Teaching Kids To Code part 1: A Brief History Of (My) Time

There is a nice section in our otherwise dysfunctional report card that assesses the following:

Problem Solving:  Analyzes problems; determine, select, and use a variety of strategies and procedures to find solutions; applies previous strategies to new situations; uses technology, including calculators, to develop mathematical concepts

Reasoning & Proof:  Draws logical conclusions; review sand refines assumptions and steps used in drawing conclusions; follows a logical argument and judges its validity; justifies and explains solutions to problems using manipulatives/models.

Communication & Representation:  Uses inquiry to solve problems; uses oral, verbal and written formats to represent and communicate mathematical ideas; uses mathematical language in explanations of strategies or procedures used

Unfortunately this seems to be arbitrarily placed in the math section of the report card (and there's that weird section about using a calculator as a problem solving skill), and it's not fully defined how we should assess these process strands. I think when these strands were created the assumption was that math word problems would be the primary method of assessment. I've been focused on alternative ways to assess these skills. One of these ways has been through programming.

Outside of my school in the Kathmandu Valley, there's been a big push the past couple of years to teach everyone- you, me, this guy....

... to code. And although I'm not a New Yorkianer and could care less about big barrels of soda, I'll just throw this into the mix:

There are lots of voices saying we should learn to code, but they differ on the "why." Take Codedemy's convoluted mission statement:

We're committed to building the best learning experience inside and out, making Codecademy the best place for our team to learn, teach, and create the online learning experience of the future... We do not want to open up universities. We want to open up knowledge... Education is broken. Come help us build the education the world deserves.

That's mission makes my eyes bleed.  I have a better idea of what's going on from the name "Codecademy" than from the five paragraph cacophony on their about page. But probably what they meant to say is that learning to code helps you become a better problem solver. Here are some other reasons thrown hitherto forthwith: It lets you be creative, it focuses the brain, it's fun, it lets you be interactive with the tools you use as opposed to being a passive sponge. All great reasons, and a similar list can be found when wanting to know why it's important to learn how to juggle.

But where's the push to juggle in the classroom?

So is the push to code a fad? Estonia at least seems to be in it for the long haul. Curiously, my interest in coding over the last 20 years has closely resembled my interest in eating Guinean rice and sauce over a two year period:

And there is a personal connection between programming and rice binging/purging. Let's begin:

A Brief History of (My) Time
As a freshman at the University of Kansas, I had no idea what to major in. I know that I thought of myself as some sort of liberal arts student. I was an advanced reader throughout my education, I loved to think about big ideas and ancient mythologies, and I loved to write. In fact, from third grade to eight grade, I was a writer. That was my identity. Writer, and a distant second, swimmer. I wrote several stories and series, but my schools didn't have a writing program and my teachers didn't know how to foster my interest.*

By the time I graduated though I was competent in my academics, but I wasn't confident in any of my subjects. And that led me to my second semester of my freshman year in college, where I took a Pascal programming class. It was fascinating. But I didn't fall in love with it until the final project. I have no idea what it was, but I do remember the time I spent pouring over the code of the assignment, trying to debug it into a workable end result. After pulling an all-nighter where I was basically just staring at lines of code that I'd written over a couple of weeks, trying to figure out the fault in my logic, my eureka moment hit about an hour before the deadline.

But instead of a bathtub I was at a computer. And I was wearing clothes.

I fixed my project, it worked beautifully, and the euphoria and pride I felt was strong enough for me to declare Computer Science as my major that week.
I loved learning programming. On hindsight I understand that I didn't love programming. But I absolutely loved learning it. Every semester I learned something new- a new challenge to think logically about and problem solve, either through an eloquent solution or a complete hack. Both were rewarding because both solved a multi-step, complicated problem. During the latter half of my college education I started teaching math and computer programming, and working internships at tech companies. The teaching stuck. The programming didn't.

In fact my experience with programming for a living was so revolting, I did the opposite: I joined Peace Corps Africa with the stipulation that I would gladly go anywhere as long as the government did not place me in any place that had a computer. The north Namibia town Olifa in 1998 had no computer.

