The more things change the more they stay the same…(Ruminations on Alice)

In the process of looking for interactive, educational gaming environments we’ve explored Scratch (see post from previous week) and recently Alice, which is done out of Carnegie Mellon University. It is striking to me that these tools are not so much new, although they certainly take advantage of the advancement in computing that has occurred in the last 20 years. What is striking is how they draw on a long legacy of student centered, constructivist philosophy that reaches back to Dewey and before.

Education is not a preparation for life; education is life itself.”
John Dewey

In so many ways, the efforts to create learning environments that are focused on the learner, and not teaching or content specific issues stem from Dewey’s philosophy 100 years ago. The development of the computer and its implications for education continued this philosophy and supported it. In the 1970s the computer language Logo was one of the central products from this philosophy of how computers could support constructive learning and education. One of the central figures in this movement was Seymour Pappert, who became identified through his work at MIT Media Lab through Logo amongst other writings and projects. History of Logo here: http://el.media.mit.edu/Logo-foundation/logo/index.html

“The role of the teacher is to create the conditions for invention rather than provide ready-made knowledge.”
Seymour Papert

So here we are now with a World Wide Web connected citizenry who easily see themselves in conversation with the world, and creating in a community. The philosophy is not changed, but the tools and what they are capable of doing have become richer, more connected, and understand better the workings of the brain. Here is Mitchell Resnick, one of the founders of Scratch, talking about the ideas behind Scratch:

Think about this again: Pappert over 25 years ago had something to say about the kinds of tools that we could enable through computers for learning:

…they [the children] become producers instead of consumers of educational software. (p. 107)

I am convinced that the best learning takes place when the learner takes charge… ,(p. 25) 

(quotes lifted from from: http://mailer.fsu.edu/~jflake/papert.html)

And so along this evolution comes another tool: Alice – which was designed with a slightly different cause — helping students learn computer programming (unlike one of the founding ideas behind Logo which was mathematical thinking). The numbers of students who are interested in working with object-oriented computer languages has not been very high, and particularly has been gender biased dramatically towards boys. This platform teaches the basics of object-oriented languages, through a interactive 3-D interface that is highly engaging, and has been shown to retain as well as teach boys and girls effectively. It was interesting that in the Alice blog, there was conversation about rationale for using Scratch or Alice in education. A couple of quotes from the design team on Alice on their blog (http://blog.alice.org/?p=102):
“The general observation is that students find Scratch to be very accessible, and can do many cool things very quickly. The downside is that they will hit the limits of Scratch relatively soon. Alice has a richer set of capabilities but that students need a lot more initial support and training to fully utilize its capabilities.”
“The distinction between informal and formal educational settings is interesting and important, and yet we are finding that Scratch is starting to be used in more formal settings (as the ap-cs listserv thread clearly illustrates), and we are also finding Alice being used in more informal settings (such as the Citizen’s School project in New York City last fall.)”
I found it particularly interesting in the second quote that they distinguish that Scratch was a more informal tool and Alice was a formal tool, but they have bleeded over from both ends so that they are used in both settings now. I agree with the general idea that Alice requires a bit more tutorial on the front end, but quickly gets one up to speed in the terminology of object-oriented languages: methods and classes and the structure therein. Here is a short movie that the second tutorial walks one through creating to understand the role of methods in sequencing behaviors in a programmed environment:

So where does this take us? It is 2009 and we have moved from Dewey to Pappert to Resnick and we are still talking about ways to create self-directed, constructive learning environments. If the next 20 years play out anything like the exponential curve we see from the last 20, the opportunities for personalized, rich, powerful learning environments will only become more likely to influence education and learning. With that said, tools like Scratch and Alice offer us a wonderful place to begin now with students.
Papert, S. (1993). The children’s machine: rethinking school in the age of the computer. New York: BasicBooks.

Welcome to the Age of Exponential Miracles. Our Credo is “Meh.”

