Tinkering

I spent sometime playing with Scratch Jr, from MIT and I have to admit that it is engaging and pleasing enough for a child younger than five to spend time with it. While I still thing procedural writing of syntax is incredibly important, visual cues help abundantly. I will anon, post some simple exercises for toddlers in Scratch.

Other addons include ScratchX, where the output can be connected to an Arduino board or a Microbits board. Netlogo is another programming platform that is for agent based modeling. Interesting, a bit out there perhaps.

In addition to programming, I also read an article about constructionism learning theory by Seymour Papert. An excellent piece of work, this speaks about how education can be liberating when the right techniques are used:
http://fablearn.stanford.edu/fellows/blog/constructionism-learning-theory-and-model-maker-education

There seem to be several organizations that are promoting and enabling constructionism (tinkering) in early learners.

1. MIT LLK
2. Stanford Fablearn


Need to explore more.

Programming for kids

I had just started looking at Scratch, the popular visual programming language for my son. I had a look at the platform and was not impressed. Too many colors, difficult even for an adult to quickly figure out how to use the platform without a readme. It wasn't self-explanatory or clean and simple like the Google search bar. But it does seem to be popular even in schools as a simple google search told me. This got me thinking about Logo, another beginner programming platform that I learned on when I was a kid. I remember liking it quite a bit and loved the simple turtle icon that would move around on your command. The best part was that you didn't need to know too many English words to understand the syntax. Most commands are just two letters.

Another google search led me to a satisfying blog article about why Logo was better than Scratch.
Definitely Sticking with Logo. I was pleased. However a more detailed look at the comments made me think again. Several people mentioned that Scratch has been extremely pervasive in teaching loops, and in putting together blocks to understand sequences of steps to achieve an objective. In addition to that several teachers mentioned shifting from Logo to Scratch for teaching. Now another look at this subject resulted in my finding this paper !  "How Programming Environment Shapes Perception, Learning and Goals: Logo vs. Scratch" . Looks like this has been a raging debate for a while, leading to a systematic and statistically deep study that has been done. The paper is fantastic, but the results intrigued me. Even though Scratch is being promoted as a visual programming language, the only benefit seems to be in understanding conditionals. Even for loops and general programming constructs Logo fares better. Even more interestingly Logo learners showed a markedly higher confidence in programming than those learning Scratch. What I liked is the final interpretation: the low-level focus on the simple syntax of Logo and the lack of visual information, allowed for students to understand the role of every command in the context of a complete program.

I plan to spend ample time going through both independently and preparing some simple lessons, to experiment with. Maybe I can come to an independent conclusion about this as well.

(Keep It Simple Stupid).