This week in the MOOC we were charged with reading and thinking about Powerful Ideas. We also tinkered with a Logo-like app called TurtleArt, which brings back the turtle geometry of Logo. You can read more about it in Turtle, Art, TurtleArt and see a gallery of images or download it at TurtleArt. For an oldie but goldie look at Logo, check out LogoWorks: Challenging Programs in Logo edited by Cynthia Solomon, Margaret Minsky and Brian Harvey.
Here’s my quick turtle art doodle, along with my reflections.
Enjoyed tinkering with Turtle Art, and appreciate that the makers of it wanted to bring back the turtle geometry of Logo. I LOVED Logo and thought it was an excellent playground for kids and adults. In fact, when I first started playing with Scratch, I used it to mimic Logo.
As for powerful ideas – it’s keeping PLAY alive, regardless of the age of the learner and regardless of the level of the learning. There is usually plenty of play in a lower school (elementary school), but the play gets sucked out of the school environment the higher up in the grade level the learner goes. It’s not just keeping PLAY alive in the learner’s life; it’s reigniting PLAY in the teacher’s life, as well.
The activity for session 3 of the MOOC: Create a Scratch project about things you like to do. The tough part was to make a decision about what to include! I decided that less is more.
Scratch projects are not embeddable, so here’s the link to mine:
Today the second session of Learning Creative Learning will take place. I will be at my school’s professional development day, which happens to be focused on Design Thinking for Educators, so will wind up watching the LCL session later this evening.
The final bit of pre-session prep was the The Marshmallow Challenge. I had seen the TED Talk awhile back, and immediately thought it would be interesting to do with a roomful of educators. Turns out that one of the second grade classes at my school did it this past fall!
The challenge specs for the MIT class are slightly different than the ones in the TED Talk, and I further changed them a bit for myself.
TED Talk specs: In eighteen minutes, teams must build the tallest free-standing structure out of 20 sticks of spaghetti, one yard of tape, one yard of string, and one marshmallow. The marshmallow needs to be on top.
MIT specs: Spaghetti, tape, string, marshmallow – Build an interesting freestanding structure. The entire marshmallow must be on top. Time limit: 18 minutes. (It is presumed that the material quantities remain the same as for the TED Talk specs.)
Laurie’s specs: With 20 sticks of spaghetti and as many marshmallows as needed from one bag, build an interesting freestanding structure in 18 minutes. (Notice the difference in materials used.)
I did my challenge yesterday afternoon.
In early April, I will be giving a talk to parents (same talk twice, once in the morning and once in the evening) about STEAM at school. STEAM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, the Arts, and Math. The bulk of the talk with not be a talk! Rather, it will be learning and doing and playing, and you probably already know where I’m going with this…yes, they will be doing my version of the marshmallow challenge.
A MOOC is quite a large “thing” – a conglomeration of people from around the world participating online in learning something. I’m not entirely clear how many are participating in MIT’s Learning Creative Learning, but about 24,000 folks have signed up. One of the ways the MOOC curators will have a sense of who is here/there is from the 30 second video introductions we’ve been encouraged to submit. Here’s my 8 second intro!
[After reading the preparatory materials for Session 2 of the Learning Creative Learning MOOC, particularly Seymour Papert's "Gears of My Childhood", we were asked to "write about an object from your childhood that interested and influenced you."]
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I wanted to take the door to my bedroom with me. It was plastered with pictures and cut-out words and letters and photos and memorabilia. When I left home, that door represented my life through elementary, junior and senior high school.
That visual potpourri overflowed both sides of the door to encompass the walls of my room, though I knew taking those walls along was not exactly feasible!
All of my interests as a kid were represented, floor to ceiling, either glued, tacked, pasted or written directly upon the walls: Collages. Newspaper headlines. Bits and pieces of this and that. The players of the Knicks & Mets teams of the late 1960s and early 1970s written in green marker. Souvenirs. Photographs. These vertical surfaces embraced my room with a scrapbook of my life, arranged by color, texture, timeliness, interest, and always by whatever available space I could find next.
I loved the process of creating layouts. I spent hours crafting birthday cards for family, experimenting with letter arrangements and doodling new letter forms.
My interest in the visual look of information followed me through as a copy editor for my high school newspaper and then for a magazine in college. One of my early jobs was working for a printer, back when letterpress printing was a typical way to mass produce print media. We shared office space with a graphics company where I was able to dabble in layout and design, giving me the impetus to take classes at the School of Visual Arts.
To this day, my brain gravitates to patterns: the visual look of printed material or digital posts, objects on the fireplace mantel, plants on the windowsill; patterns in the piano music I play; patterns in the built world around us; nature’s patterns; patterns of thinking – how does our brain work – and patterns of living – how do our bodies and our brains age.
Thanks, Mom and Dad, for the freedom to do unto those walls and door as I saw fit!
P.S. I teach. Part of what that entails is designing curriculum, be it for school or for yoga sessions I’ve led. In that design process, I’m always considering patterns, be they stretched out over a year or just over one class.
I am taking my first ever MOOC! That’s a Massively Open Online Course. And the course I’m taking is MIT’s Learning Creative Learning. I am a huge fan of Mitch Resnick and Scratch, so when this course was advertised and I saw it was offered by the MIT Media Lab, it was a quick and easy decision to participate. Plus I wanted to experience participating in a MOOC.
The course has begun, and I am going to post my written responses here. (Other responses will be Scratch programs, so the best I’ll be able to do is provide a link to them.) Below is my post to the lcl-417 Google Group – my smaller group of some 12 folks, carved out of the massive course group of a few thousand.
This Week in LCL: Particularly enjoyed reading Joi Ito’s blog posts.
Months prior to this MOOC, I had watched a video of Joi speaking and had read about his appointment to the Media Lab. What fascinated me then, as with now, was his background, and his approach to formal education. He did what worked best for him, yet it turns out that approach may very well be a good path for a multitude of students just setting out from high school.
I think of the spiral path to formal education that my husband, my two sons, and I have each taken. Long ago I concluded that the straight arrow from high school to college, a process which was the norm when I was a kid, is not necessarily the best path to learning.
Joi may first strike folks as being particularly unusual or creative or self-motivated. And indeed, not everyone following a similar path is going to wind up in an equivalent position! However, pursuing a path that makes sense for the individual may likely lead to a position of creative and productive satisfaction. And that, I believe, is the whole point.
It’s 2:03 in the morning. Not exactly my regular blogging time, but then I haven’t been blogging regularly for the past year.
If it’s time for sleeping, but I’m not able to sleep, it may as well be time for changing the look of my blog. And time for asking Posterous for backups of my Posterous blogs.
There will definitely be a bit of fine-tuning needed to synch this look with text descriptions that are no longer accurate, and that will happen gradually over the next few weeks. Okay, maybe over the next few months. (I’m trying to be realistic!)
For now, I’ve been up for a solid 90 minutes and counting, and it’s time to head back to bed!
Enjoyed tinkering with Turtle Art, and appreciate that the makers of it wanted to bring back the turtle geometry of Logo. I LOVED Logo and thought it was an excellent playground for kids and adults. In fact, when I first started playing with Scratch, I used it to mimic Logo.
