Dear Squeakers,
As one of the researchers from the University that is running the OLPC pilot project in Porto Alegre, Brazil, I was introduced to squeak, last February, when I could bring an XO home during a weekend.
But now, my work is related to promote capacity building to the staff of organizations that run TELECENTERS.
Telecenters, in Brazil, are rooms with an average of 12 computers(PCs) with access to Internet inside NGOs or grassroots organizations, located in low-income communities in Brazil.
I am the coordinator of a Foundation that promotes capacity building to the staff of these organizations, to implement curses in telecenters. Our methodology has the same line of constructionism... We have been working "IT Basic knowledge" through project-based learning, now we want to start using Squeak.
In Brazil, schools work on shifts. Children go to school in the morning (8:00 to 12:00) or in the afternoon (2:00 to 18:00). If the child goes in the morning, during the afternoon he or she might get a vacancy in an after school program offered by an NGO or grassroots organization, or religious organization. Government helps supporting these organizations to implement this after school programs. Those organizations are frequently receiving refurbished computers and building partnerships to create their telecenter. Than, they come to us, asking for guidance about what to do with the telecenter.
So, we have telecenters as informal educational environment to work with children and teenagers. We dont need to relate our work to school curriculum, we can promote any kind of curses, workshop, guided playtime... any thing!
We have about 45 of these NGOs equipped with telecenters in Porto Alegre, already working with us (from a total of 150 NGOs partners from other cities).
Our motivation is strongly related to develop programming skills on children and teenagers.
We are thinking about to start with a group of age around 10 and another group around 15. We would choose one telecenter and plan to work there ( instead of train their staff).
But what would we teach? Should we keep thinking in project-based learning? When we use other software we frequently start working with identity construction, and after some exploration of the software, the group starts a project...
But to understand the basis of squeak, the "drive a car " project seems so important!!!
Well, sorry guys to be so long in this Sunday night! Seems that to write to you already made some goals clear to me!
Ideas, experiences and suggestions are welcome!
regards,
Marta Voelcker
On Monday 21 May 2007 8:24 am, Marta Voelcker wrote:
We are thinking about to start with a group of age around 10 and another group around 15. We would choose one telecenter and plan to work there ( instead of train their staff).
Wonderful. I have seen children as young as six enjoy the discovery process so integral to learning. Squeak has very few distractions in its UI and allows one to devote more time to 'thinking' and 'doing'. Some of the morphs (like color) are too fine for small hands and the mouse is a terrible input device for drawing fine curves but it is still a great 'place' to learn.
But what would we teach? Should we keep thinking in project-based learning? When we use other software we frequently start working with identity construction, and after some exploration of the software, the group starts a project...
Training may be required in basic skills like pointing, clicking, dragging and combining them with shift/ctrl/alt keys (think of them like driving controls in a car). A good glossary is helpful because Squeak's terminology is geeky (in English atleast). I hope the Portugese terminology is easier on common folks. Beyond these basic skills and terminology, It is best to let learners experiment and discover than to 'teach' them a particular way of doing things. Different strokes for different folks.
But to understand the basis of squeak, the "drive a car " project seems so important!!!
There are lots of nice projects in Squeakland that learners can take apart and study on their own. Etoys version comes with many tutorials built right into it.
Ideas, experiences and suggestions are welcome!
For me, picking the right image was the most difficult part, since many images on Squeak web site target expert programmers. Squeakland site has some good, stable ones for beginners.
Images are like 'little schools' that can be carried along on flash memory or portable hard disks and used anytime on any computer to stimulate thinking and learning. Unfortunately, Squeak is not self-correcting like Montessori toys :-(. So encourage your learners to make copies of their images to preserve their work and give them pet names :-).
Learning Squeak is like learning swimming. Real learning happens only when you get into the pool with a few other swimmers, not when reading about swimming in books or listening to lectures. Working in small groups of 3 to 7 is a good way to come upto speed.
Happy Learning .. Subbu
For telecenters, I would take a look to Scratch ( http://scratch.mit.edu/ ), even if at their homepage they only speak about windows and macintosh, it works under linux too (only some issues with the midi support are still remaining, but the rest of the tool works ok). I think Scratch is specially thought for places as telecenters. Regards
2007/5/21, Marta Voelcker marta@pensamentodigital.org.br:
Dear Squeakers,
As one of the researchers from the University that is running the OLPC pilot project in Porto Alegre, Brazil, I was introduced to squeak, last February, when I could bring an XO home during a weekend.
But now, my work is related to promote capacity building to the staff of organizations that run TELECENTERS.
Telecenters, in Brazil, are rooms with an average of 12 computers(PCs) with access to Internet inside NGOs or grassroots organizations, located in low-income communities in Brazil.