Better Than The High Life

But to the west is the town of Ruacana. A secondary school there had a Resource Center with an old Mac SE/30. I ended up using some of my free time hitch hiking or walking the 10 kilometers to Ruacana where I designed some "Intro To Computer" classes. Then some Angolan rebels mowed down some French tourists and raided some border towns and I was pulled out of Olifa about 6 months before my contract was up.

Not Just The Name Of A Tailor In This Region, circa 2000

So I signed up to Peace Corps again with the stipulation that I needed to go to a place that didn't have electricity or spoke English. That placed me in Guinea, West Africa.

The Bridge that linked many of my students to school in Kegneko, Guinea

I entered Peace Corps in 1998 largely because I was deliberately turning my back on the tech bubble and the long gray line of American adulthood that I predicted my future would be assimilated into. I left in 2002, kind of ready to get my feet wet again... except for mobile phones. It'd be another five years before I allowed myself to try one out.

My point is that I know the power of programming as part of an education while simultaneously understanding that programming in the real world can drive a person to a rejection of everything he's known. I could sit in a university computer lab for hours and days staring at a line of assembly code because I was fascinated in the creation of something that didn't quite work. I'd rejoice in the debugging and problem solving of getting something from "almost right" to "beautifully functional." Yet after working on yet another division's database in another sea of cubicles, I decided that if I was experiencing the corporate American version of the Heart of Darkness, why not move to Africa and try to experience the real thing.

My life as an up-and-comer programmer

But it's because of this dual understanding that I've been teaching my kids how to program for the last several years. Not because I want anyone to be a computer scientist. But because when it is integrated in the curriculum it makes math not math. Because it provides another powerful way to experiment with creativity. Because it helps develop and showcase problem solving for those that don't have the language or comprehension to dissect traditional word problems. Because it opens up avenues of construction for learners whose primary interests are as divergent as writing poetry, playing Minecraft, folding ninja origami, crafting songs, or playing soccer.

And that's a long introduction. But there's more. There's always more. There's a whole debate that has nothing to do with me, and there is my actual experiences teaching programming which has a little more to do with me.
To be continued.

Explore Nepal 2013: The Kuleshwar Field Trips

This year the 4th grade went back to Kuleshwar*, the government school on the bank of the disgusting Bagmati River where approximately 80% of the children attending are indentured servants.
One of the reasons the river is disgusting is because that's where individuals dump their trash. Another reason why it's disgusting is because that's where the city of Kathmandu keeps a large waste management operation.

That operation isn't featured in the video above. Those are just individuals. To picture the waste management system  (and I failed to get a photo of it during the three years I lived in Kathmandu) multiply the above video by a thousand. It's a little more organized, and the trash is just kept on the banks of the river- not dumped directly into it. But it's a trash dump nonetheless, and it's a trash dump located just a few meters from the school.
So visiting the area is an attack on the senses. In the spring months it is hot and sticky, and the air can be a cloud of burning garbage (or burning dead bodies, since the Bagmati is also a sacred river and the dead are cremated not just at the temples that run along its banks, but along the open spaces as well). The smell can be waffle between overpowering and hardly noticeable, depending on the direction and force of the wind, and the classrooms are typical for a Nepalese school- barren, cracked gray walls encasing old wooden benches, below a corrugated metal ceiling where the spiders spin their webs.
Needless to say, it's a lot for my little ones to take in. Of course at the same time it's essential for their service learning to not only experience it but to reflect on the fact that:

1) They get to leave after an hour or two and retreat back to their air conditioned classroom. For the students there that is their educational environment.
2) They get to go home after the school day. For many of the students there, their families have sold them, and thus they go to work after and before the school day.

Lincoln School is right on the edge of the Kuleshwar district, and the school is only a dozen blocks away. It's not just a tale of two cities. It's a tale of two worlds in the same neighborhood.

