[Edu-sig] New articles on Medium.... (not all by me :-D)

[kirby urner]

On Wed, Mar 22, 2017 at 7:45 AM, Charles <ccosse at gmail.com> wrote:


> One last reflection: I’m now a long-term sub as a music teacher in the
> same elementary school that both my children attended. Irrelevant except
> that I love the school. I’ve never taught music and I’ve got up to nine
> classes per day with 20–25 kids per class. That’s 200 students from k-5
> every day. I am regularly scrambling for cool things to do in class. I
> developed a music bingo game <https://github.com/ccosse/MusicBingo>
> (original to me but not the first) in the first weeks. That went-over very
> well and I’ve been thinking of ways to extend and improve upon it.
>


I'm responding to this separately, having checked the repo, screen shots
especially.  I've always been impressed by your productivity and
portfolio.  You're quite a talented coder in my book, bravo!

In my world of 2nd - 7th graders, music / audio has also been a feature.
Learning to program with sound is a paradigm personal workspace activity.

In a classroom it gets pretty cacophonous if they don't each wear
headphones, presuming they're working on various compositions or playing
games that use sound (most of them do).

As I think I mentioned, Portland is following Seattle in hiring a private
company to provide after school / extra-curricular code school activities.
This is how convergence is managed today.

Our curriculum starts with everyday computer games, including multi-user
(over the network), such as National Geographic's Animal Jam.  That's where
students get ideas about what computers might do, along with motifs such as
1st person (looking from avatar PV), 2nd person (we're a team!) and 3rd
person (I am a god observing my creature / creatures).

Then we show how MIT Scratch lets you create an avatar on a stage (3rd
person) which you may then cause to behave (perform).  It's like a puppet
show.  You can tell a story.  Avatars mix with other sprites, each with
"costumes", and we're able to attach scripts to each of these, such that
they detect mouse clicks and / or collisions with one another.

Then we take this whole apparatus of avatar-sprites in background
situations and move it to Codesters, which is a partially implemented
Python 3 with additional __builtins__ relating to the Scratch-like
environment. The skills are transferable, from MIT Scratch to Codesters.

Pipeline (ladder):

canned games --> build your own Scratch worlds / projects --> build your
own Codester worlds / projects --> Cloud9 server in the cloud (host a
website)

By the time you get to the higher rungs of our ladder, you're basically in
code school, a high schooler learning Python + JavaScript + HTML + CSS + SVG

Parents / guardians pay extra to have their students dabble in this
parallel extra-curricular track, however the high schools appear to be
absorbing a lot of this material and incorporating it natively.

If they pioneer what I call a "lambda calculus track" [1] featuring more of
what we used to think of as vocational topics ("shop"), then there's no
reason to depend on outsiders for this content.

We often work with the full time teachers coming in and out of the room
(it's their room), observing what we're up to, mentally taking notes.
Portland Public Schools (PPS) is already well aware of the MIT Scratch
option and uses it internally. I expect they're looking at Codesters more,
thanks to Coding with Kids.

MIT Scratch is good with music, relative to Codesters.  Here's something I
wrote to the parents last week (fixed a typo):

Thank you for sharing your kids with our program.  They're very sociable
> and enjoy one another's company. No one feels excluded.
>
> At this level, we know they're only just learning the keyboard. A student
> asked me today how to capitalize. Long passwords are a challenge.  They
> rise to the occasion.
>
> Nevertheless, MIT Scratch as a platform is where games and puppet shows
> happen, and these grip their attention.  Sometimes they "look inside" and
> see the "code" -- which in Scratch looks a lot like a jigsaw puzzle.  As
> time goes on, they start seeing coding itself as the most challenging game.
>
> I'm happy to see them collaborate and teach each other, as well as come to
> me with questions.  I booted up my own Scratch application as a demo and
> shared a few details.  However my simple "player piano" is not as
> entertaining as some of the amazing things the Scratch community has
> produced.
>
> https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/149963280/ (my little demo from today)
>
> Higher up on our ladder, around 5th to 8th grade, we start transitioning
> from MIT Scratch to Codesters, which is similar yet uses a real computer
> language (Python).
>
> I've let them use sound a lot, which is somewhat raucous (noisy!) but very
> accessible.  Scratch is much better with sound features than Codesters, so
> I let them enjoy it while they can.
>
> Thanks again.  Your kids are a joy and really seem to have a good time
> being friendly and helpful to one another, very important in the coding
> world.
>
> Coding is both a solitary quiet activity, and an intensely social one. The
> logins and passwords we give them work on other computers, for example at
> home. Let me know if you have any questions about that.  However no
> homework is required.
>
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