Successful use of in-class Active Essays

[Alan Kay]

That's great Mark!

"really natural" is what we are aiming for. All on this list should 
try their hands at active essays on ideas they particularly like ....

Cheers,

Alan

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At 2:23 PM -0400 8/22/01, Mark Guzdial wrote:
>Just a note FYI:  We had our first real "lecture" with my Active 
>Essays today, and it worked quite well.  I did a lecture Monday, but 
>it was just a demo of Squeak tools.  Today was the first interactive 
>session on serious computer music issues.
>
>Some of the things that worked the best:
>- Live code examples.  I put in a little exercise to play different 
>frequencies, to explore Just Notable Differences in frequencies. It 
>was great fun and really worked for generating some surprised looks 
>on students' faces.
>- Modifiable code examples.  We could tweak things, print them, and 
>re-execute them live, in class, in the middle of the slide.
>- Adding and computing new things.  We got off in a discussion of 
>even-tempered tuning, so we were able to compute ratios and play 
>with 2^(1/2) by typing in examples in the middle of the slides.
>
>We'll see how it goes as we go deeper, but I received several 
>comments about how well the medium worked.  Particularly interesting 
>were the comments like, "It felt really natural, and then I thought 
>about it, and I realized what an amazing thing we were doing!"
>
>Mark
>--------------------------
>Mark Guzdial : Georgia Tech : College of Computing : Atlanta, GA 30332-0280
>Associate Professor - Learning Sciences & Technologies.
>Collaborative Software Lab - http://coweb.cc.gatech.edu/csl/
>(404) 894-5618 : Fax (404) 894-0673 : guzdial at cc.gatech.edu
>http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/people/Faculty/Mark.Guzdial.html


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