Learn to Program - Starting with Scratch and Minecraft

Last week, my sixth-grade son and his classmates were asked by their science teacher to design a program in Scratch (a beginning programming language developed by MIT) that depicted the water cycle. When he was in the fourth grade, I introduced my son to Scratch, and he has played around with it occasionally over the past two years. He and his classmates had fun with the project, and even those who were totally unfamiliar with it learned some basics of programming.

Yesterday, my son downloaded a new "protocol" into Minecraft. Like many boys his age, Minecraft has become the first thing that he turns to on the weekends.  Along with playing on Minecraft with other folks, my son is in the process of creating his own city that is really pretty complex.  While he was engaged in his city planning, I asked him if he had been able to transfer any skills from his extensive Minecraft experience to Scratch.   Here is his off-the-top-of-his-head response, without looking up from his laptop:

• 3-D modeling
• coordinate grids 
• I can go in and change the code a little to make it do what I want. 

I don’t think anyone would consider my son a computer geek.  He plays sports after school; he practices piano; he has sleep-overs with friends, he reads the Sunday comics; he occasionally washes his mom's car; he eats constantly; and he programs a little.  In the future, my son may decide to study and learn more sophisticated programming, or he may not. The important thing is that he knows that he can, and coding is not some mysterious operation that only geniuses can accomplish. He can do it; anyone can do it; everyone should.

 

Boys and Reading

I used to listen to NPR on the twenty-minute ride into school every morning.  Now, the minivan speeds along in total silence as my sixth and second-grade sons read in the back seat.  I feel lucky that both my boys love to read, but I think there is more to it than luck.

I know that I do a lot wrong as a father of two boys.  I feel a little guilty about not teaching my oldest son how to throw a perfect spiral and about using a little too much sarcasm at the dinner table, but I do feel pretty good about encouraging them to love reading.  Since they were babies, I have been an active reader to my boys, and now that they are older, we read together almost every night.  It has become our time together to relax in the evening.  For the last year, we have been reading classics almost exclusively.  Treasure Island, Swiss Family Robinson, King Arthur, and Sherlock Holmes have been our evening fare, and we all look forward to this time whether it is fifteen minutes or an hour.  

I have been amazed at how my eight-year-old can pick up the general plot lines of a Sherlock Holmes story.  He has learned to keep his questions to a minimum and attempt to figure out the vocabulary and complex mysteries on his own.  A couple of weeks ago, we had an extended conversation about why Sherlock would want to take a seven-percent solution of cocaine as a remedy to boredom.  Last night, they learned a little about the KKK as we finished “The Five Orange Pips.”

Reading together also gives us a common experience and vocabulary.  As my oldest son gets deeper into the middle school years and seeks more privacy, I know that I will always have something to talk with him about.  When we have difficulty expressing our emotions to each other, we still get to share a part of our lives every night.  I hope that this bond will be something that he can count on when the world goes topsy-turvy.

I know that lots of dads find this same connection with their sons through sports, and I’m certainly not knocking that time together.  I’m sure that I could learn something about parenting from them.  But when the backseat is quiet in the mornings, I continue to smile to myself knowing that my sons are imagining themselves in a world far removed from the traffic of Interstate 40.

Shadow Testing

I spend way too much time thinking about standardized testing.  Part of the reason why is because the state administered End of Grade tests became a large part of my life when I worked at a local public middle school.  During my last few years working in this school, I witnessed curricular decisions, faculty management decisions, programming decisions, professional development decisions, resource decisions, and scheduling decisions that were made only to optimize performance on the End of Grade tests -- principally the math and language arts tests which were the only EOGs given at that time.  To some degree, students ceased to be students and became percentages within categories.  I do not fault the dedicated teachers or administrators who made these decisions; they were simply playing by the rules that had been placed upon them.  However, I chose not to play by those rules any more.

I really want to see value in standardized achievement tests.  I want to look at them as the great equalizer -- objective, egalitarian instruments that don’t care if you are one percenter or on welfare.  I want them to be the provider of opportunity and the leveler of the playing field.  The problem is that in their effort to be objective, the tests must ignore the most valuable parts of being human.  They must measure things that are measurable, when, in fact, this treats our children as one-dimensional shadows and ignores their humanity.

For years I have read articles and had people tell me what standardized tests measure.  I’m not sure whether to believe them or not, but I do know what they don’t measure.  They don’t measure the most important qualities and skills that we should value in our young people. They don’t measure someone’s ability to create -- to make something of value that hasn’t been thought of or done before.  They don’t measure a persons ability to solve a novel problem by working with others.  They don’t measure the ability to form and maintain relationships.   They don’t measure a person’s ability to reflect on and evaluate their own place in the world.  They don’t measure a person’s honesty and integrity.  They don’t measure physical abilities.  They don’t measure how a child interacts with the natural world.  They don’t measure if someone can express emotion and feeling through the visual and performing arts.  They don’t measure a child’s happiness.  Truthfully, they only measure a very small part of a person, yet we have built our country’s education system as a response to these tests.  How can we look at a child in such narrow terms and think we are doing the best for her?

Exploring Artificial Intelligence

These two videos are resources from the fourth week of the MOOC Course, ELearning and Digital Cultures. They portray artificial intelligence in humanistic terms. Other than being entertaining, thinking about the videos has stretched and pushed my vision of what  interactions between humans and machines may look like.

In terms of education, it makes me believe that we need to extend the dialogue that we have with students beyond just the best ways to use technology and explore the moral implications of how we interact with technology.  Starting those discussions today with students is a wise thing, and I believe that students will be very engaged in the conversation.

I really hope that you will take the time to watch these.  They each take around eight minutes, but they are entertaining and provocative.