Sugar Beets

Today I had fifth graders and was curious to try out something new. I split up the 2 hours course into one hour of Turtle Art followed by one hour to create Memory games.

In my introduction course into turtle art I make use of following geometrical figures: a square and a circle. So before starting to work with the computers I repeat the preferences of a square (four equal sides and four equal angles (90 degree angles, or right angles) and of a circle (full circle 360 degree and a quarter circle 90 degree). Then I let them start the computer and TurtleArt (Interesting - several of the kids thought that the activity TurtleArt icon was an alarm clock). I explain briefly that the turtle is a pen they can draw with by using programming blocks.

First, I show the students how to instruct the turtle to move forward N steps.

Then how the turtle can turn the direction. Starting from 90 degrees then changing the value to 45 degrees. Here one can go back to the discussion of the circle and how many times I have to click on the programming block that the turtle does a full circle. Often, I see the kids having issues to understand that the turtle does turn without moving forward.

Then I want everyone to draw a square using the two instructions, “go forward” and “turn right”.

The transfer part of this exercise is to draw an octogon.

The concept of loops I introduce with the words: “Programmers are lazy people, and we always try to let the computer do the work. Instead of clicking 4 times on the instruction box, one can use a loop to get the work done.”

And for the transfer the octogon.

Let’s go one step further and combine two loops. In the next program we have an inner and and outer loop. The inner loop is still the same from the previous exercise. After drawing a square or octogon we turn the turtle by 10 degrees. To do a full circle we need to do that 36 times. The outer loop does do the inner one 36 times.

To make things more colorful, one can change the color after drawing an object. The color value can be the current direction, which works nicely in this example.

The students did follow quite well and repeated the examples I showed. I did let some time for manipulating the examples and let them try by themselves. Some really nice pictures were the result.

Pretty impressive how far one can get in one hour with turtle art. The class teacher explained me that the kids would learn circle and radius this semester. I think we had a great first introduction into geometry in that one hour course. The students did get the concepts really well and all in all I think they had some fun too.

Today I introduced a class of 4th grade students to the Sugar platform. Creating memorize games was topic of this session, as well.

I explained to the kids that we would use the milkmoon search engine instead of the google one. This worked for some of the kids fine (search: Pokemon, Katze…). For some search items (e.g. Pferd) the search engine returned a blank page. And some of the search items like “Hertha BSC” a german football club or the “Winx club” a kid’s cartoon did not return any result. So some of the kids I did let use google to get their pictures for the memory game.

Paint
As I introduced paint at the beginning of the lesson many kids did choose to paint pictures as well. They like the form (star, heart etc) tool. With paint I had several observations:

- Many kids had problems to find the color chooser. We have to switch to the new color chooser already available in Write.

- It is hard for the kid to differ between the shape and the filling color. It is not really possible to have both the exact same color.

- The reset to blank page was hard to find, maybe this gets easier with the new toolbar design

- It would be nice to have a crop to selection method

- we should make the selection with fixed ratio option present in the UI

- there is no text size available

- when kids use the fill bucket tool too heavily, the activity can get unresponsive

Memorize
The main issue with Memorize is, as Caroline and her team pointed already out, the separation between the play and edit mode. It is a bit cumbersome for the kids to save in the edit mode and load again in the play mode. For the toolbar redesign we need to rethink this interaction anyhow. I will keep this issue in mind when doing so.

Furthermore, there is no way to clear an entry in the add box. A little ‘-’ right to the entry like for each pair would be a solution.

Last but not least, the audio part is not fully functional. After adding a sound you can not listen to it again. Only in the play mode.

More findings tomorrow.

Today was my first day of a 4 day teaching marathon with Sugar in a primary school in Berlin. I have a different class each day. 8-10 I have the first half of the class, about 14 kids, then the second half from 10-12. There are 4th, 5th and 6th grade classes.

As an introduction into Sugar I like to do the creating of Memory games. This is a fun task for everyone to do and involves the use of several activities: Paint, Browse to download images and sounds, Record to capture pictures and sounds and of course Memorize itself. Several peripheries, audio input, camera input, audio output. They make extensive use of the Journal as well. I use Fedora 11 and a ‘customized’ Sugar 0.84 for the course.

Experiences from today:

1) Google images is not appropriate for finding pictures, for young kids! A too high percentage of the content is sexual or simply rotten. An alternative is the kid’s search engine Blinde Kuh. Though, I find it a bit hard to use for image searching. The engine milkmoon works better for those purposes. I will see how far we can get with this tomorrow. And I will animate the kids to create content in Paint. For example someone created flags in paint today, quite cool.

2) Sound: People are visual! Not so many kids want to choose to work with sounds. They like to play the sound example in memorize, though. Maybe they think it is too hard? For my class I have uploaded a few sound files from the excellent olpc sound bank. Unfortunately, the bank is not as easy to browse when one is looking for a specific sound. There is a big archive at tierstimmen.org, but I only found mp3’s so far.

3) Annoying “Naming Alert”: As much as I am a friend of highlighting the naming, tagging and description purposes, I don’t think the alert is a good way to ‘enforce’ this. I think those actions are not first class ones. I am happy when the kids understood the concept of the Journal a bit, but they will not start to make better descriptions in the first Sugar days or weeks, with or without the alert. For now, it is just a confusing dialog that pops up when you close an activity. And later, once the kids would know about the importance they would be better served with other tools. For example an option in the activity toolbar (like we have for the title already). From my experience I highly recommend to remove the alert, +1 when for 0.86 already.

4) Spell-Checker: Many kids have spelling difficulties. I would like to see this added as an overall tool to the platform (frame device or similar, like Sayamindu suggested for the translate one as well). The thing is, I do not want to make it too easy. If it is too easy, the kids will just rely on it, and do not think about the correct spelling themselves, and then are unable to spell the word without Sugar. Maybe a gratification system would be a good solution. For example, if I type in a word and I get it right (so mainly to verify that it is correct) I could get a point into the Journal (using good old Bubble-Bubblo-fruit-style-coins for example).

More infos from the field tomorrow.