[squeakland] (SQ-749) and Kathleen's question on "What do you mean by Artifacts?"

[Alan Kay]

Hi Steve,

A good slogan for teaching, pedagogy, and curriculum design is "When should it be easy, and when should it be hard?". 

The notion here is that for education to be transformative, you wind up as a different "better" person than you were, and this means that certain difficulties were very important to your learning -- the stuff that was "easy" you could already do (and some of the easy stuff is not what you want to aim at). Building knowledge and skills to get fluent at handling difficulties (and in some case rendering them non-difficult) is a key for much important learning. 

On the other hand, gratiutous non-productive difficulties are to be avoided because they generally both distract and occupy " thinking chunks" that one needs for the important stuff.

(I don't recognize my quote that was paraphrased)

Adults tend to be the biggest problems when trying to help children learn things. It's the adults who generally don't want to do the work and don't see many things as fun. Kids (and people in general) can spend a lot of time focussed and doing when they are having fun.

Constructivism (one of many such terms I don't use because they have lost their meanings) doesn't mean discovery from scratch (this is a huge confusion many people have), but does mean "understand and clarifying by making a careful descriptive model". This can be done with English and writing (it is what descriptive, expositional, and argumentative writing are supposed to be about). It can be done with mathematics. It can be done in many cases with physical construction materials. And a lot can be done in terms of computer programs.

I like the Montessori curriculum approach of making a carefully designed environment for the chilldren that allows choice on their part and allows limited the degrees of freedom on the educator's part. One of the best projects we've ever designed is the Galilean Gravity one -- and it illustrates what you have to do with guidance on the one hand and space to play on the other to enormously raise the probability that most children will be able to see and understand what is going on without having to give them the "answer" to memorize.

One of the keys in the early Montessori schools was the intense comprehensive training of the Montessori teachers -- and the lack of the equivalent of this in most of today's schools is a huge problem.

The scripts in Etoys are independent of the visible appearance of the object they are attached to (the objects' "costumes" can be changed at will -- and this is how "frame animation" is done in Etoys).

I'm not quite understanding what it is that you would like for teachers beyond a repository of projects with extensive notes about how they were made and how to make them. If "learning by making" is a good idea, then shouldn't teachers learn new ideas about Etoys by making them (but with lots of guidance)?

On the other hand, there are any number of things in the Etoys design itself that could be vastly improved to help both adult and child learning, and also for them to make better extensions. For example, I do all my talk presentations using Etoys and I write scripts to sequence "builds" of additive visual material to the slide (Powerpoint has a feature for doing this that is more convenient for some goals and simply won't allow others). It is very instructive to do this by hand a few times, and then gets annoying. Etoys does not have a good extension mechanism for "packaging up" a solution to "slide builds" that can then be used as a feature. This is a real sin against our own precepts. The lack of it is due to EToys being thought of as temporary and of limited scope at Disney. It is terrible that we don't have it now. Why don't we do it now? Because we've been trying to move on to the next design since before OLPC came along. And so forth.

Let me know your views.

Cheers,

Alan

From: Steve Thomas <sthomas1 at gosargon.com>
To: Bert Freudenberg <bert at freudenbergs.de>; Kathleen Harness <kharness at illinois.edu>
Cc: etoys-dev dev <etoys-dev at squeakland.org>; squeakland <squeakland at squeakland.org>; Alan Kay <alan.nemo at yahoo.com>
Sent: Thu, August 12, 2010 8:11:46 AM
Subject: Re: [etoys-dev] (SQ-749) and Kathleen's question on "What do you mean by Artifacts?"

I have been reading Alan Kay's Thoughts About Teaching Science and Mathematics To Young Children:
 
I think one of the trickiest issues in this kind of design is an analogy to the learning of science itself, and that is "how much should the learners/users have to do by themselves vs. how much should the curriculum/system do for them?" Most computer users have been mostly exposed to "productivity tools" in which as many things as possible have been done for them. The kinds of educational environments we are talking about here are at their best when the learner does the important parts by themselves, and any black or translucent boxes serve only on the side and not at the center of the learning.What is the center and what is the side will shift as the learning progresses, and this has to be accommodated.

By exposing everything in Etoys as "First Principles" (which in this particular case I understand to mean, that we have a minimal set of scripting tiles and objects from which everything can be built) we avoid the "productivity tools" issue because everything is exposed.  It is also a beautiful, elegant and exposes a powerful idea.

The challenge in a system where everything is done from "First Principles" is that when you are designing an"educational environment"  "lesson", or "Artifact" ( better terms might be "playthink" and/or "tool to think with"), it can take a lot of work to build those preferably translucent boxes.  And to paraphrase another Alan Kay quote on user interface design: "If it takes one step I'll do it, If it takes two steps I might do it, if it takes three or more steps forget about it!"

