LearningForward

Kent Chesnut's technology in education blog.

I’ve been preparing to lead a 4 day (~2 hrs / day) Scratch class in conjunction with my Church’s Summer Fun Days.  The class will be about 12 - 15 kids going into the 3rd - 5th grade (about 8 - 10 years old).  I’ll probably post more about this later, but today I’d like to discuss the resources I’ll be using.

• How to Use Scratch Intro video - link.  Note it’s the right video on the first row of videos.  I’ll use the largest TV I can get my hands on to show this to the kids.
• Scratch cards - link here.  These pdfs can be printed and used by the class students.  Each card illustrates a specific example, like “Moving Animation” and “Follow the Mouse”.  I plan to have several sets of these sitting on a table for the kids to look through and try out
• Scratch 1.2.1.  I used the older version because the old Windows 98 computers we have in our lab didn’t run Scratch 1.3. 
• Simple projects.  To extend / combine the Scratch card examples.

Instructional Strategy 

I’m not planning on “teaching” much at all.  I’ll give an overview of some key concepts.  I’ll walk through an example card activity.  Then turn the kids loose.  I’ll encourage them to try a card activity that looks interesting and then get them to work on projects of their own choosing.  My helper (my daughter Brittany) and I will try to serve mainly as collaborators / colearners to support the kids when they decide they need help.  Kids will be encouraged to work together, seek advice from each other, and have fun.

Challenges and Solutions

• Intrinsic Motivation / Identifying projects of personal interest
  I’m not going to make project assignments.  The goal is for the students to work on projects that are personally relevant and interesting.  I think that providing the Scratch Cards and a few example programs geared toward this age kids should help them identify personal projects quickly.  Some brainstorming with my daughter led to the following as possible projects of interest:
  •  drive a car
  • fly a plane
  • take care of a pet or baby
  • virtual pet
  • decorate a room
  • have a party
  • dress up
  • video game
  • blow up stuff
• Saving / Accessing files:
  The computers are networked with a shared folder for the Computer Camp on each.  Instead of teaching the kids to navigate to the Computer Camp folder, I put an empty project (read-only) into the Computer Camp folder.  We’ll teach the kids to start Scratch by opening the empty project.  Then they will save to the desired folder by default.
• Share and Tell:
  I certainly hope the kids will create projects they wish to show off to the others in the class.  If saving files to the Computer Camp folder works as hoped, I’ll be able to pull up any of the kids projects from the laptop connected to the TV and use the large TV for share and tell.

Educational Goals

Read Seymour Papert’s Mindstorms - Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas for a good explanation of how such creative activities can help students connect with powerful ideas in Mathematics and other “school” type subjects (highly recommended).  However, the goals for this class are affective and motivational.  Specifically, I want the students:

• to feel satisfaction in a creative endeavor
• to experience joy in learning something new
• to feel capable of learning to use a computer programming language

If this positive affect spills over into other areas of their lives - like school - that’ll be ok too.

I plan to report back on how the class goes.

I’ve blogged about Scratch being a good learning environment for kids.  But my examples have tended to be at the Junior High level (or possibly higher).  For the next few posts, I’ll be looking at projects that I think could be generated by an upper elementary student.

This week we’ll look at a simple car game.  A screenshot of the game screen is shown below.  The objective is simple, drive on the road.  The referee will complain if you drive in the grass.  Run the program here.  Download the project file here.

So what can an upper elementary student learn from making such a project?

• Scratch programming constructs and modular programming.  The project uses loops, conditionals, broadcasts, and sprite / background detection.
• Concepts such as scaling (see below).
• Debugging and troubleshooting techniques. 
• And hopefully he will have some fun!

The hardest part of this game is trying to connect the car angle to the steering wheel angle.  If you think about how a car works, the car angle keeps changing as you hold the steering wheel in a fixed place (as long as you’re not going straight).  The student can use his body to do the Turtle Walk (see Papert’s Mindstorms Chapter 3 for a good explanation of this) to help troubleshoot this functionality.  Additionally, a program like this allows the student to progress as far as he wants.  He could make a lot of improvements, including…

• Improve the steering to make the car easier to drive.
• Add a lap counter.  A lap timer.
• Add sound effects.
• Add a second car and make a 2 player racing game?

