[OLPC_Boston] Fwd: [IAEP] SoaS notes: Gardner (GPA)

Wed Jul 8 17:01:32 EDT 2009

For people not following the iaep list: there's an interesting thread
on the local SoaS pilot Caroline, Walter, and Anurag are running at
the Gardner Pilot Academy in Allston. (There's also a school in
Dorchester that they're working with, but no notes from that... yet.
;-) Good thread/list to follow if you're into the pedagogy side of
things.

--Mel

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Caroline Meeks <caroline at solutiongrove.com>
Date: Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 10:23 PM
Subject: [IAEP] SoaS notes: Gardner (GPA)
To: iaep <iaep at lists.sugarlabs.org>

Note that is this long but I think its pretty interesting and I've
been trying to share notes with the IAEP list.

First I want to say thank you and congratulations to everyone involved
with Sugar on a Stick. We used it in a real school, with an unmodified
computer lab and real kids and it went great! This is a big milestone.

If you are an activity writer/maintainer take a look at how much
information Walter got out of watching kids use Turtle Art.  Consider
taking SoaS to a school near you and trying your activity with kids!

Forwarded conversation
Subject: SoaS notes: Gardner
------------------------

From: Mel Chua <mel at melchua.com>
Date: Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 12:25 PM
To: Walter Bender <walter.bender at gmail.com>, Caroline Meeks
<caroline at solutiongrove.com>, Anurag Goel <agoel23 at gmail.com>

Notes from today's SoaS lab at the Gardner school - I wasn't actually
trying to take fieldnotes, so these aren't great, but jotted them down
anyway. Feel free to share with whatever lists are appropriate, I'm
not sure if there are any privacy issues with this.

--Mel

-----

Walter: Each computer has a stick. You'll be able to use these sticks
all summer long. Inside the computer is a turtle, and we're going to
teach the turtle how to do stuff. If you tell the turtle to go
forward, what happens? *Walter walks forward.* If you tell the turtle
to go right, what happens? *Walter turns right.* Later this week we're
going to do more stuff with maps.

Kid1: Can we teach the turtle how to walk in a circle?

Walter: You can teach the turtle how to walk in a circle. How would
you teach it how to walk in a circle?

Kid1: Go around and around.

Walter: Let's do this exercise. Stand up. *kid stands up* Take a step
forward. *kid steps forward* Now turn. *kid spins in place* What if
you go step, turn, step, turn, step, turn? *Walter walks in a circle.*

Kid2: Can you make it flip?

Walter: Flip?

Kid2: Yeah, like flip onto its stomach?

Walter: That's an interesting idea! We can make it draw pictures and stuff.

*Children get permission to go to computers, all of them run for a station*

Some children have put the headphones on. All of them are typing in
their name with no problem. Some need prompting to click on the
XO-person to choose a color... and spend a very long time choosing a
color. Students being prompted to cick on TurtleArt; they do so,
mostly sitting at the computer until adults tell them to do something,
but one boy has already dragged out a block and made the turtle walk.

Less than aminute later, this has spread - adjacent children have
dragged out blocks and are clicking on them too. Adults walking around
prompting the other children to drag out blocks and click on them.
Some kids are literally waiting for adults to tell them every time
they should click the mouse.

One girl raises her hand, she has a question, she has linked some
blocks together. The girl next to her goes over to her and whispers to
her. I'm going over to the desk, ask what's up - the second girl (the
neighbor) explains the first girl wants to make the blocks disappear.
The first girl confirms this. "How do you make these go away?" I point
to the toolbar and say she can drag them there, she tries it, and then
continues to drag and rearrange her blocks.

Kids are pointing at their screens, at their neighbors screens,
leaning over to see things... I'm not sure if they're copying ideas
from each other yet, but a few appear to be showing their classmates
how they made particular block combinations. Some kids have linked all
their blocks together and are playing with a single stack; some have
arranged the blocks across their screen into a sort of custom turtle
control panel and are clicking one button at a time.

One girl (the first kid who talked today) gets out of her seat and
finds Walter, very excited. She's pointing to the screen - she's
gotten her turtle to draw a circle. The two girls to the right of her
have done the same.

Most of the students are still exploring the turtle toolbar, but two
in front of me have discovered the other toolbars and are dragging out
bulky orange control statements (an 'if' block) - they don't seem to
know how to use it, though, and the blocks are standing on their
workspace with nothing attached to them.

Ah! One boy discovered he could link a stack to the bottom of the 'if'
block. But that doesn't seem to get him anywhere, because he hasn't
attached anything to the control statements. He unlinks his stack and
drags the 'if' block back to the toolbar, discarding it.

I spent the next few minutes working with two girls who are trying to
understand the 'if' block. After I show them an example on my own
computer of what the block can do, they try to figure out how to link
it together on their own screens.

One child confused by the graphical error ("you need to attach a block
somewhere") at the bottom of her screen.

At the end of the class, one child asked if they got to take the sticks home.

----------
From: Walter Bender <walter.bender at gmail.com>
Date: Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 2:47 PM
To: Mel Chua <mel at melchua.com>, Caroline Meeks
<caroline at solutiongrove.com>, Anurag Goel <agoel23 at gmail.com>

Mel,

Thanks for the write up.

A couple of additional observations:

The kids kept modifying the same project over the course of the 45
minutes, so all of their intermediary steps were lost. Auto-versioning
will help here, but I will attempt to move the Keep button to the
Project toolbar as well as the Image Save button, to facilitate their
keeping occasional records of their progress.

None of the kids every figured out how to close the activity.

I shut the machines down for them one at a time.

A handful of kids managed to launch multiple copies of Turtle Art.

Some had trouble removing blocks.. they ended up in a pile under the palette.

Quite a few were interested in drawing letters of the alphabet.

---

Next time (Thursday 9 Jul at 11:30) we plan to use a projector. I will
walk them through using the setxy block to position the Turtle on a
Cartesian coordinate space. I'll show them hw to print the current
position and have them guess coordinates for the turtle. Then we will
have them each try to label the school on a map.

-walter
--
Walter Bender
Sugar Labs
http://www.sugarlabs.org

Caroline's Observations

Students were very engaged.  These students had not yet been
introduced to angles so I'm not sure if they understood the
significance of what they were doing but I could see this as a way to
get there by the end of the summer.  Computers change what math is
useful when and students using Turtle Art may want some geometry
earlier then the standard curriculum.  They were very motivated to
draw cool pictures.

Kids wanted to erase part of the screen.

The lesson could have been a good an opportunity to introduce them to
some math vocabulary.  Ones I know I used were:

Program
Angle
Arc
Heading

We might want to keep track of what words we want to use and see if
the teachers want to reinforce any in class.  When we start working on
the clock activity we might want to think through what words we want
to use and have them introduced in class.

Kids wanted to take the sticks home right away. I need to think
through what we need to do before they can do that. We need a parent
communication plan.

I was very pleased with the results and it'll be interesting as we
give them more challenge and structure on Thursday.

--
Caroline Meeks
Solution Grove
Caroline at SolutionGrove.com

617-500-3488 - Office
505-213-3268 - Fax

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