state (see mental modelling all the way down)

external, social and personal bit - Learning by socially and personally meaningful doing or construction

technology, education environment bit - Some tools are better than others for learning (more appropriable, evocative and integrated)

Harel and Papert (1990) argue that some materials are better with regard to the following criteria:

• appropriability (some things lend themselves better than others to being made one's own)
• evocativeness (some materials are more apt than others to precipitate personal thought)
• integration (some materials are better carriers of multiple meaning and multiple concepts)

philosophical, dangerous bit - Since we don't know how the mind works with any certainty then constructionists will inevitably flirt with idealism, the idea that all knowledge is subjective and idiosyncratic, that there is no such thing as objectivity - the need to stay grounded and to keep doing a theory to practice spiral (see ascending from the abstract to the concrete)

Another point not included is that we need to be concrete and give examples of real learning when talking about it - which I haven't done here

I have argued earlier that constructionism is a suitcase word. But I'm rethinking that. Certainly, constructionism is a complicated word but that's a bit different from what Minsky says about suitcase words, that they have multiple, different meanings. eg. "consciousness" (requires more explanation)

I wouldn't like to take out the philosophical, dangerous bit because that would create the risk of too much blindfolded walking. It's better if the word is associated with some risk rather than blandness and the thumbnail definitions tend to gravitate towards blandness through simplification, imply that this is a known known. Bland definitions such as "learning by doing" are mundane and meaningless.

I can't operate as a constructionist without all the above bits

Some more background information about this:

The constructivist word is not prominent in either Mindstorms (Paperts original book, it is not mentioned in the index) or Margaret Boden's biography of Piaget (only mentioned twice)

I think what Piaget did was treat young children as self directed learners through play etc. not as empty vessels to be filled by adults. The term "genetic epistemology" is more associated with Piaget - the evolution of knowledge structures in the young learner - it seems to mean the same thing for Piaget as constructivism

So the term did not originate with him probably but he might have been the first to investigate it as a concept wrt children learning seriously and consistently

Other theorist saw the learning ability as innate but needing time to unfold. Some still argue this, I think Chomsky (and Pinker) argues that for language development that we are preprogrammed genetically in "mentalese", a universal grammar

Also the idea of mental representation (cognitive stuctures) is attacked by the connectionists who think it can all be done with patterns - Downes also argues this

So Piaget, Papert and Minsky's position that humans gradually develop learning structures or representations over some years in childhood is still controversial - constructivism

This concept has been altered by social constructivists but also by others - constructivist idealists (radical constructivists) like Ernst von Glasersfeld

Post modernists who deny objective truth sometimes identify with constructivism

Boden makes the point that all constructivists flirt with idealism but they don't have to capitulate to it (pp. 79-80):

Piagest is aware that as a constructivist he must be careful to avoid idealism ... that he must answer the sceptic's challenge that perhaps all our so-called 'knowledge' is mind-dependent illusion ..." (elaborated further by Boden)

Wikipedia identifies Giambattista Vico or Giovanni Battista Vico (1668-1744) as the first constructivist ("truth itself is constructed") - also Kant and Dewey preceded Piaget
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_(learning_theory)

reference:
untangling constructionism
tidying up the constructionist suitcase (initial draft on my blog)
tidying up the constructionist suitcase (expanded version at OLPC news)
genetic epistemology
untangling Free, Sugar and Constructionism
EDUCATIONAL SOFTWARE: DESIGNED BY KIDS FOR KIDS
PAPERT'S IDEAS: MAINLY FROM MINDSTORMS

Need to add some original Papert articles to this list

A shorter version of the above was part of a longer discussion on the IAEP list

Raymond Lister's paper

After the Gold Rush: Toward Sustainable Scholarship in Computing (pdf, 16pp) by Raymond Lister, Faculty of Information Technology, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia

Mark Guzdial, on his blog, described this as a "great paper" and then uses it to promote Cognitive Load Theory and its critique of constructivism or constructionism (link to Mark Guzdial's post)

Cognitive load theory keeps coming up again and again as an alleged refutation of constructivism. So, I read the Lister paper with that in mind. I have previously written a rebuttal of the Kirschner et al paper which claims that minimal guidance during instruction does not work (one of the relevant paper cited by Lister)

The Lister paper is about the authors journey from being a bad teacher of computer programming to a better teacher and some of the attitudes and pitfalls encountered along the way. It's an admirable paper from that point of view, of someone becoming aware of what emerges as rather extreme deficiencies of many teachers and deciding to begin to tackle this seriously.