This is the second year I've taken my fourth grade class on a series of community building field trips to Kuleshwar. After the first year, the main feedback I got from the current fifth grade class was that they wish they could have worked there more. So I tried to be a little more ambitious this year. In some ways this was good, in others it was exhausting for the current crop of fourth graders. There were up and down times, but in the end most of them were extremely pleased by their effort and the work they did. As we did last year, we participated in a No Talking Fund Raiser to support our projects at Kuleshwar. We painted one of the classrooms with the current fourth grade class, which was a monumental undertaking for 9 and 10 year olds. We painted a giant map of Nepal on one of the walls, and made several posters / visual aids in English and Nepal based on the Nepalese 4th grade curriculum.
We also worked together to make a giant map of Asia, courtesy of National Geographic Map Maker Kit.

Each of the children colored at least one map "panel". We then laminated the giant map in strips.

We also painted and designed gardening pots, and planted flowers in them in an effort to expand the school garden. The reason we plant flowers and not vegetables is that the principal of the school explained that as soon as we plant vegetables, they will be stolen. Flowers are not nearly as much in demand, so they'll have a stronger chance of survival.
So here is a montage of our activities for this year, bringing together several trips over a two and a half month period. One thing you might notice is that sometimes the school is orange, and sometimes it's blue. Sometime between our trips there, the school's outside was painted. Why they decided to paint the outside instead of the classrooms with their resources would be an interesting discussion. Kuleswar gets assistance from one or two other NGOs, so it's hard to know who does what and how. For my part, the projects that the two fourth grade classes do are from discussions with the principal and fourth grade teacher, as well as conversations with the fourth graders themselves.

This was originally designed as a presentation of the Elementary School. 

The kids would be reading their reflections while the video played in the background.

My goal isn't for a fourth grader's reflection to be, "I feel good about this project because I helped the poor people." Instead the way I try to tailor my instruction is so the kids hopefully reflect on the experience in one of these ways: "I collaborated with friends I normally would never have met,"
"I worked hard and succeeded in making what I wanted to make," and 
"I understand a little bit more the obstacles that others have to endure to get an education." 

* I don't think I ever blogged about these field trips before. I guess I just forgot. Here is last year's presentation to the Elementary School at Lincoln. It was the same format as the one for this year; the video would play in the background as the fourth graders introduced the project and read their reflections.

The Evolution of a Meme: A Lesson In Online Collaboration

As I make the transition from Nepal to Prague, I realized that I forgot a yearly ritual I do with my group of international learners at the end of the year. After a brief discussion of summer plans and potential travels, I show the children a "Where the Hell is Matt?" dancing video. But I give them a task: I want them to yell each time Matt dances in a country that they've visited. I can do this because my kids have been to a lot of places in their short lives- either on holidays or just moving to a new country and new life every couple of years.



But the "Where the Hell is Matt?" videos have changed over time. There's a deliberate transition in his 2008 video where he goes from dancing alone to dancing with a cast of thousands. This is a great lesson in participation- how a cool idea is made even better when you open it up to anyone who wants to participate.


And then Matt released his 2012 version. It's not just about participation anymore. It's collaboration. People aren't just imitating Matt's dance or doing their own thing. Matt changed. He played to the strengths of the people he visited, and obviously spent some time working with them and learning from them.



So this isn't just a post about watching a video and yelling out when you recognize a place that you've been. The series of videos is a metaphor for how we try to teach online usage. First you experience  it by trying something new (Matt 2006), then you begin communicating with others (Matt 2008), and then when you're ready to do truly magical things you collaborate (Matt 2012).

Posts: A Slick iPad App for Offline Blogging

School's out for me now. This normally means I have a lot of time to write. I hope for this summer the trend continues. I'm without an Internet connection for the next couple of days, so I'll be using Posts by Pico to plan some future... wait for it... posts.

Right now the app is free and does pretty much what I want a blog managing app to do:

1 It doesn't belittle me for trying to write a post offline. Do you hear me Blogger App For the Ipad? I'm calling you BAFI for short. 

Oh BAFI lets me write a post offline too, but he hates me for trying. He assumes I made a mistake. When I try to save my post BAFI blurts, "Internet connection appears to be offline." I know this already, okay BAFI? I don't need your lip. And yet after the message gets saved, there's a little message attached to my saved post that says, "Retry Upload." Like everything is not okay because it is not saved online. Like my draft post is an error. 

