Dear All,
I have been charged with running the ICT stream of the Teach First Mind Games 2009. This is competition for Year 7-9 G&T students from schools across the country. The day will be split into 3 * 1 hour slots and I'm trying to think of how we could put together an interesting set of activities that would teach the children something and allow us to rank them along the lines of
- Integrity
- Excellence
- Collaboration
- Innovation
- Commitment
It is very important that the software and activities we run should be OSS so schools can take away the things learnt and children will be able to apply the skills they learn at home in their free time without having to pay license fees. At the moment I'm thinking of splitting the day into 3 modules, covering things such as Vector Graphic design with Inkscape, Music Making with Audacity, Programming with Guido van Robot or 3D animation with Blender. Or alternatively focusing on programming with 2 hours teaching the basics and the third focused on completing a task. Or something to do with code cracking, paper work then looking at computer solutions.
If you could think of any alternative sessions I could run or programs that you could recommend, that could be run in a competition then please reply to this thread. I'd be interested to know of similar events and how they went.
Thanks
Pete
PS. this will mean a new release of the OpenEducationDisc to give away on the day, so suggestions for that gratefully received.
Write assessment criteria for each of the 5 categories. (say 5 for each) . Ask each candidate to submit evidence against the criteria to community web pages either here or they could use the INGOT community web site, it's free. Get participants to vote on-line for what they think is the best in each category. This is how we got Otto the OpenOffice.org schools mascot. Kids all around the world designed mascots and voted on line. http://www.cafepress.com/nicuooo.14093252
Rather than having two graphics oriented things and bearing in mind what OFSTEDs "The importance of ICT" said about programming (lack of it being taught even though it is in the NC) Why not give them and intro to Python - plenty of free tutorials on the net, eg http://wiki.python.org/moin/SimplePrograms and ask them to program some simple interactive game or something.
I'd agree with Ian that programming would be absolutely ideal for a group like this.
There are some really interesting open source programming tools written with learners in mind around now, including:
All of the above hold true to the idea of children being in control of the computer, rather than the other way round, and, to a greater or lesser degree, have interfaces that children can learn through discovery. Be great to have these on the Open Disc! Python would work well too, but the learning curve might be a bit steeper and it perhaps takes longer to get impressive results.
Those interested in getting programming back into schools (or just seeing it get a bit more attention), might be interested in the Computing at Schools group, who have a conference coming up on Friday 19th June in Birmingham, at which Open Source Schools will be represented.
This may be of interest for python:
http://www.livewires.org.uk/python/home
I am going to suggest something that is not fully open source for once. But is very good and the resulting projects could be released as OSS.
Microsoft Robotics :-
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/bb483024.aspx
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Robotics_Studio
In relation to learning to program VS Studio allows some quite powerful programs to developed in c# which would teach object orientated programming with a c style syntax.
Some example lessons are http://www.programmersheaven.com/2/Les_CSharp_0.
All above software can be downloaded for free via https://www.dreamspark.com/
MIT are taking an interesting approach to teaching programming, starting students off on programming robots in Python:
http://pyrorobotics.org/
This is, seemingly, instead of the more traditional to teaching software development where you start off with small, self-contained systems where everything is documented and nothing can go wrong. MIT's undergraduate robotics course assumes that you will be programming using a bunch of half-documented APIs and that the stuff you tell the robots to do might or might not actually happen, you have to program in exception and error handling right from the start. Actually, lots of other undergraduate courses seem to be using Python too, it's just that MIT's switching from Scheme seems to have caused a fair bit of comment around the web.
Greenfoot has been mentioned above. Greenfoot is indeed ideal for this. Then again, I would say that - I am on the Greenfoot team... :)
But seriously, we have done very successful competitions with Greenfoot, and many very popular workshops with kids from about 14 years up with no programming experience. It works great. Kids really get to program, not just use applications. They can make a game from scratch in about two hours. It also integrated perfectly with graphics and sound production (like Audacity).
If you don't know what Greenfoot is, look at greenfoot.org and at http://www.greenfoot.org/book/ Look at the two sample chapters from the book site and you quickly get the idea.
I would be very happy to help or to advise if that was useful. Just send me an email if that is of interest (mik [at] kent [dot] ac [dot] uk).
Regards,
Michael Kölling
Thanks for all the suggestions, I have some serious mulling to do and i'll tell you what I decide to go with.
when is the event and how can we get pupils involved?