Ken:

In a school board of 100 000 students we are all Mac in the elementary (K-8)
panel. The day that Toon Talk goes cross-platform, put me down for the first
Mac copy. = ) Commercial kudos aside, I greatly appreciate your input
regarding computers and kids, and that what I really want to discuss in the
following.
 
> ToonTalk (Kahn 1996, 1998) is an animated world where children build and run
> programs by performing actions upon concrete objects.

Over 20 years ago, R. P. Taylor identified 3 basic ways of using computers
in schools. I think they are still valid:

1. As tutor, such as drill and practice, remedial exercises, training
simulations.

2. As tool,  such as word processors, spreadsheets, multimedia encyclopedia
CD ROM, HTML editors.

3. As tutee, such as macros, scripting, domain-specific programming and any
other development environments that enable the student to teach the computer
how to perform some task.

One does not need to know much about Bloom's taxonomy to see the rapid
progression up the cognitive ladder.

Unfortunately, the ladder also has a downside. Excerpt follows.

/--------------------------------------------------------------------------\

Despite having access to technology in schools, many teachers reported that
they did not use computers and other technologies regularly for instruction.

A majority of teachers felt inadequately prepared to use technology
resources, particularly computer based technologies.

Despite the importance of technology in teacher education, it was not
central to the teacher preparation experience in most U.S. colleges of
education.

Districts spend far less on teacher development than on hardware and
software.

Much of the teacher development activity focused on the mechanics, not on
integrating technology into the curriculum.

Teachers lacked an understanding of curricular uses of technology and were
unaware of the resources technology can offer them as professionals in
carrying out many aspects of their jobs.

-- Gonzales and Roblyer, "Rhetoric and Reality: Technology's Role in
Restructuring Education" in Learning and Leading with Technology, November
1996, pages 11 to 15.

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------/

We could see that one a kilometer away. It doesn't matter how good the
software is if the teacher is left out of the loop. One possibility might be
to create a teacher's manual with blackline masters (ready for photocopy)
that contain the main point, annotated screenshots, and a practical task
linked to general maths and sciences topics. This helps the teacher "save
face" -- a point that must not be over-looked -- and integrate programming
with other subjects.

U. S. Chief Justice Holmes said that the law is what the courts will do in
fact. Well, curriculum is what the teachers will do in fact.

> The child builds real
> computer programs by doing things like giving messages to birds, training
> robots to work on boxes, loading up trucks, and using animated tools to
> copy, remove, and stretch items.

I ran ChipWits in my classroom on a MacPlus until the disk died. After that
we (a grade 4 class in this case) created our own ZIP [Zany Icon
Programming] language on a stack of index cards. One student would "run" the
script authored by another student (the Zobot -- Zany Robot, of course).
Other students had standing scripts corresponding to the baddies (e.g.,
electro-crabs) and we used props for the static objects (e.g., pie, bombs).

Gosh, we had a great time!

 The closest thing to it today is probably Pit Droids
(http://www.pitdroids.com), but one cannot really program the droids as much
as set up a path. Droidworks is not much different.

ChipWits hasn't been around since 1985, when it won best educational title
from MacWorld. GnuRobots is supposed to be an open-source version, but in
practice it seems limited to Unix.

One of the many exciting aspects of Squeak is that it seems capable of
recreating a ChipWits environment. Doing so would be a major project, but
wow, what a wonderful contribution. Actually, it would enable a scaling
factor for the learner. An omniuser would be able to edit characters, say
add another robot, giving it extra capabilities (e.g., see through walls
into another maze room), and so on.

--

R. Kenyon

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