ABSTRACT. TBA

ABSTRACT. Mr. Paron is the leader of the Constructionism movement in Thailand since 1996. He has gained first-hand experience about how a constructionist initiative can become a success or a failure. The basic principle is what he calls Constructionism the Thailand way.

ABSTRACT. Darunsikkhalai School for Innovative Learning in Bangkok is known as the most extreme model of Constructionist school in Thailand since 2001. The panelists consist of school administrators and facilitators who involved with the effort trying to rebuild a school for learning will be sharing experiences of school's transition over the past 15 years. Experiences of using Constructionism as the backbone of classroom pedagogy embedded with other different learning philosophies will also be sharing in this session.

ABSTRACT. Twenty nine years ago Costa Rica decided to introduce computers to the elementary public schools, to teach kids to program as a way to promote the use of ICT´s as powerful tools to think, to create and to collaborate. An idea that received at that time many critics. An idea inspired on Seymour Papert´s proposal: constructionism, an idea that bring us all here. And he became close to a godfather to the in-gestation Program. Nowadays, the Program has endure the roughness of time, and has grown to reach over 2500 schools all over the country. Many lessons have been learnt, and new –as well as not so new—challenges await to be answer in the coming years, but the journey has been fruitful in many ways. To share this long and intense journey, to contrast it with the experience of many interesting alternatives around, is a nice opportunity to initiate three more decades of work and certainly enrich our agenda.

ABSTRACT. GoGo board toolkit is a hardware-embedded curriculum designed to teach children aged 7-10 years old (grade 2-5) the concept of compassion and empathy through inventions. The toolkit is inspired by children books that adults read out loud to their loved ones before bedtime. Many storybooks are interactive but not so many engender proactive behaviors from the young readers. Scenario storybooks in GoGo Board toolkit aims to help young children observe and understand the problems of others. With support from adults, young children can construct original inventions that help characters in their stories solve their problems using GoGo Board, scrap or prototype materials, and their imagination. The main objective is to inspire children to be active social inventors who can see the problems of others or themselves and be eager to solve them.

ABSTRACT. Snap! news includes keyboard-based script editing (the beginning of support for visually impaired users), the ability to include Javascript code in a Snap! block definition, and (thanks, Citilab!) the ability to create standalone applications from projects.

BJC news includes two major curriculum efforts: BJC is now live on the edX platform, and a substantial rewrite with supporting teacher materials is under way to make BJC easier to use and more successful in high schools. Also, we have taught BJC to the first 28 of a planned 100 New York City public high school teachers, and they are teaching students (mostly 17-year-olds) this year.

ABSTRACT. We set on a task to develop a set of 20 different activities with LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3 robots focused on how to use the robots in a classroom on various subjects. As contrasted to most of the activities, work-sheets, courses that are based on this technology, we are not interested in teaching introduction to robotics and control, or teaching programming with robots. In this project, we would like to give teachers in Physics, Mathematics, Art, Chemistry and even Informatics a set of project ideas with solutions that they can 1) adopt to enhance their teaching, for instance when demonstrating a phenomenon in a classroom, or 2) give as a project assignment to a group of canny students to be demonstrated to a whole classroom later on, or 3) simply use in a classroom, if multiple robotic sets are available in the school. We have written a summarizing book in Czech language, but the tasks are available on-line in English as well as part of the Centrobot portal with robtivities.

ABSTRACT. Projects designed to give children experiences playing and building with high tech equipment such as 3D printers, laser cutters, and microcontrollers have gained momentum in recent years among researchers, educators, and parents. Despite an explicit commitment to epistemic diversity, makerspaces have struggled to serve a diverse population of creators and have become heavily dominated by men and the highly educated and wealthy (Moilanen, 2012). The Bots for Tots project is an effort to move beyond surface level participant characteristics (such as girls like fashion) and to instead explore the affordances of activity framings and structures that tap into alternate mental dispositions and ways of knowing to broaden participation and interest in maker activities.

The Bots for Tots project engages elementary children to design and build a "dream toy" for younger children in their community. Workshop sessions are designed to engage participants in interviewing stakeholders, brainstorming and critiquing, prototyping, and construction. In a pilot study involving 8 girls and 2 boys, dream toys were constructed using a variety of methods, such as sewing, lasercutting, and 3D printing as well as materials such as fabric, cloth, wood, acrylic, and extruded plastic. While data collection is ongoing, early findings suggest this activity framing may be fruitful as participants drawn to the project were overwhelmingly female, were highly interested in technology and making, and had some experience engaging in craft activities. Further analysis will evaluate the materials and techniques used by participants, how mixed and same gendered teams interacted, STEM content encountered by participants, and the degree to which framing the activity as being about making for others impacted day to day activities.