I am the coordinator of a Foundation that promotes capacity building to the staff of these organizations, to implement curses in telecenters. Our methodology has the same line of constructionism... We have been working "IT Basic knowledge" through project-based learning, now we want to start using Squeak.
In Brazil, schools work on shifts. Children go to school in the morning (8:00 to 12:00) or in the afternoon (2:00 to 18:00). If the child goes in the morning, during the afternoon he or she might get a vacancy in an after school program offered by an NGO or grassroots organization, or religious organization. Government helps supporting these organizations to implement this after school programs. Those organizations are frequently receiving refurbished computers and building partnerships to create their telecenter. Than, they come to us, asking for guidance about what to do with the telecenter.
So, we have telecenters as informal educational environment to work with children and teenagers. We don't need to relate our work to school curriculum, we can promote any kind of curses, workshop, guided playtime... any thing!
We have about 45 of these NGOs equipped with telecenters in Porto Alegre, already working with us (from a total of 150 NGOs partners from other cities).
Our motivation is strongly related to develop programming skills on children and teenagers.
We are thinking about to start with a group of age around 10 and another group around 15. We would choose one telecenter and plan to work there ( instead of train their staff).
But what would we teach? Should we keep thinking in project-based learning? When we use other software we frequently start working with identity construction, and after some exploration of the software, the group starts a project...
But to understand the basis of squeak, the "drive a car " project seems so important!!!
Well, sorry guys to be so long in this Sunday night! Seems that to write to you already made some goals clear to me!
Ideas, experiences and suggestions are welcome!
regards,
Marta Voelcker
Squeakland mailing list Squeakland@squeakland.org http://squeakland.org/mailman/listinfo/squeakland
Hello,
You may get some good ideas by checking out the Intel Community Education page at http://www.intel.com/education/communityed/index.htm
Especially take a look at the
Intel Computer Clubhouse Network
at http://www.intel.com/education/icc/index.htm.
regards ------------------------ Frank Caggiano frankcag at crystal-objects dot com http://www.crystal-objects.com
The best education for the best is the best education for all. Robert Maynard Hutchins
Hi Martha,
(Warning: This will be a long mail... :-))
I'm also working with young people (but not children) and Squeak here in my university in Colombia and we have also two XO prototypes of the OLPC project here (I'm not the leader of the project for the country, which is a friend of mine, but my thinking/doing has been influenced by this project). Recently we have a workshop for university teachers about using Squeak for the creation of virtual learning objects. Because Squeak has been used intensively with children and there is a lot of documentation and material for them, I will concentrate more in the experience with young people and other teachers. The idea, in both experiences, is the creation of learners' networks and communities of practice on technologies, education and science. From the theoretical point, we work on postvigoskian cognitive and distributed cognition theories in which there is a lot of emphasis on how cognition is "affected" by the environment, social rules, other people, mediations and media. I have added some conceptual framework on Multiagent systems to make some models on collective problem solving and put that model in talk with the educative correlate of teaching/learning in classroom.
We start with some small introduction to social software (wikis, blikis --blog inside wikis) as a way to create organic memory from our learning experiences and a share space of reflexion, thinking and talk. Having the habit of writing constantly about your learning/design experiences as they advance is difficult (the lack of documentation on software is a good example of this) but in a more formal settings [1], as we have in the classroom this, is solved by the evaluation instruments [4] which puts a lot of emphasis on documentation. On informal settings[5] is needed to insist with examples, talks, reminders and so on. Informal settings compensate discipline with passion ;-). The key here is that your architecture and social practices needs to reflect the values that you want to create/consolidate in your learners community (for example the value of sharing knowledge using the social practice of documentation)
[1] http://www.eduwiki.info [4] http://www.eduwiki.info/IntroduccionInformatica/Evaluacion/Instrumentos [5] http://www.el-directorio.org/
The first activity that my students work with, is the creation (and of course process documentation) on a interactive book, using the Bookmorph of Squeak, on any subject they like (the emotional link with the subject is important). The second one is the creation of an eToy (you can see examples of my students works on [2][3]), then we go deeper in the algorithmic programming concepts, using BotsInc[6] and finally, when they have the proper shared culture size (publishing, squeak and programming basics) we go to the creation of a collective problem/project[7] which is the first consolidation of a micro community of problem solvers, and is nice to see that we get a community of discourse where people is interacting with respect and getting knowledge with the help of others
[2] http://www.eduwiki.info/SergioAndresRivera [3] http://www.eduwiki.info/JoseRamirez [6] http://www.eduwiki.info/BotsInc [7] http://www.eduwiki.info/MazeSquad2 [8] http://www.eduwiki.info/MazeSquad/Foro
For the teachers workshop we go in a more conceptual way first talking about virtual learning "objects" and then we try to provide a panoramic view of the "Squeak multiverse" (Squeak, Scracth, OpenCroquet). Getting the teachers documenting its more difficult because of the lack of time, but the experience showed that Scratch interface is easier for them that Squeak interface (and for a lot of people too). The focus on interactive creations (games and stories) and after school centers of Scratch[9][10] could be a better introduction for teenagers that eToys and Booksmorphs and would be really nice to have some kind of bridge between Squeak and Scratch, for example using Scratch animations/stories on Squeak books/projects.
