[squeakland] Artifacts in ObjectCatalog

Sat May 29 14:58:24 EDT 2010

Hello Kathleen,

I am not sure what you are trying to tell me, and I don't know much 
about the US curriculum, I am teaching math and computer science in 
junior high school at Geneva. In our computer science courses, Logo, 
Etoys, Scratch are used in school. Personally I use both Etoys and 
Scratch to teach  programming.

Regarding artifacts the term I am using should be understood under the 
perspective of the theory of activity, and it has nothing to do with 
assessment or ready to use teaching material.

About the artifacts I am writing in Etoys: if you consider token and 
grid, their intrinsic quality does not bring any teaching value, the 
teaching value is in the way the teacher uses it with his students.
So my artifacts are the same, they are just simple facilitators, and of 
course they are objects like the polygon, they come with a set of tiles. 
Otherwise they will be useless.
My very personal feeling is Etoys miss such artifacts. Too many time I 
saw teachers seeing amazing things but feeling at the same time it is 
out of reach for them. Artifact are just filling a gap in Etoys.

Of course, we should have hundred of artifacts to cover many teaching 
domain.

In some way, you could see Artifacts as distilled substance from smart 
Etoys project. Steve clearly articulated it in a previous email.

Regarding the integration of DrGeo, so far it appears in  Tools and 
Graphic categories in the Object Catalog. We have not discussed about 
its integration, and any idea are welcome

Regarding the integration of the artifacts in the next release of Etoys, 
I am not deciding, I just try to bring some fresh idea to discuss with. 
So far the artifacts I am writting are math oriented, as a mater of 
personal taste and knowledge. We may want more for other domain, but I 
don't know the artifacts teachers in music, art, litterature, xp 
sciences may want to use. We could distilled artifacts from references 
documentation.

Yes, I read USEIT adaptations of Etoys. From what I saw, my artifacts 
are at a lower pedagogical level (I may say neutral pedagogically). May 
be distilled artifact may come out of these projects, and reprogrammed 
in Smalltalk for scalability.

I don't know teacher using Etoys for math instruction. More in robotic 
or CS.

Regarding the place Etoys can take in curriculum, my feeling is we could 
try to make things change. If we can shift the use of some well know 
author software (JC, HP) to Etoys, we may be successful in both 
improving the quality of the media provided to the student and in Etoys 
acknowledgment.