ABSTRACT. In this paper, we introduce the results game programming in Scratch workshop for children. Scratch is programming language for children. In the workshop, children program game with facilitator. Second, children plan game programming. Third, children program unique game follow their plan. Finally, children plan their future work about their game. It is our hope that this workshop for children will provide new experience about planning and execution. The workshop results show that game programming is good. Children's interest encourage idea of game programming and motivation. Additionally, Children was interested to other child's work. In the stage of workshop requiring that they plan, we prepared writing paper to write idea. The writing paper enabled us to visualize children's idea and programming procedures for members of staff.

ABSTRACT. Little Builders is a social enterprise that aims to disrupt Thai education by employing constructionist design paradigms and human-centered design processes in at-risk formal and informal schools to foster Grit and growth mindset. We believe that constructing is a valuable learning process for the students; “children don’t get ideas; they make ideas” (Kafai & Resnick, 1996). Little Builders was first established in early 2014 by a group of recent graduates with various backgrounds but a common goal of shifting the Thai classroom from instructionist to constructionist systems, where students can work on their meaningful project, learn at their own pace, and at the same time create a community of learners. Through our two years of commitment, Little Builders has received a grant from Thai Social Enterprise Office and currently has 7 core team members, over 100 active volunteers, and 350 supporters.

ABSTRACT. We held programming workshops for middle and high school female students using Scratch to program educational robots. We presented the educational robots, Romo, as social robots to the students and asked them to design programs to improve the interactions between human and robots. We believe we were able to have the students, novice programmers, imagine the future society with very low cost robots in our daily life. In this paper we would like to describe the workshop outline, the interaction programs that the students created in the workshop and the feedback that we received from them.

ABSTRACT. Building popsicle sticks bridges is consider as a relevant activity for engineering students, many professional associations (Professional Engineers and Geoscientist of BC, 2015) and academic corpuses have established contests for different academic levels. As part of his degree thesis, one of the authors opened a contest for engineering students in the University where he teaches and we report some of the results we have found in this contest. By now, students have shown a great interest and participation in the projec

ABSTRACT. At Aoyama Gakuin University in Japan, we offered a course “Hands-on Practice in Social Informatics.” A major objective in this course is to acquire basic skills of learning at the university. The skills mean not only knowledge of programming, but also learning proactively. For that purpose, we practiced a method of learning by making. We prepared two slogans and a lot of gadgets (various sensors, blocks, etc.) to pursue this method. In this poster, we describe the course content and students' products.

ABSTRACT. A quarter of a century after Seymour Papert tentatively suggested constructionism might be provided with a scientific foundation it is a disgrace that his followers still wrap themselves in a ‘philosophy’ comfort blanket to insulate them from challenge by non-believers. It shows an unwillingness to dive into beckoning deep psychological and epistemological waters fearing cherished beliefs will drown therein. For the fourth time I call upon the constructionist community to take the step from sect to science. The fundamental proposition remains that which I outlined at the Paris conference and further developed at Athens and Vienna. BH rather than classical entropy is now used. This gives a constructional foundation from which information naturally flows. The entropy differential between technological and biological forms, which caused a degree of uncertainty previously, is now resolved by reference to DNA information. The paucity of the stimulus, successfully used against the stimulus-response theory of language learning, is used to demonstrate that all information from which percepts are produced lies within the brain. Further, that this information, the product of aeons of evolutionary adaptation, is not congruent with physical reality. Unaided cognitive construction cannot, therefore, provide an accurate view of the world. The technology that we are uniquely capable of producing as a result of access to Hubel information must conform to physical reality. It is our species’ corrective lens. Because constructionism was built around the introduction of the computer, or Turing medium as I call it, I make some remarks about its role in education relative to paper and pencil-eraser. As writing, taught in the developmental phase from five to ten has turned children into competent computers, the new medium similarly applied would create new minds for new challenges. This is the constructionist challenge.

ABSTRACT. Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab has been the source of two notable interventions putatively to influence the education of children in the realm computing. The first attempted to introduce a new geometry into schools. The second, Scratch, consequent on the failure of the former, was directed at computer clubs and bedroom-bound connected children. Neither took cognisance of the curriculum that children followed in school: both developed an isolated skill. Given the prestige of MIT as an institution, this might be viewed as hubris. This paper seeks to consider computing education in primary school from the perspective of the extant curriculum, child development, and the character of the computer as a new educational medium. Logo never having been used in schools, rather turtle graphics, the potential for the less mathematical LogoWriter to serve computing in the context of the core curriculum is evaluated. The author is a primary school teacher, no computer scientist, who concludes that the constituencies of academe and administration will continue to convert children into computers, in their extant likeness, for the foreseeable future; for neither, as Socrates when faced with writing, can envision an education where the new Turing medium is the child’s intellectual companion.

