What am I studying for the next two years?

I got asked for my Ph.D elevator pitch the other day when talking with colleagues at CEMP:


So what is mine? Well, the idea is to evolve an artefact (artifact for my American chums) that allows us to research really young children's (think pre-school, pre-notational) understanding of computer science before they come slamming up against it in the National Curriculum.  Teachers are worried enough about teaching it, and although we know children can understand it (think back to Papert in 1980), who's helping them to show their understanding?  Now I'm not proposing that toddlers will be banging out a few hundred lines of Ruby on Rail between episodes of Peppa Pig, but it would make their teacher's lives a bit easier if they knew what a greater than or less than did when playing with their toys before they're asked to explain an algorithm at age seven.

The really exciting bit is how we capture and synthesise the data.  Think pattern and colour matching and smartphone cameras (or Google Glass?!) which sets up an interactive 'code play' area where the children's toys (or even themselves) become part of the program. Watching and recording their learning and then recognising their learning styles could be immensely powerful and insightful.  Back many years ago, we used to let children program themselves by putting a cardboard box over their heads.  The amazing thing was how much more careful, considered and cognitive their play became - after all  you don't want to send your sister stumbling into the village pond, no matter how much you think she eats spiders.

Ph.D Progress!

My doctorate at CEMP in Bournemouth seems to be gathering momentum.  I've just handed in my initial review which is a great milestone to get out of the way, and my supervisors seem happy.  The last month was more of a headache than the previous months as I went round in circles (infinite loops) with methodology and research methods.  It seems some doctoral students take to this side of their Ph.D easier than others, and I didn't take to it that easily if I'm honest.  It's one of those things that you spend hours reading, writing, iterating (that sounds like action inquiry doesn't it?) and end up with far too much stuff, which your supervisors then ask you to rip back to the bones.  I spose 'growing up' at Ultralab always stuck me in a mentality of wanting and trying to be ahead of the curve, whereas this part of my studies involves grounding myself in existing research.

One of the best things about my studies so far has been working with and talking to my fellow students at CEMP.  What a bright bunch they are - no wonder many of them are wondering what to do post doctoral study, they've all loved doing their research so much.

DronePhone

So there I was, thinking out loud with my mate at Makerspace, RichardR about what you could do with a Parrot AR.Drone that might teach kids something.  The brief was brief (aren't all the best ones?) - we need to have a more 'active' computer science activity to engage our knowledge hungry local cub scouts, as they love running around and doing things.  We've got a Parrot AR.Drone (The BananaDrone) and another on the way, and we've all got phones.  We want to get a GPS chip for the Drone, so what about if the cubs went outside to the big field behind their scout hut (also home of Makerspace), plotted some kind of route on their phones, upload it somehow to the Drone which will then follow the route. After all, all cubs love a bit of pathfinding!

The missing link is the thing that transfers the route from the phone to Drone, but that can't be hard can it? Between myself, the cubs and the makerspace folk, we should be able to do it in an evening I reckon.

Activities like these are great for kids because it teaches them how you'd program a device (you create the program by walking around, and the program needs to make sense at the very least), and then install that program into the memory of the thing that then runs the program.  There is a bit of a challenge to it, and some anxiousness as you watch it act out your instructions.  it's like BigTrak, but flying and very much in the 21st Century, using the latest technology.

Once the cubs (or other kids) have done the routing and flying bit, we can sit down and show them how the simple program that transfers the instructions between the devices works, and hopefully teach them a bit of programming along the way.  If you've got some less technically-inspired kids, then the fact this is a physical and fun activity should still engage them with the task.

The above concept and the BananaDrone is very much the approach I think you need to take to teach kids computer science in the 'teenies' - it's fun, realtime, technically bang up to date and it has that tiny bit of danger/doubt that all good hacking should have...

We'll get some code up once it's written ;-)

(Oh, and when I get my AR.Drone GPS module - hopefully I'll get one very soon)

Learning Together at the BETT show

Firstly, sorry for the delay since the event and me writing about it.  In a round about way, this blog serves as a bit of a life story of my PhD and anything I do practically I blog about.  When I start writing in anger, I can look back and see what I've learnt as time has progressed and my viewpoint has changed.  As I start doing more practical research, hopefully this blog will become more heavily populated with posts and become a bit of a reflective research diary.  At least that's the plan anyway!  The reason for the delay is that I've been deep in reading, and planning out my methodological approach and conceptual models.  It's been a tricky time as I keep going round in circles and to top it off, it's a new term so I've been busy preparing my teaching.  there is no time like the present though  so here is a quick write up of what I did at BETT.