The Edublogs App That Is Located On The Ipad is much worse. I'll call her TEATI-LOTI. She won't let you write anything if you are offline and she expresses her dissatisfaction by inundating you with error messages. 

And worse yet is the Weebly app. I'm just calling him Weebly. "An error occurred"  is all I get for opening him up offline. 

Well thank goodness Posts dropped the attitude. And is actually very welcoming when I try to write something offline. It expects me to, and I love it for that. Which brings me to my second point...

2) 1) It allows me to manage as many blogs as I want. Do you hear me BAFI, TEATI-LOTI, and Weebly? I don't need your casual features or snarky attitude anymore because Posts takes care of everything for me.

Now what I should do is write a solid review of Posts, sharing the features that I like or have questions with, but I'm outside and I'm getting eaten by mosquitoes, so that will have to be for another day.

What blog manager do you like?

The Dark Side Of Lightt & Days

June 12, 2013 Edit: Today "Days" came out with an update that allows you to connect to Tumblr, Facebook, or Twitter. The problem now is that when viewing the photos on a browser, there's a giant time stamp covering the whole photo, obscuring much of the content of the photo! Oh and the time stamp is wrong.

There's been a host of stories the past couple of weeks about Snapchat- the photo sharing app that gives your friends 10 seconds to view your photo before it's deleted.  The reason why Snapchat's been in the news though is because the photos aren't actually deleted. And even if they were, it's easy to save them.  And in fact there are sites that are popping up wholly dedicated to capturing those moments you thought were gone forever. I thought this was timely, but I'll come back to that.

Just wait... we'll get to you in a moment my friend.

The way that I shared classroom photos this year was to take them on my iPad, use the photo stream to have them magically appear on my laptop, and then finally upload the photos to my weebly class website. This is a lot simpler than uploading the photos from a digital camera, but I want to find an even easier way. In fact I'm spending a lot of time and energy to find a way that will save me time and energy.  I'm not considering Istagram because it doesn't really encourage lots of pics to be uploaded at a time and because filters are stupid.  I haven't considered Flickr because I thought that surely there'd be something new out that I could use and Flickr has been around since the 90s. 

So I tried this Lightt app first.

"beautiful" in the sense that everything is spastic and jerky

Lightt is a photo sharing app that doesn't take photos- it takes animated gifs. You can't control the gif speed, so even their featured highlights from their collection of users look like the planet is experiencing a collective muscle spasm.
Oh! But there is an option to directly link to Tumblr! This is great because I can open a Tumblr account that directly links to my class blog. Then with a click of a button, everything will automatically be uploaded and saved.
Here are the steps to link your Lightt gifs to Tumblr:
1) In the "Settings" click on "Social Networks"
2) Click on the blue 'Connect' button next to Tumblr.
3) Wait for Tumblr to open in your browser.
4) Click on the green 'Allow' button when Tumblr asks, "Grant this application read and write access to your Tumblr account?
5) Watch Lightt crash before it posts anything.

Now you can be indignant Kirk.

Next, My friend turned me on to Days, a photo sharing app that believes that quantity is the best way to show the quality of a day. 

Days has a lot of good features. Photos taken within 10 seconds of each other form an animated gif and if you don't like that you can split up the photos before posting them. Also photos taken within a day are grouped together, you can't filter or mess with the photos- you can only delete photos, and it promises to link up with Tumblr, Twitter, or Facebook. Except that it doesn't. I would love to link this to a Tumblr account and have that be my platform for sharing photos, but it doesn't work. 

Dang it Tumblr! Don't make me use Instagram!

Days is a fairly new app so maybe they'll fix that over the summer, but what is more annoying than not being able to connect to the services it says you can connect to, and the reason I brought up Snapchat in the beginning of this post is that once you post a new group of photos to your "Days" account, you can't get rid of it. Maybe you can, but I haven't figured out how. So I guess it's better than Snapchat in that they're not pretending to delete your photos, but it really does everything it can to add on to the permanent tattoo that is your online life.

So that's how I'll end this unfinished quest to make my life more lazy with a TED talk that reminds us to be wary of the permanent tattoo of the Internet: