How do you share research online?

As some of you might know (those who've read down a few posts anyway), I'm turning the informal work I do with Code Ed into a PhD with Bournemouth University.  This has always been an ambition of mine to firstly do a PhD, but also spread the work I am doing into the wider academic community in the UK.  Obviously, the guys at Raspberry Pi are making making cheap 'hacker' style hardware available and accessible to schools, but they don't really look after the software.  What I'm looking at is how do we make coding and hacking more accessible to young minds; especially really young minds.

Fine then, I know a lot of people in this sphere, from folks at Computing at School, the Raspberry Pi Foundation, Cambridge University, the wonderful Chelmsford Makerspace, 3D printing gurus and many many more - I won't bore you with my connections in this field.  I talk to these people, in informal and formal settings, and I capture the best bits to make sense of answering my PhD hypothesis.

The issue is "How do I share this?" I blog a bit, I tweet a bit, but mostly, I am aware I do a lot of the good stuff offline.  When I say the good stuff, I mean the contentious or edgy bits really - the ideas I haven't property formulated or are just hunches or opinion.  My Supervisor Stephen thinks that this is where the best stuff is, whereas I think I only like sharing when I have something proven.  I don't want some opinionated old so and so telling me my research is rubbish, so I tend to dumb down what I share or only share the bits I'm really confident are right.

It seems this is an endemic problem in PG research and I'm not alone in not sharing my stuff enough, as  it seems are my peers who are in the same boat.  I know previous PhD students are BU have done brilliant work, but would I know where to find it? Probably I could find their thesis if I tried, likely I'd try and get in touch with them directly and ask them.  This doesn't help the media or other PG researchers all around the world find their stuff though.  It also means you only get the finished article and you don't see the journey they go through to get to the Thesis.  A fellow student (who will remain unnamed) had a research blog, who's final post said "I've stopped blogging as I'm too busy with my PhD!" Hey! You just got to the good bit, thanks!

Anyway, I am going to try and share stuff a bit better via Twitter and my Blog, and BU have asked me to look at ways in which I can share good practice on what I discover... Any input would be gratefully received  and as I'm a poor student, please send me your ideas scribbled on the back of a five pound note to...  Seriously, you can comment below, you just need a Blogger or Google account. Ta.

..I'm now off to teach people how to program with a Raspberry Pi and Scratch.  Update soon!

Video call with the Raspberry Pi foundation

I was party to a wonderful video conference with Rob from the Raspberry Pi foundation today. Introduced as their only employee(!) this is a company that have sold over 500,000 £29 computers in less than a year!

Rob spoke passionately and enthusiastically about the philosophy of the Raspberry Pi and how it aims to introduce children and adults alike to the wonders of digital creativity in an increasingly consumerist IT culture. In conjunction with an 'open source' IT curriculum in UK schools where teachers can choose how 'codey' their lessons are, the Pi allows those enthusiastic pupils and teachers to experience how a computer and software really works with very little capital outlay. When you think that an iPad costs ten times as much and yet you are never really exposed to how the software on it really works, the Pi looks like incredible value, because unlike an iPad, the possibilities of what you can do with it with no investment except for a little time and learning are limitless.

Even better was that Rob told us that as from yesterday all Pis now have double the RAM and are made in the UK for the same price. Also, if you are worried about waiting lists, you can order a Pi today and have it delivered tomorrow from CPC Farnell.

The video conference was organised as part of Chelmsford's Ideas Festival and was hosted by Anglia Ruskin University.

Scratch classes in Chelmsford

A reminder that I'll be running some taster sessions on Scratch on the RaspberryPi at Changing Chelmsford's Ideas Festival in Chelmsford in Essex, UK on 18th and 19th October... Details here

MACME @ Bournemouth Uni

I'll be joining the lovely folk down at Bournemouth Uni where I am doing my PhD on the 20th September to give a quick talk about Practice-Research in the context of my PhD about inspiring kids to start coding.  The MA Creative & Media Education is an innovative masters course designed specifically for teachers and college lecturers, or those in relevant educational support and development roles.

