Education ∪ Math ∪ Technology

Day: October 6, 2012 (page 1 of 1)

Programming for kids

I was recently asked about some programming environments I’ve used with students, and I thought I might as well compile a list of them, as well as some environments I’ve considered using.

Younger students:

  • Blockly

    Blockly sample
    (Image credit: Blockly

    Blockly is an open-source online programming environment developed by Google. It is currently very much a work in progress, although the language itself seems pretty stable, getting it to a state of usability for a group of students is not for the faint of heart. I mocked up a version of Blockly that resembles some aspects of the Logo programming language that I used with kindergarten students.

     

  • Turtle Art

    Turtle Art
    (Image credit: Sugar Labs)

    Turtle Art is a derivative programming environment of Logo, having been heavily influenced by the Logo programming language, and developed into a visual block version of it. It is multi-platform, and free to download (well sort of free – you need to email the developers of the program and request a download link for the program). I’ve used it with third and fourth grade students with some success. Turtle Art actually comes installed on the OLPC laptops.

     

  • StarLogo TNG


    StarLogo TNG is the extension of the original Logo programming into a 3d world. From their website, "StarLogo is a specialized version of the Logo programming language. With traditional versions of Logo, you can create drawings and animations by giving commands to graphic "turtles" on the computer screen. StarLogo extends this idea by allowing you to control thousands of graphic turtles in parallel. In addition, StarLogo makes the turtles’ world computationally active: you can write programs for thousands of "patches" that make up the turtles’ environment. Turtles and patches can interact with one another — for example, you can program the turtles to "sniff" around the world, and change their behaviors based on what they sense in the patches below. StarLogo is particularly well-suited for Artificial Life projects."

     

  • Hopskotch

    Hopskotch is an iPad, which is still in development, which allows children to do block programming in a very similar fashion to Scratch, Turtle Art, and other programming environments. I’ve not used Hopskotch myself to verify that it works.

     

  • Scratch

    Scratch
    (Image credit: Chris Betcher)

    Scratch is probably the most well known program for programming with kids. It has the same basic block structure that Turtle Art uses, but it has some additional features (ability to customize icons, object based programming) over and beyond the Turtle Art feature set. It can be quickly used to create simple animations, which is an attractive feature, but I found it harder to create simple geometric shapes than it is with Turtle Art.

     

  • Move the Turtle

    Move the Turtle Screen shot
    (Image credit: Move the Turtle)

    Move the Turtle is an iPhone/iPad app. It has a feature set very similar to Turtle Art (although somewhat reduced programming functionality). One thing that is compelling about it is that it includes a series of tutorials through puzzles which means that students without the support of a teacher can play around with the puzzles and learn how the application works. Obviously there is a certain amount of playing around necessary with any programming environment in order to learn it, but the tutorials Move the Turtle provides are useful when students get completely stuck.

     

  • CoffeeMUD 

    Coffee Mud screenshot
    (Image credit: Coffee MUD screenshot)

    Coffee MUD is easily the most difficult of all of the programming environments listed here to set up, and certainly amongst the most complicated environments to use. Coffee MUD is an online multi-user dungeon environment which means that it is both a somewhat collaborative game that students can play (and build their literacy skills in) and create.

    How Coffee MUD works is that it provides a server to which each student connects using some client software (recommendation: Jaba Mud client). While playing Coffee MUD, students navigate through a text based world, moving from room to room, and interacting with objects and non-player characters (NPCs) within the game. Many MUDs have no combat at all and have users interact with each other (social role-playing) or with the digital world provided via quests that the users solve.

    It also provides a way to interface (through a web browser) to the code that runs Coffee MUD and let trusted users add rooms, objects, and NPCs, as well as add a specialized coding system to allow players to interact and change these objects, rooms, and NPCs during the normal course of play.

    One enormous advantage I see with Coffee MUD is that the system is flexible and stable enough to potentially allow an entire school to interact via text in a virtual Coffee MUD world. While obviously this interaction shouldn’t come at the expense of face to face time, it could replace the traditional book report (create a virtual version of the story of the book instead!) or some creative writing time. For example, it would be an interesting interaction of the 7th graders attempt to create a portion of the game that the 3rd graders then play in.
     

Older students:

  • Alice

    Alice logo
    (Image credit: Alice 3 logo)

    I’ve not used Alice myself (except in a rudimentary way to test it out a bit), but I have heard some good things about it. One strength is that it relies on building object based programming with students, which is much more powerful and flexible than more traditional procedural based programming. From the Alice website:

    "Using an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create animations or games, the Alice Project seeks to provide tools and materials for a conceptual core of computational thinking, problem solving, and computer programming.

    The Alice Suite of educational tools is designed to support teaching and learning across a spectrum of ages, grade levels, and classes in K-12 and in college or university courses."


  • Python

    Python is both a command line programming language, and a language that can be used to build web applications. Many of the web applications created by Google are powered by Python. It’s not an especially new programming language, but the benefit of this is that there are an awful lot of great resources out there to learn how to program in it. See, for example, this excellent online tutorial.

