[Edu-sig] a non-rhetorical question

[Laura Creighton]

In a message of Sun, 08 Jul 2007 00:04:14 EDT, "Andy Judkis" writes:
>I've been out painting my house, so I have some catching up to do as well
>.
>I thank Andre for coming to my defense, but I think Michael's on the righ
>t 
>track. The problem is that I haven't found something sufficiently motivat
>ing 
>to get these kids to climb the hill.  It's not that I haven't tried, but 
>it 
>hasn't worked out very well. I too try to get to graphics stuff as quickl
>y 
>as possible, but I think it isn't very meaningful without some control 
>structure around it.  I use the livewires API because it's the simplest I
>'ve 
>found, requiring the least foundation, but it still takes a while to get 
>to 
>where you can do much.

<snip>

It is easier if you let the kids find what they want to do, rather than
having to read their minds, and find something that you think they
ought to want to do.  The kids I was teaching were a fair bit
younger, but when I asked them 'what do you use the intenet for now'
the answers clustered around 'finding out when some favourite web
page changed' 'getting tickets for the Spice Girls concert' and
'playing computer games'.  So we ended up doing a lot of screen
scraping, and collaboratively writing a small text based game.  Of
course the kids that I were teaching were all volunteers.  If your
class is mandatory, you may get kids who don't use computers and
don't want to use them for anything.  They will be a much harder
problem then I had.

Laura