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

[Charles]

On Wed, Mar 22, 2017 at 12:14 PM, kirby urner <kirby.urner at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> 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!
>
> Thank you. I'm looking for a new job btw :)


> 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.
>

Any place for PDX Guild to expand operations and benefit from that?  They
deserve it, and in a just world they should get a piece of that action.
They are the pioneers of the code school phenomenon.


>
> 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
>
> Does Javascript only enter after rung 3, i.e. through Codesters it's all
Python, then port as webapp to "the cloud"?  That Bingo game I was
referring to, I started in Python and used Pillow to generate the Bingo
card images at first.  But early-on I went through the remainder of the
process that would be necessary in order to have usable cards by morning
and realized that I needed to be copying images from my browser into Google
Docs, then export as PDF and take to Kinko's in the morning.   So I ported
it to Javascript right there and could have bypassed the Python prototype
stage.  This happens all the time to me, i.e. Javascript does things that
only Python could do before, and I opt for Javascript.  I think Javascript
should be taught early, perhaps even first.  I would have never said such a
thing a few years ago.



> 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.
>

You're talking HS here, but also code schools ... do any code schools get
into either of the 2 math tracks you describe?  If no, then that's a big
difference between the two forms of code school.

>
> 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.
>

Oh to live in a tech hub ...

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

I played with HTML5 MIDI ... in Jython I used to use the Java MIDI API, and
the associated sound engines.  In HTML5 the best I could determine was that
you have to write your own synth ... I hope I'm wrong, or that an
alternative comes along.  I just want a piano sound via the HTML5 MIDI
API.  Any suggestions?

>
> 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.
>>
> Sounds like a great job!
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