     

  • Visual Python

    From the website for Visual Python (which I have successfully installed and played with myself): "VPython is the Python programming language plus a 3D graphics module called "visual" originated by David Scherer in 2000. VPython makes it easy to create navigable 3D displays and animations, even for those with limited programming experience. Because it is based on Python, it also has much to offer for experienced programmers and researchers."

     

  • JavaScript

    JavaScript is actually a pretty difficult language to learn because it requires an understanding of HTML and CSS first. It is probably best learned as a companion piece to making HTML websites more interactive. It also happens to be the base language for the scripting language Google uses for their Google Apps scripting environment, which means that students could potentially learn some JavaScript through programming directly in their browser. Students who want to learn JavaScript will also want to learn HTML, a mark-up language that JavaScript is often used to give dynamic capabilities.
     

  • See also:

Evaluating the Mathematical Thinking MOOC

I’ve been participating in Keith Devlin’s "Mathematical Thinking MOOC" hosted by Coursera. The purpose of my participation has been to evaluate the MOOC as a learning environment for my students. I want to see if we can find ways to bridge the gap between the type of thinking required for my students to be successful in their current k-12 environment to what it will take for them to be successful at the university environment, particularly in mathematics. We’ve already spent some time thinking about what they need for their success outside of school. I really want my students to think mathematically, so any resource I can share which will improve that will be valuable.

Unfortunately, I will not be suggesting the current version of Keith’s course for my students, but I will continue to follow the project to see if becomes something that will be more valuable for most of my students. Below is a critique which outlines some of my reasoning behind not recommending this experience for my students (yet).

I can separate my critique into three areas; user interface, course content, and course structure. I’m hopeful that this critique can be used to improve this experience for future students (or at least to have points I’ve brought up rebutted). Keith has mentioned many times that this is an experiment, and of course with all experiments, we try things out and see what works, and see how we can improve the experiment for next time.

 

User interface

This is likely to be out of Keith Devlin and his team’s control, but is worth mentioning because of how important it is for student learning especially in an online setting. It seems to me that something which is so crucial to how students develop understanding is so often outside of the control of the people responsible for their student’s learning. We spend an awful lot of time trying to improve learning environments for students in offline settings; we should spend at least as much time trying to improve learning experiences in online settings.

The course is basically divided into course videos, course problem sets, and discussion forums. The biggest problem I’ve noticed with this way of dividing the course is that there is no way for a user to know what videos they have missed, what problem sets they have not yet done, and who has replied to their discussion posts or comments without visiting all of these areas of the website each time. The system, of course, does keep track of this information, as it will let you know when you visit a particular lecture if you’ve watched it before, so why not aggregate this data for students?

The structure of the course is designed around containing the information in such a way which is easy for an instructor to follow but which should be re-arranged in such a way that the most relevant information necessary for a student is delivered to them. See Edmodo for an example of a fantastic user-interface which does exactly this. Courses, and the relevant user interface design for a course, should be designed around the experience of the user, not around the way the information is categorized by the facilitator of the course.

This user interface makes a difference. For example, one of the course suggestions is to join a study group for the course. As many of the participants of the course may be participating in isolation, making those connections and setting up a study group for one’s self is incredibly difficult. There are no spaces within the course where an effective study group could meet and discuss ideas. Given the emphasis placed on this by the course designers, this space should be woven into the structure of the course in a meaningful way. Improving the user interface so that it has more of a social feel, much like what Edmodo has done, would do a lot to improve retention of students through-out a course.
 

Coursera error
 

The course server itself crashed, just as Keith was set for students to complete the final exam for the course. This critique has nothing at all to do with the server crash, as this is outside of the control of Keith and his team. This is a problem that could have come up for anyone trying something so ambitious as to deliver a course for more than 50,000 people.

 

Content

When I heard that Keith Devlin was running a course on mathematical thinking, I had in my mind a much different experience than what has been offered. My students are exposed to formal mathematical reasoning of the sort offered in this course; in fact I have a student who is continuing learning about formal logic in university due to the interest in this area that arose as a result of my classroom. However, one thing which is often missing for my students is a result of what I like to call the black box approach in math education.

Here’s a story to explain what I mean. I had a professor in university who had a habit of giving lectures on how to solve specific problems related to concepts he introduced in class. Almost every single time, he made some error while presenting the solution to us, and ended up with some sort of impossible situation or contradiction. He would give up on his solution and say, "Okay, but you get the idea." He was always incredibly embarrassed, and he would promise to come with the correction in his solution for next class; which he always did. Unfortunately he created a black box around mathematical problem solving for us. I always wanted to know, given that I’ve found an error in my solution, what process can I go through in order to find my error and fix my work? This aspect of problem solving is usually not shared with students, and certainly wasn’t by my professor, often because of the complaint; we just do not have time.

So when I heard about a course about mathematical thinking, I thought that it would include more than just the formal symbolic portion of mathematical thinking and give students opportunities to learn what is in the black box.