Anyway, I was grateful to my supervisor Stephen for letting me loose on some willing and (very capable) young students from around the world who wanted to learn more about computer programming.  The setting for this, was again at the BETT Educational Tradeshow, which has moved this year to the ExCel centre in East London from Olympia in West London. It's a cracking venue, but not without its challenges when working with children and technology (for instance GPS and WiFi are completely non-functional in the massive metal hall).  So much has happened in the year since I did this last time - for instance - the Raspberry Pi came into existence - an educational computer, designed and made in the UK and available to purchase for less than £20, the English Baccalaureate was proposed (with a Comp Sci element) and then was scrapped before it came into being, UK primary and secondary schools became enthused about Comp Sci then ran off with their tails between their legs saying teachers needed too much upskilling (they don't), and I started my PhD with Bournemouth Uni to try and make a contribution academically in this area!

So, what did we do at BETT? Well, the idea was that the show's central stand was themed around 'Learning Together', with a special focus on making and STEM subjects.  Four schools and a community educational group had provided willing students from 9-18 who wanted to learn about and share what they had learnt on the stand.  I was there to provide some projects and supervision for the students.  A number of projects were dreamt up (mainly in my hotel room), and what I wanted to try and do was see how the children's creativity could produce some really interesting outputs.  I also wanted to see if a more physical, touchy-feely approach would engage the creators more than just sitting in front of a computer and banging out some code.  My hunch is that something physical can teach the core elements of virtual creation (i.e. coding) quicker and better than actually coding itself.  Remember, I'm only trying to see if we can teach some of the elements that would prepare you to understand programming/Computer Science.  If I wanted to have a polished app as an output, I'd use code and an IDE of course, and so should the kids.

So, the best approach was going to be offer a range of activities, and compare the enjoyment, outputs and engagement of the different activities.  I didn't really want this to be an experiment as such, but rather to try and prove my hunch.

So what did we do?  Well, the following activities were very much enjoyed by myself and the kids on the stand:

• Learn Programming with Scratch
• Learn (a bit more) Programming with Python
• Make a fruit based controller or musical instrument with a MakeyMakey kit
• Control an RC car with JavaScript
• Count in Binary using real people (with 1s and 0s on their T-Shirts)
• Control a Parrot AR.Drone with a Raspberry Pi
• Use people to complete a circuit with a MakeyMakey kit

All of these were tried by at least one group of students, and each one was LOTS of fun for both me and the participants.  In terms of proving my hunch, as it happened all of these activities were enjoyed, but engagement was certainly higher with the more physical tasks.  It wasn't really that scientific if I'm honest as there were other variables present (for instance some of the boys love cars, so the car task was really interesting for them).  Then again, did it need to be scientific? This was a qualitative study, but perhaps there were too many variables here to really prove that much, and I was too distracted sometimes trying to supervise the students to take enough notes.  As I said before, I'm not far enough down my PhD to be doing the research in anger yet, but it is helping inform my research design, and my understanding of what students and teachers need to be able to do this stuff in schools and pre-school.

Oh, and as a side-note, my group of older researchers decided that combining the MakeyMakey and AR.Drone was too tempting - check out the AWESOME video here.

Scratch Event at SET

I promised those who came to my Scratch event at SET that I'd upload my slides and provide some resources.

Useful Scratch resources:

Scratch.ie (Lesson plans)
Scratch Ed
Learn Scratch videos (Check out Simon's other videos)
Mitch Resnick on Scratch

Resources from the day:
My presentation (Powerpoint)
Question asking Cat (Scratch Project)
Maths Cat (Scratch Project)

BETT 2013

More news - I'll be at the BETT show again this year with heppell.net.  BETT is an educational technology trade show held every year, and I've been going on and off for about 10 years now.  The plan is to work with school children from Spain, Hounslow in London and Chelmsford in Essex and let their creativity go mad with a bunch of different technology focussed exercises.  It's all a bit of a secret, but expect to see toys like Parrot AR.Drones being hacked, Raspberry Pis being pushed to the limits of their capabilities and the kids getting a lot more engaged with things like programming than they ever thought possible!  I've even got a Makey Makey kit so hopefully we can do silly stuff with bananas and oranges.. ;-)  More soon!

Event in Southend with SET 25th Jan 2013

Just a quick note to say I'm running an event tomorrow in Southend-on-Sea, Essex showing teachers how to get the best out of MIT's Scratch software.  The aim is to bring the teachers up to speed so they can start using it (more successfully  in the classroom.  I will post my slides and resources up on my Blog after the event.