[9] http://www.el-directorio.org/Scratch/Introduccion [10] http://www.el-directorio.org/Scratch?action=AttachFile&do=get&target...
Developing computer literacy and fluency with Squeak has been a really transforming experience for me and my students, and the Squeak community is one of the most friendly communities out there, but there are still some issues that we need to work together.
Issues:
* Lack of properly licensed material: This one was of my biggest problems last year (and still is). Most of the documentation for Squeak its outdated and the one that is current, comprehensive and suited for teaching/learning is mostly in English and licensed under restrictive copyright terms. I would be willing of creating a Spanish translation of the excellent Bots Inc's book (and I have not enough knowledge yet to write my own comprehensive book) and even Stephane Ducasse (the author) is willing to release the material under a liberal license, but convincing the editors could be difficult. May be if one of the sponsors of the OLPC or local governments participating in the project could cover the cost of freeing/opening the good current materials (instead of giving only financial support for the creation of new open content material) we could accelerate the "content layer" of the project. You can see, for example, some Spanish translation of the Powerful ideas for the Classroom book, but if you want the Portuguese version you will need to ask permission again and you and your students will not create derived material (at least not in the sense understood by Free/Open-Source Software).
* Multiple incompatible images (Desktop, OLPC, Squeakland, Small-land, BotsInc, 3.8, 3.9, 3.10): This breaks the sense of continuity. Would be nice to have some way to create custom images depending of the task, but with a minimalist image as a common base (may be this is happening in some sense but its opaque to the user and they see the virtual machine as the only thing in common). The 3.10 image is working through this path but meanwhile you need to choose carefully which image you want, because some patches and developments are not compatible (for example between Squeakland and Small-land). I suggest to get an image with eToys support and trying to go from them to other squeak learning environments (for example eToys). If we're thinking in an Squeak learning environment which grows with the children, we will need to have, for example, the possibility to pass from eToys to Smalltalk (Bots Incs seems a nice bridge) and may be we need to impact the scholar system in places where is more needed (in Colombia teenagers are more vulnerable to leaving their studies that children) and would be nice to have this reflected on the OLPC or Telecenters projects. Another problem with incompatible images is that the creations on some of them can't be loaded in others or doesn't look fine. For example, we tried to create some interactive fables of local folklore for XO machines in Desktop ones, and the different size and aspect ratio of the screens make the content to look really bad on them.
* Variable responsiveness of "the list" and other community places to talk/teach/learn. Most of the times you ask and get a nice and quick response even with code examples, screenshots and references, but some other your mail can sleep inside the castaway's bottle and nobody respond.
Surely I'm forgetting a lot of things and would be nice to share more about the creation of learning spaces/experiences in the Squeak multiverse, about the important of continuity, interaction, and context, but this mail is long enough already. I hope that this helps, will be nice to hear about your experiences in Brazil and more questions/insights as they appear.
Cheers,
Offray
Marta Voelcker escribió:
Dear Squeakers,
As one of the researchers from the University that is running the OLPC pilot project in Porto Alegre, Brazil, I was introduced to squeak, last February, when I could bring an XO home during a weekend.
But now, my work is related to promote capacity building to the staff of organizations that run TELECENTERS.
Telecenters, in Brazil, are rooms with an average of 12 computers(PCs) with access to Internet inside NGOs or grassroots organizations, located in low-income communities in Brazil.
I am the coordinator of a Foundation that promotes capacity building to the staff of these organizations, to implement curses in telecenters. Our methodology has the same line of constructionism... We have been working "IT Basic knowledge" through project-based learning, now we want to start using Squeak.
In Brazil, schools work on shifts. Children go to school in the morning (8:00 to 12:00) or in the afternoon (2:00 to 18:00). If the child goes in the morning, during the afternoon he or she might get a vacancy in an after school program offered by an NGO or grassroots organization, or religious organization. Government helps supporting these organizations to implement this after school programs. Those organizations are frequently receiving refurbished computers and building partnerships to create their telecenter. Than, they come to us, asking for guidance about what to do with the telecenter.
