Month: February 2017

Specs for learning platform

Mary-Ann HorleyLeave a comment

Objectives of the platform

  • To create empowerment through making things to improve ones environment
  • To encourage confidence and mastery in computational thinking
  • To give people a starting point in situations where they see the value but don’t know where to start

Essential

  • A route or routes through the available resources
  • Ability to upload or embed user generated content (UGC)
  • Log in system
  • Awarding of points for UGC
  • Visual progress indicators
  • Design that resonates with 11-16 year olds
  • Badges
  • OpenBadge compatible badges

Nice to have

  • Ability to export PDF progress reports
  • Ability to use the same IA for different computing platforms e.g. Arduino
  • Awarding of points for UGC on different services e.g. Stack Exchange, GitHub
  • Automatic updating of content as the official version is updated
Specs for learning platform

Assessment

Mary-Ann HorleyLeave a comment
  • Users are awarded points for doing tasks within a sequence
  • Encourage users to answer questions from other users, this can be one of the tasks that points get awarded for
  • Points = Badges

Tasks

  • Asking questions
  • Answering questions
  • Uploading photos of projects
  • Uploading code
  • Commenting on content
  • Commenting on other people’s content

Does it matter if it’s any good?

Mitra’s “method of the grandmother” was enough to increase scores of children learning in a self-directed way – i.e. Standing there and being encouraging.

“I said, “I’ll tell you what. Use the method of the grandmother.”

So she says, “What’s that?”

I said, “Stand behind them. Whenever they do anything, you just say, ‘Well, wow, I mean, how did you do that? What’s the next page? Gosh, when I was your age, I could have never done that.’ You know what grannies do.”

So she did that for two more months. The scores jumped to 50 percent. Kallikuppam had caught up with my control school in New Delhi, a rich private school with a trained biotechnology teacher. When I saw that graph I knew there is a way to level the playing field.”

The principle is rewarding the activities that lead to learning as learning doesn’t happen in a linear fashion and a defined time.

Assessment

Content Mapping

Mary-Ann HorleyLeave a comment

Mapping the content available on the Raspberry Pi website made it possible to see connections and to design the structure of the platform further.

I also looked at the entire content on GitHub and it’s in separate repositories, but if I can download or fork them in bulk then using a GitHub-based CMS like Jekyll may be worth doing and save time.

To plan what to do with the content and to start to work on navigation I needed to audit it, to look at the structures and the different attributes and connections.

I also needed to look at how the official curriculum relates to the rest of the content available, and I created a database in Airtable to list a cross-section of the learning content. I started by listing the title, URL and an excerpt and giving everything one or more tags. From listing the tags themes and patterns started to emerge. I also added the ideas from the curriculum to the main Activities table, with the different areas and levels in their own tables.

After doing this I could tell that the content could be grouped in a couple of different dimensions. The curriculum uses the areas Design, Programming, Physical Computing, Manufacture, and Community and Sharing. I also think there should be an area in my platform called Setup as I have found getting your equipment to work the way you want to be a big roadblock for beginning makers.

The curriculum uses four levels of complexity, which in order are:

  1. Creator
  2. Builder
  3. Developer
  4. Maker

From doing the content audit I identified several major themes too, for example Weather, Space, Gaming and Pets. Weather and Space are particularly well-populated because there have been distinct hardware initiatives from the Foundation, and several areas have the scope to have a track using the block-based children’s programming language Scratch or the mainstream language Python.

There are quite a few different types of content on the website. I have defined the following:

  • Guide – these are overviews of a particular topic
  • Tip – short pieces of advice
  • Help – troubleshooting type content
  • Getting Started – introductory activities on a particular concept or piece of hardware or software
  • Activity – further activities on one or more themes
  • Idea – a suggestion with no further content which a user needs to plan and carry out themselves

From this I envisage having many sequences in the following form:

New-Mind-Map

Content Mapping

Unschooling links and quotes

Mary-Ann HorleyLeave a comment

On the wildness of children – “our schools still embody the fear of children’s “wildness:”  the fear that without constant control, constant measurement, and the constant threat of punishment, they will “run wild,” fail to learn, become anti-social, harm themselves or others, become incompetent, helpless adults.”

Peter Gray on The Gardener and The Carpenter – “Gopnik describes research showing that deliberate teaching can, at least sometimes, reduce the amount that children learn about an object, because the teaching tends to inhibit them from exploring the object themselves and thereby prevents them from learning any more about it than what the teacher had pointed out.”

The foundations of unschooling – “Finding a mentor, teacher, class, book, Internet site, or person who can explain or help our children do what they want to know is not that hard nor does it require a degree in education. Any parent can do this if they want to, and you will get better at it the more you ask. Eventually, your children will be doing it on their own, getting their own books out of the library, asking to take lessons or do travel, because you have modelled this behaviour for them. You help your children learn about how to navigate the world by doing your learning in front of them.”

Unschooling links and quotes