I also recently watched a lecture by George Polya in which he describes the beginning of mathematical thinking as starting with a guess. What Polya attempts to do is to lead a group of students through an activity in which he tries to make his thinking, and his process of turning a guess into a certainty, completely clear. I know that this approach is something that many students never get to experience, and understand, and I was disappointed that there very few opportunities for students to see this type of approach discussed, or even modelled.

My hope was that students would be given some examples of mathematically challenging ideas and problems from throughout history, and given some of the tools to try and work out the solutions for the problems themselves, and more importantly, to have some of the creative thinking required for these solutions laid bare.

It is probably true that this may mostly be a matter of differing definitions and I may be being especially pedantic here. Obviously formal mathematical logic is a critical part of mathematics; I’m not trying to argue that. It is also true that many students are never exposed to formal mathematical reasoning in the current k-12 system. All I’m trying to argue is that there is more to mathematical thinking than formal logic, and that I would probably not have this complaint if Keith had labelled his course something like "Introduction to Formal Mathematical Reasoning."

 

Structure

The course has a series of videos which have to be watched, and which include in-video quizzes, which have to be completed in order to gain course credit. There are also a series of problem sets which also have to be completed. In order to gain the certificate of achievement for the course, and a related course grade, students need to complete the quizzes and problem sets (submitted in the form of a solutions to a multiple choice exam). There are also problem sets which do not count toward course completion and have a much more open-ended set of solutions.

Despite the fact Keith has repeatedly said that people should not focus on the lectures and the quizzes, people continued to do so in the forum discussions, even taking the time to point out minor mistakes and omissions made. Why would they do this, if the teacher of the course is telling them not to worry too much about them? Quite simply put; when you place a series of tasks in front of people in the context of a course, they will naturally choose whichever of those tasks is most necessary for them to complete for credit. So even though the forum discussions and study groups could be a far more effective way for students to figure out how to solve the open-ended problems, they will focus on the lecture quizzes and problem set quizzes because these are what are necessary for completion of the course. For an example of platforms which put emphasis on the discussions, questions, and comments of their users (such as Keith wanted people to do as per his emails out to the participants of the course) explore Stack Overflow or Quora.

The course had time limits set for completing the in-lecture quizzes, and the problem set quizzes. It seems to me that this is completely arbitrary. Why set time limits when the quizzes are all machine graded anyway? We set time limits as teachers mostly for administrative reasons (it is really hard to grade a bunch of assignments that come in at different times) or as some would argue (can you tell I disagree with this argument?): "to teach people how to meet deadlines." Since neither of these is a concern for Keith and his team, I do not understand the use of the time limits at all, except that it replicates one aspect of what happens in an offline university course as well. My recommendation: set the time limits for the very end of the course, or perhaps a day or two earlier. This allows students to catch up without penality, which again would lead to a greater number of students completing the course.

 

The positive

I really liked the problem sets I looked at. Some of the problems given were so good, I shared them with colleagues from outside of the course. One of my colleagues incorporated some of the problems into her own classroom, and at one point three of us discussed one of the problems, and a possible solution to it, at length. The problems themselves were an excellent source of discussion, and I noticed a lot of strong positive discussions around the problem sets on the discussion boards.

Having an ability for people to have essentially unmoderated conversations around formal mathematical logic is excellent. The discussion forums were filled with people discussing the intricacies of formal mathematical language, and trying to explain these concepts to each other. It cannot be a bad thing to have thousands of people discussing mathematical ideas.

The distinction Keith made between how language systems work and how formal mathematical language works was an important point, which is often missed by people studying mathematics. We use formal systems for a reason; they prevent (or at least minimize?) ambiguity. Ambiguity in language is a problem that mathematicians struggle to avoid, and which the non-mathematician sometimes has no patience for resolving.

The peer review system for grading assignments is a very interesting idea, and one which I wish I had more opportunity to observe. I think that the idea of peer reviewing work in an online setting is a powerful one, as it allows us to move away from quantitative (and sometimes misleading) descriptions of student engagement and learning in an online setting, and move toward a more qualitative description of student learning. The numbers rarely give the entire picture when students are learning, and so anything that produces a different picture of that learning is valuable.

 

Summary

I think that creating an experience through which students learn mathematical reasoning is a terrific idea, and I’m impressed with the work Keith Devlin and his team did to work on such an experience. Many people I’ve spoken to think that the course content for Keith’s Mathematical Thinking course is excellent; I do not disagree, I was just hoping for a different emphasis.

I believe that online learning has the potential to be more centred around the needs of students, and connecting people in new ways, who learning similar information, but I think that the Coursera course structure has a long way to go before this will be easy to do in their environment. We don’t need to emulate the pure classroom experience any longer, we can create new experiences and allow students to learn material in wholly new ways.

I felt like there were a lot of positive aspects of the MOOC Keith created (as per above) and I look forward to keeping track of this project as it evolves over time. I’m also going to post a summary of an idea I’ve had around creating a space for learning mathematical ideas in an online setting. After all, if I am to critique someone else’s work, I should put my own work out to be critiqued as well.