So, we have telecenters as informal educational environment to work with children and teenagers. We don’t need to relate our work to school curriculum, we can promote any kind of curses, workshop, guided playtime... any thing!
We have about 45 of these NGOs equipped with telecenters in Porto Alegre, already working with us (from a total of 150 NGOs partners from other cities).
Our motivation is strongly related to develop programming skills on children and teenagers.
We are thinking about to start with a group of age around 10 and another group around 15. We would choose one telecenter and plan to work there ( instead of train their staff).
But what would we teach? Should we keep thinking in project-based learning? When we use other software we frequently start working with identity construction, and after some exploration of the software, the group starts a project...
But to understand the basis of squeak, the "drive a car " project seems so important!!!
Well, sorry guys to be so long in this Sunday night! Seems that to write to you already made some goals clear to me!
Ideas, experiences and suggestions are welcome!
regards,
Marta Voelcker
Squeakland mailing list Squeakland@squeakland.org http://squeakland.org/mailman/listinfo/squeakland
Hello Marta,
To effectuate the development of programming skills, I suggest starting with the Squeakland tutorials such as the "Drive a Car" tutorial and progressing with a paralleled study of:
1. object oriented class structure, 2. microprocessor architecture and functionality, 3. human meta cognition 4. history of the computer/transistor, 5. modelling logic gates and Boolean logic, 6. syllogistic logic, 7. and developing similar programs within multiple programming environments
This list, I'm sure has the potential to be seen as overwhelming if not overkill for such young people however, it has been my experience that even elementary grade children experience the authenticity of the art of programming much earlier when their personal practice with very basic programming has begun to embrace some of the majorly connected concept clusters. In fact my last statement can be validated while examining meta cognition. You might first decide upon which learning strands/connected concept clusters to include in your study then develop, with the aid of research and others, clear levels of vertical articulation within each of the strands. Having a clearly defined hierarchy of learning levels within each learning strand will inform you in your continued lesson planning as well as inform other teachers of these students as to how they can better support the development of these young people. This type of planning and communication can effectively bridge a lot of gaps between tech-savvy and not so tech-savvy individuals and institutions. If this reply lacks enough concrete detail and you would prefer elaboration and/or exemplification of my comments, don't hesitate to reply back.
Yours in Education,
Eric Eisaman
On 5/21/07, Marta Voelcker marta@pensamentodigital.org.br wrote:
Dear Squeakers,
As one of the researchers from the University that is running the OLPC pilot project in Porto Alegre, Brazil, I was introduced to squeak, last February, when I could bring an XO home during a weekend.
But now, my work is related to promote capacity building to the staff of organizations that run TELECENTERS.
Telecenters, in Brazil, are rooms with an average of 12 computers(PCs) with access to Internet inside NGOs or grassroots organizations, located in low-income communities in Brazil.
I am the coordinator of a Foundation that promotes capacity building to the staff of these organizations, to implement curses in telecenters. Our methodology has the same line of constructionism... We have been working "IT Basic knowledge" through project-based learning, now we want to start using Squeak.
In Brazil, schools work on shifts. Children go to school in the morning (8:00 to 12:00) or in the afternoon (2:00 to 18:00). If the child goes in the morning, during the afternoon he or she might get a vacancy in an after school program offered by an NGO or grassroots organization, or religious organization. Government helps supporting these organizations to implement this after school programs. Those organizations are frequently receiving refurbished computers and building partnerships to create their telecenter. Than, they come to us, asking for guidance about what to do with the telecenter.
So, we have telecenters as informal educational environment to work with children and teenagers. We don't need to relate our work to school curriculum, we can promote any kind of curses, workshop, guided playtime... any thing!
We have about 45 of these NGOs equipped with telecenters in Porto Alegre, already working with us (from a total of 150 NGOs partners from other cities).
Our motivation is strongly related to develop programming skills on children and teenagers.
We are thinking about to start with a group of age around 10 and another group around 15. We would choose one telecenter and plan to work there ( instead of train their staff).
But what would we teach? Should we keep thinking in project-based learning? When we use other software we frequently start working with identity construction, and after some exploration of the software, the group starts a project...
But to understand the basis of squeak, the "drive a car " project seems so important!!!
Well, sorry guys to be so long in this Sunday night! Seems that to write to you already made some goals clear to me!
Ideas, experiences and suggestions are welcome!
regards,
Marta Voelcker
Squeakland mailing list Squeakland@squeakland.org http://squeakland.org/mailman/listinfo/squeakland
squeakland@lists.squeakfoundation.org
-
Eric Eisaman -
Frank Caggiano -
José Luis Redrejo -
Marta Voelcker -
Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas -
subbukk