ABSTRACT. Imagine Logo is a successful product that has not been replaced with an equivalent tool in many ways and in many places. In this poster, we present our work of interfacing Imagine Logo with most of the LEGO Education robotics platforms, including RCX, NXT, EV3, and the CtrLab from the 9Os. This contribution is important to overcame the conceptual limitation of the program-download-run paradigm that is enforced by all LEGO MINDSTORMS products, thus making it very inaccessible for children to learn by creating interactive projects that combine the external robotic hardware with an interactive software they write and that runs on a computer simultaneously. Our tools bridge an excellent learning environment based on Logo language with an excellent robotic platform resulting in joyful playground for a brave teacher.

ABSTRACT. We demonstrate our best practice to develop IT vision and thinking in school education and how we link the various subject groups to IT. We wish to show that writing programs is the best game to play with the computer, because it is better to command the computer than being commanded by it. To teach programming should not simply aim at practical competence but also to develop cognitive skills similarly to teaching math, but in many respects more effectively. The basis of our pedagogy is to make the material playful in accordance with Papert’s principles. (Papert, 1980) In addition to body and ego syntonicity (self syntonicity) we also apply cultural and social syntonicity and we endow our objects with cultural and behavioural features of humans. We have experimented in a secondary training school in two age groups: 6-10 and 10-14. For the young group we use our own educational package, for the older group we use a freely available package (Fling the teacher ). We also describe our experiments in teaching programming for the second group.

ABSTRACT. This paper proposes a tangible constructionist tool called Electronic Math Blocks (eM Blocks) system particularly developed for two main purposes: 1) to enable students to construct their mathematical understandings by engaging in tangible activities within mathematical environments, and 2) to enable teachers to monitor and collect data regarding learning behaviour of students. A real­world experiment with the first prototype of eM Blocks system is conducted with students at Darunsikkhalai School, Bangkok, Thailand. The preliminary results are very encouraging as they show that students are able to develop their own mathematical understanding using the eM Block prototype.

ABSTRACT. We have developed a low-cost robotic platform that we use to teach first grade undergraduate students programming in C language. After the study program in Applied Informatics has been redesigned, our students learn programming in high-level programming language Python, which has automatic memory management, advanced data-structures and algorithms. Demands of some of our courses however show that the students lack the understanding for bits and bytes, low level programming and loose connection to the actual processes that occur in hardware when their software is being executed on a machine. We think it is important to understand this level too, if the student is to program efficiently and correctly. Furthermore, playing with robots stimulates and motivates freshmen students, makes the study program more attractive, and allows more playful learning, improves the overall experience and shock from entering the University. In this demonstration, we will show you the robot, its capabilities and how we have used it in our course on Computer Hardware.

ABSTRACT. We propose to demonstrate the third iteration of a design-based research study—BeeSmart—on students’ learning about complex systems. Previously, we presented the second iteration—a microworld for honeybees’ hive-finding behavior (Guo & Wilensky, 2014). We found that students had difficulties with random interaction between bees in this complex phenomenon (Guo & Wilensky, 2016). Here we introduce our design of a whole-class participatory simulation activity consisting of a HubNet model and a set of inquiry activities to scaffold students’ learning about random interaction. This work enriches the literature of designing constructionist learning environments to scaffold students in learning complex systems.

ABSTRACT. In this demonstration we present our work-in-progress: a platform for creating called JumpSmart. We are developing to inspire new explorations in patterns and programming logic through open-ended activities for young learners (ages 7-14).

JumpSmart is designed to help young learners acquire new knowledge, abilities and insights through the construction of personally meaningful artifacts. The digital and physical technology of our system is built so that learners can engage in technical processes which resonate with their non-technical interests. Interactions that incorporate novel forms of making can bring computing to more communities and broaden who participates. Programming needs many methods for entry (Turkle, 1992) (Resnick,2009) and we posit that the physical activity is a worthwhile gateway to explore.

We intend for JumpSmart to promote learning through physical activity and extend programming to a wider array of young learners. The kinds of play possible with JumpSmart further the idea of using computers as chalk; rethinking how computation can be used in making through engaging, expressive, and transformative experiences (Millner,2012).

ABSTRACT. Pyonkee is a visual-programming environment running on iPad. It is based on Scratch 1.4 from the MIT Media Laboratory. Since Pyonkee is fully compatible with Scratch 1.4, millions of existing Scratch projects can be used for reference. Pyonkee's user interface is optimized for touch devices. We do not need cumbersome typing, even a mouse. Just write programs wherever you like. Pyonkee nicely supports pinch-in/out, and font scaling for small devices. Moreover, sound recorder and camera are provided for importing your sounds and pictures into the projects. We can mix various media on Pyonkee and program them.

ABSTRACT. In this paper, we present a software tool which enables students to discover and learn about data stream systems (DSS) in a constructionist way. As DSS are part of the ongoing developments and innovations in data management, which are often summarized by the term Big Data, this tool shows in an exemplary way how these complex topics can be incorporated into school teaching. Therefore, we extended the block-based programming environment Snap!, so that it supports analyzing the Twitter data stream even without having any pre-knowledge on data stream analysis.