Successful use of in-class Active Essays

[Mark Guzdial]

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