Here is a brief summary of some of the problem attitudes identified, at length, by the author:

1. the assumption that all students learn in similar ways (one mould fits all)
2. the reluctance of those who have been successful within a system to question deeply the way that system does things
   
3. more years of teaching means you teach better
4. the most outspoken individuals often dominate curriculum change
5. teachers don't criticise other teachers, the culture of silence
6. Anecdotal flag planting, I tried this and it worked
7. Lack of real evidence
8. Systemic separation of the theory of teaching and learning from particular disciplines
9. Teachers resist researching their own teaching
10. Teachers blame their colleagues at lower level levels when their students don't know stuff
11. If students fail then blame the student, not your teaching. Students might be lazy, spend too much time in paid work or are genetically deficient (common belief amongst teachers when it comes to learning how to program)
12. the need to move past the industrial model paradigm to a more ecological model, in harmony with the teaching and learning environment

For the author the wakeup call was too many of his students failing and students not learning how to program.

He describes some ways in which his teaching has become more interactive with his students and various papers he has read in his search to become a better teacher and also to understand the reasons for the decline in IT enrolments. He takes the trouble to find out the real reasons why students are obtaining wrong answers to "easy" questions and explores some interactive techniques, such as asking students to explain "in plain English" what a short piece of code did.

So far, so good

But along the way the author has quoted from some papers on Cognitive Load Theory and agrees with those authors that constructivism is deficient. He goes onto say that the Australasian University Teaching and Learning (T&L) communities are heavily influenced by constructivism and contrasts this with "discipline based academics" who tend to focus mainly on their disciplines at the expense of teaching and learning theory. Towards the end, however, the author repeats his call for the bringing together of theory and practice based on a "social constructivist view of the world"

The authors view of constructivism is taken uncritically from the Cognitive Load Theorists (link to the original Kirschner, Sweller and Clark paper) and is then oversimplified further by him to equate constructivism with problem solving:

On the basis of that definition, computing education has used constructivist approaches for decades. For example, many of us introduce students to programming via the problem-solving approach, which McCracken et al. (2001) defined as an approach where we provide students with a problem description, and then require them to decompose it into sub-problems, implement them, test them, then assemble the pieces into a complete solution (Lister, p. 6)

Hence, Lister misunderstands the issue of what the Papert version of constructionism is because he relies on the inadequate definition emanating from these critics of constructivism. (Rather than researching what supporters of constructivism are saying.) As I pointed out in my earlier rebuttal there is only a single Papert reference in the Kirschner, Sweller and Clark paper even though Papert is recognised as an authority and has authored many papers, books and supervised many PhD theses. Now we see this harm being spread to Lister and then onto Guzdial.

Most tellingly, many of the positions that Lister puts as problems to be overcome are in fact similar to issues that the constructionist Papert has long ago identified as problems to be overcome. For example, Lister explains at some length about the problem of constructivist theory (T&L departments) and the practice of disciplines being kept separate. But Papert has famously said:

You cannot think about thinking without thinking about thinking about something

In their paper, Software Design as a Learning Environment (1990), Idit Harel and Seymour Papert, focus on and discuss in detail four important issues in developing constructionist learning environments, in this case, in the learning of fractions:

• Development of Concept - the need to move beyond rigid, particular and isolated understanding to more flexible, generalised and connected understanding
• Appropriation of the Project - taking personal ownership enhances learning
• Time Frame and Rhythm of Work - School time is organised in rigid and fragmented segments, whereas experts and an apprenticeship model has a totally different feel to it
• Metacognitive Awareness - thinking about ones own knowledge and understandings is an important part of learning

Plenty of scope for interactive teaching here.

One final point, briefly. Having now read Marvin Minsky's book The Emotion Machine, I can now see ways to improve my rebuttal of the Kirschner, Sweller and Clark paper. This does connect to Lister's concerns about the relative inadequacy of "folk pedagogy" and citing Cognitive Load Theory as an antidote. I can see now that Cognitive Load Theory might just be another form of folk pedagogy with pseudo scientific terms like "working memory" and "long term memory", concepts that sound scientific but have yet to be explained. See Minsky, page 243.

At any rate, to suggest, as the Lister paper does, that Papert's constructionism is a theory that eschews a deep study of interactivity with the learner, that it means something like give them a problem and walk away, is a gross misrepresentation. (although, to be fair, this may well be true of some of the University based Teaching & Learning faculties, so muddied have the constructivist waters become)