It's early days for my Doctorate, so I'm hoping I have enough to share with them! Maybe next year (if I'm invited) I'll be able to share a little more with the students on this course, and I'm sure that actually, the folks on this course will be able to share more with me that I will with them.

I'll put my slides up shortly if anyone is interested.

Link to my slides here

Ideas Festival Scratch Classes

Stop Press!

I'll be running a series of workshops at the Chelmsford Ideas Festival 2012 in October 2012 in Chelmsford, a city in Essex, UK.

Why not come along and get involved in learning how to program computers using MIT's Scratch and App Inventor for Android phones. The classes are free, and you'll be able to take away anything you do if you bring a USB stick!

More details soon...

The good old days!

I loved this article over at the RegHardware. I used to love getting new programs in the back of magazines and typing them into my 1980's computer.  Even better was finding the bugs in the mag's code and writing into them pointing out the error of their ways.

http://www.reghardware.com/2012/04/27/retro_week_basic_instinct/

All we need to do now is bring back this homebrew culture to the bedrooms of the coders of the future. It can't be too hard can it?

Literature search & delightful learning toys

I've applied to do a PhD at a UK University, and am hoping to get accepted. The research would of course be centred around kids and computer programming. I think the real gap in the current research and thinking is around early years development, and perhaps reviving some of the work that we did at Ultralab in the late 90's with the EU-funded eTui project is particularly valuable.

To that end, I've contacted some old mates from the lab days and am hoping to track down at least one of the eTui prototypes which I think is currently living in the National Archive of Educational Computing. If anyone knows more, please contact me!

Even though I have no word on whether I'll be accepted to do the PhD, the literature search has already started.. I'll be dusting off the Seymour Papert for sure, and John (and Iram) Siraj-Blatchford's extensive work in this area will need reading too.

Exciting times!

http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Mindstorms.html?id=HhIEAgUfGHwC

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=zFkPmALV1iEC&ei=qfyDT7_SAaeizASusZ3kBQ

Neat tools you can use in the classroom part 2

The physical vs. the virtual

I've had great success (mainly through the work I have done with heppell.net at the BETT show) with some more 'hands on' resources that can help teach the fundaments of computer science. Diving straight into notepad and banging out some Javascript is all well and good, but you'll find that with younger learners especially, they'll respond much better to visual and physical feedback, and can struggle with the more abstract notion of writing, running and debugging code (even with visual programming languages).

Here are some of the things I've used:

1. Zeon Tech BigTrak

I love this toy! Originally a kid's plaything made by Milton Bradley the 1980s, it was re-released as an executive toy a couple of years back and is still available in toy shops and on eBay for £25-£35. The basic concept is this 'remote' controlled moonlander-esque vehicle is similar to the old logo turtle, but a lot more fun! BigTrak can basically drive forwards, and turn around and the movement in driven from a stored program that you enter on the keypad on the vehicle. Very simple commands like 'forward 3, turn 30, back 2' can be strung together to create a complete program. Consider strapping a pen to the back of it, putting it on a while board mounted on the floor and get the programmers to draw pre-defined shapes.

2. Unilab Decision module

Another 80s/90s classroom favourite and still used and available now in much updated form new. The picture above is of an original loaned to me by Professor Stephen Heppell, which I updated to USB power. Using a combination and AND, OR and NOT gates, learners can grasp the concepts of how inputs can change outputs using simple logic. You can then take these concepts and show how a computer 'thinks' fundamentally (or NOT). As with all these tools, it's very hands-on, very visual (and aural) and accessible, whilst teaching some valuable concepts about how computers are built.

3. Lego Mindstorms

Build it, program it, test it, share it and improve it. Lego Mindstorms is an exceptionally powerful construction kit that allows you to build machines, vehicles, robots and more and then share your creations with the Mindstorms community. The programming bit is taken care of with LABview - A visual programming language that has been around for as long as I have. The cute bit is that interfaces to Scratch or any of the accepted languages such as C and Java are also available, and this means the programming possibilities are as massive as the construction ones. The community that supports Mindstorms is active, and many schools have invested in it. Sadly, my experience has been one more of dusty boxes in cupboards than student-built vending machines serving hot coffee to school visitors! I've no doubt that with the right support and resources this can't be changed though.

