learning and teaching Turtle Art

Turtle Art is a deliberately minimalist design of Logo by Brian Silverman and Paula Bonta of the Playful Invention Company. By minimalist I mean it sticks to the principles outlined by Mitch Resnick and Brian Silverman in their 2005 article, “Some Reflections on Designing Construction Kits for Kids”, namely

• Make it as Simple as Possible – and Maybe Even Simpler
• A Little Bit of Programming Goes a Long Way

The Turtle Art sessions were the starting point of a bigger project. The students began by designing interesting and artistic geometric shapes. They then exported an SVG of their shape into Tinkercad. From Tinkercad they saved an STL and then 3D printed the shape. Next they used the shape to imprint a clay tablet and finally they painted the tablet.

Following a well worn path I began with the square. The Turtle Art defaults are setup for drawing a square. Once a square is drawn you can then show how to “black box” it with a named hat. This creates a brand new block which can now be used later as part of a larger design.

This starting shape is a good one to role play with a student acting as a robot and another as the controller. This gels with the body syntonic principle (Seymour Papert, MindStorms) and hopefully gets students thinking in terms of “I am the turtle, what do I need to do to make this shape”

I then challenged the students to create the shapes shown (page 1 starters). I witnessed some students completing the square where the turtle begins and returns to the centre whilst others struggled to do this.

In my experience some things have to be taught whilst others are more likely to be picked up naturally in a well constructed learning environment like Turtle Art. My goal is for students to become fluent in their ability to make complex, artistic geometric patterns.

The principle I talk up at the start is turtle state. When you make a shape make sure the turtle ends up in the same position and heading (direction) as where it began.

Later on I talk a lot about 360 / N where N is the number of repetitions needed. For example, say you want to make this shape

First make a midpoint square, remembering that the turtle must start and finish in the same state

Then count the number of repetitions (5) and work out the angle 360 / 5 = 72. Use the midpoint square hat as a building block for the more complex shape

I had a number of regular polygons on my starter page (square, triangle, pentagon, hexagon, octagon). The 360/N formula produces the external angles of these shapes, not the internal angles. I did talk briefly about that showing a diagram on the board with internal and external angles. In this class I never got around to showing how to do variables so to draw all these shapes with one equation. I could have done that but
(a) it wasn't strictly necessary, and
(b)I’ve found in the past after showing this that students often don’t use it anyway. Many prefer the simpler version!

One of my triangles was right angled. Most students worked it out using a guess and test method. I asked the maths co-ordinator if they had done Pythagoras’ theorem yet and she said it would happen a bit later in the year. I decided to go ahead and show how to get the exact lengths using Pythagoras. The hypotenuse is 141.4 if the other two sides are 100 each. A few of the more capable students picked up on this but when I checked later for some of the others if they remembered me teaching Pythagoras I received some blank looks!

I’m not too fussed about this. On the one hand some students are doing it by tinkering which is another word for guess and test. Perhaps they are learning some perseverance as well. Others are learning the more traditional way and getting a more precise answer. For the purposes of what we are trying to achieve here – make interesting and artistic geometric shapes – both methods work fine.

From the page 1 starter shapes I then suggested some pathways that students could go down to produce more interesting and artistic shapes

I did make efforts to setup a situation where students worked in groups and helped each other. They nominated their preferred partners, I then set up groups. I also sometimes asked them to fill out a planning sheet at the start of lesson (questions like ‘Which shapes do you plan to make today?’) and end of lesson (questions like ‘Who helped you?’, ‘Who did you help?’ and ‘Give some details of the help’). I make this part of the assessment criteria. Some students emerged as brilliant helpers of others while some others learnt to find the right person to ask.

A few students managed to complete all my challenges before the others and so I gave them some harder challenges (shapes 36 and 40) from Barry Newell’s original booklet, Turtle Confusion. His hardest shape is shape 40. I had three students successfully do that one and one of them went on with it as his shape to 3D print.

A handful of students went their own way and developed their own shapes at some point. I didn’t push particularly hard for this but did praise it when I saw it happening

As the process continued students finished up with a variety of 3D prints that looked like this:

And painted clay tiles that looked like this:

And yet, this is only covers a tiny fraction of what you can do with Turtle Art. I hope to write some notes in the future about how to teach the many other artistic elements of the program.