A typical Sunday. Take the dog to the beach for a round of play catch. Come back read some of the paper, make a quad cappuccino, make breakfast, play with the boys, and spend some time with course work. Near the end of the day, I read the comics from the Sunday funnies and absolutely love this one from Retail:

Retail

http://www.seattlepi.com/fun/retail.asp

Why? Specifically, about three hours today I spent playing and creating with the free software called Scratch, from MIT media labs to create a prototype for a game we are designing for ETEC 697, Educational Technology in Informal Learning Environments. I’ve played with Scratch before, but never sat down to really tackle a project that had been defined through a game brief. What struck me was how many ways I could attack the problem to bring in graphics, to create animations, to design interactive elements. The end result of three hours of work was either remarkable or work at a seven-year-old could do, depending upon how you look at. My seven-year-old sat at the table while I designed the project, and understood most of the interface and the feedback in the design and even the programming aspects of the game. Let me say that again: a seven-year-old watched me go through the process of designing a game that had backgrounds, sprites, scripts, imported graphics, audio files, and programming errors and found it engaging to work with me and give feedback into the process. That’s why I found the Retail comic strip so funny. We have reached a point in technologic development that surpasses our ability to appreciate the amazing things we are doing (in this case on my kitchen table wirelessly with a computer more powerful than a 1990s supercomputer) and our generation of young students assumes this is the way the world has always been. It reminds me a lot of the Arthur C. Clarke quote:

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”

I believe we have come to an age where either it is magic or the response is “Meh.”. When go back and look at my Sunday I marvel at the layers of technology that I applied without thinking. I had a iPhone by my bed that both act as a alarm clock and a telephone in case an emergency scheme during the night. When I came back from the beach, I grabbed my iPhone to help finish off a crossword puzzle (six letter word for Island in the Bahamas? Bimini). While I was at it, I scanned my personal learning network, checked out the start times for NFL football games, then check the up-to-date news. A few hours later, I was on my laptop using Skype to connect to my cohorts in Colorado and Honolulu, where we planned through Google docs both a written document and the presentation to give in about 10 days. I then downloaded the latest version of Scratch from MIT media labs, and using the web to look for tutorials, taught myself enough to develop interactive elements in a game in less than three hours. While I was doing that, I was also watching the live New England Patriots game which was being broadcast through a streaming website. Meh.

Let’s look at Scratch a little more closely. A free, cross platform, easy to learn programming environment designed for primarily middle and high school students to design interactive games and media. When you are finished, there is a “share” tab that allows any author to create and publish their idea for free. Think about this… anywhere in the world, Macintosh, Linux, Windows, your creation can be shared via their website for free, or others can look for and enjoy it and give feedback. Meh.

Now, I readily agree that having access to a programming environment is no different than having access to a pen. Without assistance and good mentoring (teachers, facilitators, other means of building knowledge), the product will likely be weak and ineffective. With today’s technology, it is possible to easily find many free tutorials to learn how to do just about all aspects of the program. More importantly, there is a whole community of users who write about their experiences with the program. Think about that — resources that I can reach from my kitchen table, experts that I can find, video tutorials (screen casts) that others put up to help ME. Why? Because that is how users in this new frontier see themselves – as contributing community members for a world of users. Meh.

here is the game, btw (simple, yes – the goal for this prototype is to guide the butterfly to the flower – if you touch the flower and hit the space bar, it increases the energy level of the butterfly)

Learn more about this project

So where does this take us? Everything we see today is at the bottom of the exponential curve of technological change as we look into the future. What awaits us is even more connectedness, more access, more personalization, more ways that we can look back and wonder about a time that we didn’t have these resources. For educators with the right focus — who really are in the game to help students learn — the opportunity to help students appreciate both where we are, where we have come from, and where we are going makes this a marvelous time to try and drive away the “Meh” culture that surrounds us. Peter Vail in his book “Learning as a Way of Being” talks about Whitewater Learning as a metaphor for a dynamic approach to changing times. In Hawaii, we talk about getting on the wave as a way of dealing with the dynamic of the ocean as a metaphor. All educators need to recognize that the world is changed, and is continuing to change exponentially, and that the only way to stay relevant is to adapt and adopt to the changing frontiers in front of us, lest our classroom experience be regarded as “Meh.”