4. Storyboarding

Like digital creativity projects, proper planning will mean learners achieve more and are more engaged with learning programming (The 5 Ps?). Storyboarding your programming challenges, especially where game creation is involved is far more successful than just rolling your sleeves up and going for broke in an IDE. Software development in the real world is going a lot more down the road of creating stories from which code can be written, and Agile methodologies and XP (extreme programming) advise the use of 'User stories' to capture requirements. The ide of structured English to help you transfer ideas into code has been around for ever, but take a Wikipedia tour beginning here to learn more.

That's it for now, I've got more tools and ideas to blog, but in the meantime, please feel free to comment and add your thoughts.

Neat tools you can use in the classroom part 1

A few people have asked me recently for what I'd recommend using to teach children computer science skills, and more specifically how to learn programming. These are also really good ways to get your skills up to scratch as an educator!

1: MIT Scratch - Not the first visual programming tool, but one of the best around now. Kids love it, it teaches the concepts of programming very well, but ultimately it is limited. So you could move onto...

2: Scratch BYOB - Berkley's offshoot of Scratch that allows you to access higher order functions and make scratch more like a modern OO Programming language. Better for older kids.

3: Alice - Alice and Storytelling Alice will take you onto an even higher level. This is a free (again) 3D programming environment that introduces learners to the more complex three dimensional design space and mimics production programming languages like C++ and Java. As Alice has been around a long time, lots of well-developed resources exist to help you out, and the visual, immediate nature of Alice helps keep learners engaged.

4: Python - "Learn to think like a computer scientist"! Python would appear at first as hardcore as any programming language. Certainly the way you create in it is just like the classic languages - you write your scripts in a text editor, and then run them to see the results. Except Python is really easy to work with and much more forgiving than C or its peers. The thing is, it hides massive power under the hood and you could create something as impressive as Facebook or eBay given the time and motivation. (4a would be Ruby on Rails, a great environment for creating Web apps, with the 'Rails' giving you structured support to do common Web stuff like logging in to a site without reinventing the wheel. Favoured by the RAD/Agile Web development industry)

.. to be continued (with some stuff to help teach the fundamentals)

BETT 2012 thoughts

So, the Code-Ed team are back from a successful and incredibly busy BETT 2012 show. We learnt lots, had even more fun and are now thoroughly knackered! I need to extend my thanks to the wonderful kids of Lampton School of Hounslow in West London. What a lovely and hard-working bunch they are! Also thanks to heppell.net, Panasonic, EMAP, Juliette, Stephen, Carole and Stephanie for supporting the project and being wonderful friends throughout the show. A review of the pedagogic findings will follow, and I'll also upload some Scratch projects that the Lampton lot did..

It's not all here!

Some of the work we are doing with Code-ed is on twitter - Code-Ed

On the Heppell.net stand

Posting on the go - here on the world famous Heppell.net stand "new worlds of learning" at the BETT educational trade show. Busy busy busy! (but fun)

BETT postcard

This is the cute little postcard we had on our stand at the BETT show telling the world what we were up to (which was teaching ten 11 year olds how to program in 4 days from scratch, using scratch!)

You can actually send the postcard to someone if you want...

Playing with Scratch and App Inventor

I've been spending a lot of time recently playing with two incredible tools provided by MIT. They are Scratch and App Inventor. Both are based around the idea of making computer programming easier to learn, by 'visualising' the syntax of programming, but keeping the idea of the logic, variables and operators so key to every modern programming language.

Scratch enables you to build beautiful little apps that run on a computer or a browser, (the latter being cleverly packaged up as Flash or Java) and is so accessible it's unreal.

In my mission to try and get kids programming as part of their ICT education, I think both of these tools are just what is needed. Certainly in other countries outside of the UK where I live, many educators and kids are producing wonderful stuff with them.

App Inventor is in a bit of a state of transformation right now and is not publicly accessible, so I'll give an update on that when it settles down, but essentially it takes a lot of the concepts of Scratch and puts them on your Android powered smartphone.