Reference:
Burker, Josh Invent to Learn Guide to Fun (2015), pp. 107-113
Newell, Barry. Turtle Confusion (1988)
Papert,Seymour. Mindstorms (1980)
Stager, Gary & Martinez, Sylvia. Turtle Art Tiles Project Guide (adapted from the original Josh Burker article)

Software:
Turtle Art https://www.playfulinvention.com/webturtleart/

(earlier blogs on this project)
Turtle Art Tile Project Conclusion
Working with Acrylics
Working with Clay
Scaffold for Turtle Art Tiles Project
Turtle Art Tiles Project

the wider walls

In commmemoration of the 50th anniversary of "Twenty Things to do with a Computer" by Seymour Papert and Cynthia Solomon

THE WIDER WALLS

“the room was humming harder
as the ceiling flew away”
- Whiter Shade of Pale by Procol Harem (1967)

Seymour was very good at finding a great pithy expression to describe a learning event. For example, he described the turtle as “an object to think with”. Another such expression is “wide walls”, to express a diversity of doing, but I’m less certain about who coined that one.

I wasn’t aware that the concept of wide walls (as distinct from the expression) was there from the start. I thought there was a transition as the baton passed from Seymour to Mitch Resnick. Not only did the turtle become a cat but, in my mind, the philosophy also changed from “low floor, high ceiling” (Seymour) to “low floor, wide walls” (Mitch).

Being a long way away, in Australia, perhaps I missed some nuance. Maybe someone closer to MIT can fill me in. In reading “Twenty Things ...” I can see the wide walls were there from the beginning: floor turtle, screen turtle, turtle graphics, game making, movies, music, robots, light displays, poetry, physics, curiosity about self, even making fun of Computer Aided Instruction.

Nevertheless, we owe a lot to the Scratch team for continuing to lower the floor (block coding), opening the windows (remix and a web site where it is so easy to share) as well as wider walls (easy to code multimedia and extensions to music, the micro:bit, Makey Makey and others). The user interface, with its colour coding of blocks into categories has always been brilliant.

What attracted me to computers in the first place was Seymour’s book “Mindstorms” with its intention of making maths more accessible to those who struggle with textbook maths or maths in general. Start by drawing a square using your body. Build further from that simple starting point by changing the angles, changing the number of repeats and introduce variables. This approach was both more interesting and could bring maths to more students.

Tinkering: Seymour was also there early on in a collaborative article with Sherry Turkle, “Epistemological Pluralism”. Ostensibly, this was directed at the needs of girls but in reality, it was about those who tinker or the bricoleurs. It’s better to initially allow sloppy code (spaghetti) and for design to iterate through stages. If a teacher insists on getting it perfect from the start then that is a sure way to kill motivation in many students. If only the standards based curriculum designers, remote from the classroom, who separate the what from the how, understood that. This was pointed out by Mitch Resnick in a recent exchange with Mark Guzdial in the comments at Mark’s blog. There are those who understand how the wider walls can work and those who, through not understanding, put up barriers to them working.

In my research, I came across a thesis by Jennifer Cross where she designed a course called Arts & Bots. Taking this cue, I wrote a submission for a new course in my current school and called it Artbotics. Rather than robotics, we can have Artbotics, with the Hummingbird Bit. Let us create a provocative, tangible sculpture and then add robotic actuation and sensing. This reframing of robotics makes a difference. The artbotics word hit a nerve since there is an ongoing desire for school administrations to introduce more creative middle schooling curricula. I see Artbotics as another expression of wider walls, integrating different subjects in the curriculum into a whole which students find more meaningful.

As Seymour pointed out, the computer has a protean nature and can be used as a multimedia hard fun machine. It is also true that the division of Knowledge into different subject domains, although useful in some ways, has always created artificial distinctions too. Maths can be Arty. Art can be Mathy.

Look up Wassily Kandinsky for more like this

In Central Australia, where I live, there is a famous indigenous art movement called Papunya Tula. One of its core motifs is dotted circles. I had a go at simulating parts of that work using SNAP and the local gallery in Alice Springs agreed it was worthwhile. I invite you to see the simulations at my blog, with a link to the SNAP program where you can do your own.