No, I am not arguing to make things easy for everyone, we need find ways to get kids to have "hard fun." Hard work and ragging a problem are good habits.  I also strongly believe that giving kids a "blank canvas" and a great set of brushes and paints is an excellent and preffered method, but not the only one we should use.

I am arguing (and struggling) with is how in a "First Principle" system like Etoys, we can find ways to make it easier for teachers/designers (ie: make them more productive).  I fear I see in some folks (none on this email list of course) a tendency towards what I initially saw (and fell into myself) as the constructivism trap. Where I encountered people who thought kids should construct all knowledge themselves from Scratch (pun intended ;).  As I recall Alan (and others pointing out) we can't expect kids to do that, they will repeat the same mistakes people did over thousands of years. My initial thoughts are a repository of Artifacts that teachers can use along with a set of scripts (the problem with the set of scripts idea is that the scripts in Etoys are not decoupled from the ?morphs? (not sure of the correct term here, but basically the pixels visually representing the object). Bert's idea that we have a Player Variable and the scripts that operate on it is a good one, but I think there may be some bugs there, need to test more.

Now I will more directly address Kathleen's question: "What do you mean by "Artifacts".
I will switch from "Artifacts" to the term "Playthinks" (which I encountered in the "The Big Book of Brain Games" by Ivan Moscovich).
One of the best and simplest "Playthinks" for teaching I ever encountered was Robert B. Davis' classroom warm-up (which I showed at Squeakfest and have wrote about here.)  Basically it involves drawing on the board a 4 x 4 grid
. . . . 
. . . .
. . . .
. . . .
Then having kids pick two numbers and using those two numbers as X and Y counting from 0 at the origin point in the lower left and then If they land on the board marking an X or O until one team wins.  Some of the keys to this "Playthink" are:
you let kids puzzle it out for themselves, they figure out the rules, you don't tell them
it contains a powerful idea
it can be easily extended to other concepts (negative numbers, a number is all the ways you can name it, is this game fair ...)
its fun 
Other examples of "Playthinks" would be cuisenaire rods, pentagrams, area blocks, other good "virtual manipulatives" and my feeble attempts Circle Explorer and Pattern Blocks and Tools.

Bert, your comments on SQ-749 sparked my writing this, I will address it more specifically in a separate email after some more thought.

Including Alan so he can correct any misinterpretations and hopefully comment

FYI: A lot of other excelent writings from VPRI are here, most are Computer Science related but a number deal with educational issues and Etoys.

Stephen

On Thu, Aug 12, 2010 at 5:02 AM, Bert Freudenberg <bert at freudenbergs.de> wrote:

On 12.08.2010, at 10:32, Steve Thomas wrote:

> On Thu, Aug 12, 2010 at 3:32 AM, Bert Freudenberg <bert at freudenbergs.de> wrote:
>> This would likely be simple to implement, but could break existing projects. E.g. the morphing stuff in the showcase. Maybe you could take a look?
>
> Checked "Morphing" by Kazuhiro Abe and that should be fine. Each Polygon in the holder has the same number of vertices and the script simple changes the positions of the vertices one at a time.
>
> "The Walkers" and associated remixes by P.A. Dreyfus uses a special category "morphing" which would be great to get into Etoys (although I would suggest the addition of some way to show/manage the frames) to make the invisible more visible and to make it easier to create these kind of animations. Anyway, whether this would be a problem or not depends on how it is implemented.  If he stores complete information about the polygon in each frame, I see no problems. If he only stores differences and adds/removes/repositions each vertex that MAY cause a problem.
>
> Anyway if it is a simple change and you can make it, I think I can easily test the change by opening the project, then file-in the changes and see if anything breaks. Or you could also ask P.A. Dreyfus (master of polygon's and connectors) what he thinks as he knows and can check the changes against his implementation.
>
> Stephen

Thinking about this more I do not like the proposal. It would makes the system less predictable.

Having the new vertex remain at the same position is the only sensible choice. It matches the "copy" behavior of regular objects, which also appear in the same position. It would not scale anyway - see this image where I only inserted 4 vertices. The position quickly converges to the next vertex position.




Also, I'd argue that "add a vertex at beginning" and "add a vertex at end" tiles are not needed in the first place. To be useful they would, as you noticed, have to be "set cursor to beginning and insert vertex" and "set cursor to end and insert vertex", because otherwise one cannot assign their position immediately. But that makes them perform two operations that are available separately. There is no good reason to coalesce those steps into one.

In any case, inserting a vertex should not change the cursor. If you want a cursor change to occur, insert a tile.

So my counter-proposal is: remove the "add vertex at beginning" and "add vertex at end" tiles. (to not break existing projects, the tiles would only be hidden)

- Bert -



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