Tek4L

Well my sons had a great time last year getting stuck into Scratch, so I thought it might be worth moving them up another level to a more fully blown game development environment

http://www.microsoft.com/express/gamedevelopment/

Our first problem was our graphics card was not up to scratch, so having replaced that just before xmas we are now all set to get started in the new year.

We are going to use the c# version rather than c++. It is a major learning curve compared to Scratch, so it will be interesting to see how they get on. I will keep you posted.

I posted a few weeks ago about Scratch from MIT. I introduced it to my sons and it has been a real hit. Not only have they been self motivated to learn all the ins and outs of it, but they have also organised some lunch time sessions at school to teach other kids how to use it. The first sessions were so popular there were not enough laptops to go around. They have had to limit numbers and have promised to run more sessions next term for those that missed out.

Combined with this, the online scratch community is providing lots of examples for them to download and learn from, as well as feedback on the projects that they upload.

No offence to their teachers, but it has been the most active and engaging learning experience they have had this year, and it has only involved about 15 minutes input on my part.

In Derek’s recent post about the launch of the Nelson Loop he wonders about the danger of under-estimating the ongoing costs of sustaining such networks. The problems he outlines don’t just apply to the introduction of high speed loops, but to the sustainability of IT infrastructure in schools in general, particularly at the primary school level.

I was talking to a principal from one of our local schools recently about this, who had three very profitable years in an ICT cluster and now has some decent network infrastructure in place, good ratio of laptops to teachers/pupils, etc. but is struggling to employ technical support in order to maintain it, both due to a lack of funds and a lack of availability of technical staff - who at present are in high demand in the commercial sector.

There would be no point adding a connection to a high speed loop on top of this without building in the ongoing technical support.

I think there are some solutions, and the cluster concept is one of them, with pooled technical resources serving a number of schools in a district. I know some schools already do this, but perhaps it is time for some sort of centrally planned/funded model. I think the introduction of high speed loops also needs to be seen as an opportunity to rationalise some of the basic application infrastructure. There is so much duplication of effort around such simple things as setting up and maintaining school websites. This sort of thing could be easily pulled back into a single central server.

As always though money is the big question - but perhaps if the Ministry drops MS Office licenses for PCs like they have done for Macs already they might at least have a bit of a seed fund to get things going

It has been around for a while, but if you haven’t seen it already, and have young learners interested in computers then Scratch is a must have. It is a visual programming environment specifically designed to introduce children to programming concepts, and the people at MIT have done a fantastic job in my view.

As they say, “the proof of the pudding is in the eating”, and so I introduced Scratch to my 10 and 12 year old sons a couple of weeks ago and they have taken to it like ducks to water. With very little prompting from me they have picked up the basic concepts of variables, loops, etc.

I see now they also have a ‘Scratch board’ available that plugs into a USB port and enables you to add external inputs to your program - guess what will be high on the birthday present list if the boys see that!

In my view anybody teaching primary school maths at the 10-12 year old level should look seriously at introducing Scratch to help with teaching concepts of algebra, etc. As is stated in the Scratch info

“They also gain an understanding of important mathematical concepts such as coordinates, variables, and random numbers. Significantly, students learn these concepts in a meaningful and motivating context. When students learn about variables in traditional algebra classes, they usually feel little personal connection to the concept. But when they learn about variables in the context of Scratch, they can use variables immediately in very meaningful ways: to control the speed of
an animation, or to keep track of the score in a game they are creating.”

“Well done” to the folks at MIT that have developed this and made it available.

The beginning of the end for the industrial schooling system?

Knowsley Council in Merseyside, has abolished the use of the word school to describe secondary education in the borough. It is taking the dramatic step of closing all of its eleven existing secondary schools by 2009. As part of a £150m government-backed rebuilding programme, they will reopen as seven state-of-the-art, round-the-clock, learning centres 

This is a developement that will be worth keeping an eye on.

http://www.popfly.ms/

Microsoft’s answer to Yahoo pipes. It is done using their new silverlight app so is much more drag and drop/flash like than pipes.

Stumbled across this project from JISC

http://www.xcri.org/ 

Which may be worth looking at it relation to the virtual learning network here in NZ, which acts as a broker/aggregator for courses available in New Zealand secondary schools.

There has just been a bit of a debate on a New Zealand email list for IT people in Schools. It centred around a ministry decision to fund MS Office for schools. One side of the argument says they have to do it because students need to be taught the applications they are going to encounter in the work force - the other side says the money could be better spent elsewhere as there are perfectly usable open source office applications.

I go with the second one. I hate to think how much the Ministry is paying MS for Office lincenses for all schools, but however much it is they would be better off putting it towards paying for technical support to backup a roleout of Open Office. I imagine that for the same price as MS Office they could imploy a full time help desk person in each of our main centres just to take Open Office enquiries.

The argument about students needing to be taught the applications that they will encounter in industry is a nonsense. For a start the chances of them encountering the same version of the same app on the same OS is limited anyway, and secondly schools should be teaching concepts and IT nouse, not step by step instruction on specific apps. If somebody has a good understanding of IT concepts and a bit of nouse then they will quickly pick up any application that is thrown in front of them.

http://www.henryjenkins.org/2007/02/from_youtube_to_youniversity.html

Worth a read.