Would an upper elementary student find such a project interesting and motivating?  I think many boys would… but I’m not sure that this would appeal as much to girls.  Any comments?

In Mindstorms - Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas (published in 1980), Seymour Papert seemed to foresee that schools would leave the great potential of the computer as a constructive tool largely untapped.  We can clearly see this - schools now have a significant number of powerful computers - but most are used to teach keyboarding, Microsoft Office, or to “look stuff up” on the internet.

In Chapter 8, Images of the Learning Society, Papert discusses possible venues that might be used as models to create learning environments that support the use of the computer in a way compatible with his ideas - “one that helps us not only to learn but to learn about learning.”  (page 177)  One of those models discussed is the Brazilian Samba school.

The Brazilian Samba school model is fascinating to me.  Papert describes the samba school as a social organization that forms for a specific purpose (to perform in Rio’s carnival), is composed of a few hundred to a few thousand people of various ages, works together as collaboative co-learners to put together their performance.  In this post, I’m going to make a few comments about the samba school model and then try to come up with educational examples that may fit with the model.

The samba schools:

• Are voluntary.  It appears that people choose which (if any) of the various samba schools they want to be a part of.  This would appear to enhance intrinsic motivation.
• Allow for significant choice.  There are lots of tasks associated with preparing for the carnival… and it appears the members can choose which activities to be a part of.  Also an intrinsic motivator.
• Don’t allow for infinite individual choice.  The schools as a whole appear to set their goal, and then work together.  I assume an individual can’t change the direction of the whole group.  This fosters a sense of community and teamwork.
• Provide for intergenerational interaction / teaching / learning.  This wouldn’t always be just the adults telling the students how to do something.  I suspect the more mature sometimes rely on the younger to come up with and develop new ideas. 
• Provide for collaboration between novices and experts.
• Provide authentic tasks / learning experiences (making costumes, choreography, learning to dance, …) within a real-world context (preparing to perform in the next carnival).

OK, so my goals don’t include travelling to Rio to perform in the carnival.  I want to understand and encourage constructive thinking and learning using technology.  Are there educational programs available that include some of the attributes of the samba school?  Let’s do some brainstorming…

• IEEE Future City
• Botball
• After-school Computer Club (possibly with Logo Mindstorms / LCSI MicroWorlds)
• Saturday Computer Camp (possibly Scratch or NetLogo Programming)
• AECT’s ISMF (Association for Educational Communications and Technology International Student Media Festival).
• Maybe there could be an after-school or Saturday club to explore the use of various web 2.0 tools - like blogs.  However, I think this kind of task would be best situated within one of the other clubs.  For example, someone in a botball group may choose to blog about the progress of their project.  Or the IEEE Future City group may use a wiki to collaborate on the design of their city, …

All of the above are voluntary and I belieive will allow for the kinds of constructive efforts that Papert described in the samba school.  I also believe they would foster intrinsic motivation.  Future City and Botball are competitions with a pre-specified goal - very much like the samba schools.  ISMF is a competition but with many choices for products.  These competitions supply an overall goal and real-world context.  The computer club / computer camp ideas are more geared for individual exploration and goals - in these the individual would be setting their own goals.

Does anyone have experience with such clubs / competitions / festivals?  I’d love to hear your thoughts on them.

Now I’m sure I’ve missed some really good ones!  (For example, I know there’s a small school district in Canada that hosts an international media competition - but I don’t remember where it is!)  I’d love to hear from readers (assuming such people exist) with additional ideas.

One of the hardest aspects of blogging for me is determining what to name my posts!  Here I am in part 3 and have yet to talk about using Scratch in the classroom.  Oh well, I’ll try to do better.

In this last segment I’ll reflect on what Scratch can be used for in the classroom (reveiw Part 1 for an overview of Scratch as a programming environment and Part 2 for a comparison of Scratch to NetLogo).  Again I’ll note that these uses are compiled from others I read, including Gary Stager, Wesley Fryer, and Seymour Papert.  See Blogroll for links to Stager’s and Fryer’s blogs.  Papert is the author of Mindstorms  - Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas.  However, it’s possible that I may contribute something to this conversation - hopefully!