By making art a real part of the plan we soften the traditionally hard cultures of the STEM subjects and broaden the appeal of the whole mix. It has to be real and it can be real because digital by its nature does embrace everything. A program such as Scratch is multimedia with built in icons, backgrounds, sounds, music, speech with all of them editable. The coding is there too, of course, and the purpose of the coding is to bring the multimedia to life.

As well as art, storytelling needs to be in there too. I managed to rewrite all my introductory Scratch projects as short stories rather than lessons in technique, eg weird animals where the dog meows and the cat barks. This serves as a good model for later when I ask students to create their own stories.

One of the best expressions of the wider walls concept is a 2005 article by Mitch Resnick and Brian Silverman about how to evaluate construction kits. We need those design principles now with all the new construction kits (and this also applies to the new microcontrollers and new software) that have come on stream.

A key principle here is that a little bit (of programming) goes a long way. By using the KISS principle, new users will make a fast start and the possibility is there to transition rapidly to projects they really want to do, not just can do.

When it comes to learning principles the value of tinkering and iteration (iterate, iterate, iterate …) as well as curriculum integration also fit under the rubric of wider walls.

You can see the same KISS principle designed into Turtle Art (by Brian Silverman, Paula Bonta and Artemis Papert). Its variety of coding blocks is restricted yet you can make beautiful art readily. See some beautiful Turtle Art here

Here's a sample from my article How to create a great background in Turtle Art:

What I’ve really been looking for is a pithy expression to describe the ongoing evolution of the creative use of computers in education. In reading “Invent to Learn” (thanks to Gary and Sylvia) I was struck by the three game changers assertion, the game changers being coding, physical computing and fab labs. Could there be a pithy expression to describe these?

Possibly “wide walls”, although a good try, lacks a bit of oomph, requires too much explanation and can only be stretched so far. Can we set the world on fire with wider walls? Perhaps. As my students explore more I do feel the room humming harder ... but I am still not satisfied that it is an adequate descriptor.

Jay Silver takes this a step further when he situates his invention, Makey Makey, within a larger context. He designs tools which enable a sensual re-experiencing, a re-seeing, of the everyday world. With Makey Makey you can make an orchestra which is played by pieces of fruit, rather than a keyboard. Digital meets the banana. It began with Seymour’s insight that the turtle could be “an object to think with” and has now further developed, in Jay Silver’s words, into conceiving the whole “world as a construction kit”.

The world as construction kit has a very long history. Indigenous Australians used to live off the land and made all their tools, as well as their food and medicine, directly from nature. When they looked at the natural environment they saw a construction kit.

The part of this argument that I like is that our perception is a variable: we can design new tools, like Makey Makey, which changes the way we perceive the computer / keyboard. Insofar as modern consumerism can kill off self reliant productivity this new way of perceiving is a good thing.

Wouldn’t it be desirable for many more of us to become more maker orientated, particularly if the developments in modern technology lower the entry barriers? From STEM to STEAM then moves on to STEAM for the 99%.

STEAM for the 99% means bringing all of the subjects to a broader audience. This may be achieved through diverse cross curricular subjects which go under names like Artbotics, Digital Wearables, Culturally Situated Design Tools and Unruly Splats.

When the computer is used as a dynamic (programmable) multimedia fun machine it becomes the best tool available for wholesale curriculum integration. In other words it’s time to merge the computer into the world with all its junk. If that isn’t wider walls, then what is it?

REFERENCE
Cross, Jennifer. Creative Robotic Systems for Talent-Based Learning (2017)
Culturally Situated Design Tools
Makey Makey
Papert, Seymour. Mindstorms: Children, Computers and Powerful Ideas (1980)
Papert, Seymour and Solomon, Cynthia. Twenty Things to do with a Computer (1971)
Resnick, Mitchel and Silverman, Brian. Some Reflections on Designing Construction Kits for Kids (2005)
Scratch
Silver, Jay LENS x BLOCK: World as Construction Kit (2014)
SNAP
Stager, Gary and Martinez, Sylvia. Invent to Learn (2nd Edition, 2019)
“The goal of a first CS course should be to promote confidence … ”
(see comments 2, 3, 11, 13, 14, 15 and 16 for discussion between Mitch Resnick and Mark Guzdial)
Turkle, Sherry and Papert, Seymour. Epistemological Pluralism and the Revaluation of the Concrete (1991)
Unruly Splats

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”