Hilaire

kharness at illinois.edu a écrit :
> Hi Hilaire,
> I looked at the png of the die, dot in table, and fraction box and wonder, are they objects like the polygon with a dedicated set of tiles or a halo menu of options? The label Artifacts is confusing me; in schools here the label artifacts can mean educational materials used for assessment or, do you mean ready-to-use objects?
> 
> The Object Catalog and Supplies have similar things. Will DrGeo be a new tab in the Object Catalog? Do you propose another new category called Artifacts in the Object Catalog and then do you plan to add many objects to the next release of Etoys? Will they all be of special interest to math teachers and/or science teachers and at what grade levels? Do you know the USEIT adaptations of Etoys in use at the University of North Carolina Wilmington? The UNCW adaptations are for middle and high school science teachers. Are these similar to your ideas? Would they fit your category of Artifacts?
> 
> I am growing more uncertain about what Etoys will become if many specialized objects are added. To be useful, some of these objects require more knowledge in math and science. For example, the particles are amazing and whenever I show them to science teachers they are a wonderful example of using Etoys to explore ideas in physics. They are however, sophisticated and difficult for students to use without instruction. They are not intuitive unless you are already know physics. My elementary students click on them in the Object Catalog and then are at a loss, they have neither the science knowledge nor the programming skills to use them.
> 
> Are the teachers you know using Etoys for math instruction? The microcosm of the school where I work has not shown any interest in using Etoys to teach math even though the teachers are always impressed with the math students use to make projects. The teachers are more concerned with following a rigid curriculum that pre-tests, introduces concepts, post-tests, bench-marks, and quarterly assesses. And all of that instruction/assessment is, of course, focused toward the standardized tests given in March. Their curriculum is too large, time is too short, and each concept and skill is given too little time to mature. But, that is a problem for the math establishment and one of the reasons I like Etoys is that it is so much more open ended and so much less prescriptive and so much outside of the whole assessment environment that is consuming education in the US today. 
> 
> The god of assessment has always had clay feet and Diane Ravitch's book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education (New York: Basic Books, 2010) gives me hope that we will see less emphasis on multiple-choice-single-right-answer-learning. I would urge that we (Etoys) not spend very much time developing subject area electronic worksheets and mechanisms that count right/wrong answers and keystroke attempts to be part of the software. Book publishers routinely provide such materials that are specific, sequenced, and aligned and, from what I can see, teachers are hard pressed to use everything that is already available. If new artifacts are being considered as potential objects for the next release of Etoys, we should start talking about our vision for Etoys and what the core of it will be. 
> 
> Etoys thrives on mathematics and, on imagination, but to put too much emphasis on teaching a core curriculum of math or science will limit the other uses and imagination. My students use math in their projects and are indeed learning concepts at a deep level but they are not learning the math curriculum for their grade. For example, my 2nd-5th grade students routinely use test statements, create variables, and add random number generator tiles to projects. They use xy coordinates fluently because they want to control locations of objects and to position objects with reset scripts. Most of the Races and Mazes in EtoysIllinois were made by elementary students and show these kinds of applications of learning.
> 
> Unfortunately, standardized assessments do not assess for this kind of learning and certainly not in elementary grades in dynamic environments. My sense is that subject area teachers everywhere are bound by local, state, and national requirements. My hope is that Etoys provides collections of projects that show examples for deep learning and that as schools react to the growing need for more and more people who can program, who can use the language of the computer to express ideas, who are creative and, who will thrive in the future or, in careers that use programming skills, that Etoys would be in a position to be adopted as the tool for teaching programming in K-12 schools. 
> 
> Etoys is certainly powerful enough to grow up with children from elementary to high school . . . without a doubt. It was one of the reasons I first considered Etoys, that is, it can not be outgrown or worn out in a year or two.
> 
> I have written materials that show how easy it is to integrate Etoys into core curriculum but in every case I find that the core curriculum is already full, too full, and very well planned by curriculum specialists and that there is no room for Etoys in their view of their subject. I said this at a MSTE Board of Advisors meeting a year ago and Chip Bruce said: if there was no room at the table we should make our own table. It seems to me, Etoys could make its own table and in doing so raise the rather low expectations for what is currently passing as computer literacy. Keyboarding and using the internet are at a much lower level than the most basic Etoys project.
> 
> The K-12 cs/programming discipline is very new and that is good for us. It is an opportunity for us to define what should be.  If we can provide a cogent set of projects that develop good habits of mind, creative, and logical thinking we might find Etoys adopted by schools who are looking ahead for their students' futures. I would much prefer that we build our own table rather than try to squeeze Etoys as one more topic into other disciplines already full curricula.  
> 
> My hope is that schools will see the need for specialists to teach the subject of programming, just as music and art specialists focus on providing an excellent general education for all. Wouldn't it be grand if children routinely went to the computer lab to learn Etoys, just as they go to the music room to learn music. You may know, I was a music teacher and taught music to everyone in the school every year. It was not a course with preliminary requirements of talent, IQ, skill, interest or, potential for becoming a professional musician. Music is part of what it means to be educated. If we can align with that kind of belief, that knowing how to program, how to use the computer creatively to express ideas rather than being passive users or used by it, then we will have achieved something of value. 
> 
> I know this note is too long but I hope we can start talking about some of these ideas.
> Regards,
> Kathleen
> 
> 
> 
> ---- Original message ----
>> Date: Fri, 28 May 2010 09:22:40 +0200
>> From: Hilaire Fernandes <hilaire.fernandes at edu.ge.ch>  
>> Subject: [squeakland] Artifacts in ObjectCatalog  
>> To: "squeakland.org mailing list" <squeakland at squeakland.org>
>>
>>   Dear all,
>>
>>   In the latest Artifacts package at
>>   (http://www.squeaksource.com/LearningArtifacts) I
>>   added a category Artifacts as a place holder for the
>>   artifacts.
>>   See the attached screenshot.
>>
>>   I also added an Artifact DotInTable to represent
>>   collection of token in row and column.  It can be
>>   used to represent graphically the multiplication of
>>   two integers. The column, row and dot color are all
>>   Etoys scriptable.
>>   Again as an artifact, teacher can invent new way to
>>   use it and to combine it with other artifacts for a
>>   teaching purpose.
>>
>>   By the way, I tried these artifacts with Squeak 4.1
>>   and it works perfectly well from there, and the
>>   Squeak environment is more pleasant to write
>>   Smalltlak code.
>>
>>   I will continue to add artifacts to this package.
>>
>>   Hilaire
>>
>>   --
>>   http://blog.ofset.org/hilaire
>> ________________
>> ArtifactsObjectCatalog.png (16k bytes)
>> ________________
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