Ways that Scratch can be used in the Classroom:

• As a programming environment to allow kids to learn programming (and powerful Mathematic and Scientific principles - see Papert’s Mindstorms).
• To create a slideshow (for a book report, history report, …).
• To create a narrated slideshow (digital storytelling).
• To create an animated story, cartoon, …
• To create an animated story, cartoon, … with sound (narration, character voices, sound effects)
• To simulate a science principle.
• To simulate a math problem.
• To design a set for a play or design a layout for a room.
• To block out the movements of characters on the stage for a play (I saw this in one of Gary Stager’s posts recently).
• To make a video game.

I think all of these would be valid uses of Scratch in the classroom.  However, in line with Constructionist thought, any of these activities could be vastly improved by encouraging reflection, discussions, and explanations of what was done, why various design decisions were made, …

I would have liked to create an example of each of these uses and explain how they could be used in the classroom - but I don’t have that much time or energy at the moment.  So I’ll settle for 1…

This link will demonstrate a simple physics principle (trajectory motion) in the context of juggling (pretty much laid out as Papert described in Chapter 4 of Mindstorms) that I think would be appropriate in a secondary Physics course.  Oddly enough, the balls move significantly faster when playing in the Scratch environment… they seem a little slow on the internet.  The motion of the balls is described by the script shown here.

This script is executed when the tossleft message is received - it simulates a throw from the left hand to the right hand.
The main part of the script executes only when the ball is in the left hand (AtLeft = 1).  The ball ignores the message if it is flying or in the right hand.
A loop of 101 passes calculates the differential x and y positions.

The 3 degree turn is just eye-candy; it looks nice for the balls to be turning at different rates.

When the ball is about at the apex (programmable with GlobalTossTime), a message is sent to toss the ball in the right hand.  (Actually the message is sent to all the balls, but only the one in the right hand responds to it.)
When the ball arrives in the right hand, the AtRight flag is set.
The X and Y positions are cleaned up so the juggle doesn’t walk across the screen.

The tossright script (tossing the ball from the right hand to the left hand) looks very much like the tossleft.  Each of the 3 balls have scripts that are very similar.  (The main difference is that ball 3, which starts in the left hand, ignores the first tossleft.)  A link to the project file is here if you want to look at it.

So what kinds of questions could be discussed in a secondary science or Physics class based on this simulation?

• How are the equations of motion in the script similar to those studied in class?  How are they different?  Why?
  Probably similar to X(t) = Xo + Vx * t, Y(t) = Yo + Vy *t - 1/2*g*t^2
  (Does WordPress have an equation editor????)
• What does it mean that the equations in the script are implemented as differential?
• Where do the constants in the script come from?
• Do the balls move as the equations of motion predict?  Are there anomalies - caused by bugs in the program?  Can you find the bugs?  Can you fix them?
• Do the balls move as they do in the real-world (affected by the assumptions in the equations of motion)?  What kinds of forces would we need to add to better reflect the real-world situation?

I a reader can think of any other ways Scratch can be used in the classroom, I’d appreciate hearing about them.

While reading today I ran across the following (rather lengthy) quote.

“Many cultural barriers impede children from making scientific knowledge their own.  Among these barriers the most visible are the physically brutal effects of deprivation and isolation.  Other barriers are more political.  Many children who grow up in our cities are surrounded by the artifacts of science but have good reason to see them as belonging to “the others”; in many cases they are perceived as belonging to the social enemy.  Still other obstacles are more abstract, though ultimately of the same nature.  Most branches of the most sophisticated modern culture of Europe and the United States are so deeply “mathophobic” that many privileged children are as effectively (if more gently) kept from appropriating science as their own.  In my vision, space-age objects, in the form of small computers, will cross these cultural barriers to enter the private worlds of children everywhere.”  (italics added)

When I read this, I immediately thought of Nicholas Negroponte and the one laptop per child project (laptop.org).  Actually, it’s from page 4 of Seymour Papert’s Mindstorms - Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas.  Papert’s book was published in 1980.