ABSTRACT. In recent years we witness a new intense outburst of interest in educational programming in several countries, including their primary or even pre-primary stages. Constructionist educational programming for everybody has been the main principle in our development and research since our first influential implementation of Logo programming environment for Windows in 1993. However, until recently we have not experienced systematic, nationwide, long term, thoroughly built, sustainable and properly supported integration of educational programming into formal school systems – in spite of the fact that several countries have declared such policy materialised in their (sometimes even mandatory) subjects named Computer Science, Informatics, ICT or Computing. Therefore, it is natural and legitimate to ask whether this wave of interest in educational programming differs from the previous ones, which had never managed to reach the level of permanent presence in naturalistic classroom settings – especially in primary classroom settings. In my presentation I will argue why there is now a chance to achieve this and which factors I think must be thoroughly taken into consideration to build sustainable and broadly accepted educational programming at primary level. In general, for primary programming to really work and sustain, it needs to ensure that: (i) Learning it is relevant for the primary learners and leads to meaningful progress, (ii) Primary schools (i.e. the school administration, teachers and indirectly also parents) are supportive and supported to adopt it, and (iii) External circumstances do not restrain it. In my reflection I will focus on the first two requirements which we as researchers and developers have a potentially greater opportunity to influence. I will primarily draw on my current exceptional opportunity to engage with two different primary educational systems – that of England and Slovakia. In the presentation I will try to synthesise the experience accumulated at Comenius University and London Knowledge Lab.

ABSTRACT. This article extends a 2005 taxonomy of languages and environments for teaching computer programming to the current field of pedagogical programming languages and environments. The original taxonomy organized tools according to the barriers to learning programming they addressed, and the strategies used to surmount or avoid the barriers. Updating the taxonomy was not entirely successful; some strategies have emerged as widely-used best practices, and individual tools employ many strategies. Furthermore, as computers and programming have become prevalent in everyday life, it has become difficult to distinguish programming from non-programming, and difficult to distinguish tools for learning from ordinary computational tools. Programming, formerly a specialized activity, has developed into a computational literacy comprising many different forms of cultural interaction. We propose a new taxonomy organizing tools by their literacy aims, based on DiSessa's analysis of the structure of literacy. The new taxonomy allows learners, teachers, and designers to ground decisions about how to learn or teach programming in literacy aims expressing why they want to learn to program.

ABSTRACT. In a discussion about future programming languages with Seymour Papert, he asked the question whether their design should be driven by mathematical aesthetics or engineering. He thought that most current efforts come from engineering criteria and was uncertain if that was good or bad.

When designing a constructionist programming language one must make choices about the underlying computational model, the syntax, the programming environment, and the extent to which it is compatible with existing languages and systems.

What are the ultimate goals of a new programming language? Should we strive for a single ideal language or would multiple languages be best? (Kahn, 2007) brings up many of these questions.

Logo, and more recently Scratch, has played a foundational role in constructionist learning. Could something other than incremental progress lead to much better tools for using computers in a constructionist manner? What lessons can be learned from existing languages such as Logo, Scratch, Snap!, NetLogo, ToonTalk, etc.?

A panel will include Cynthia, Brian, Ivan, and myself.

ABSTRACT. The intent of this panel is to foster discussion around the role that the Internet of Things has on current and future work in Constructionism, and the role that Constructionism should have in shaping the Internet of Things. We will invite researchers who are conducting scholarship at the intersection of these two areas, in order to highlight some of the forthcoming opportunities and challenges that are likely to emerge.

ABSTRACT. The widespread use of mobile phones is changing how learning takes place in many disciplines and contexts. As a scenario in a constructionist learning environment, students are given powerful tools to create games using their own ideas. In the “No One Left Behind” (NOLB) project we will study whether the use of mobile game design has an impact on learning, understanding, and retention of knowledge for students at risk of social exclusion. We will use the mobile learning app Pocket Code with partner schools in three countries: Austria, Spain, and the UK. This paper focuses on the Austrian pilot, which is exploring gender inclusion in game creation within an educational environment. We first study differences in game creation between girls and boys. This study that started in September 2015, will help teachers to integrate Pocket Code effectively into their courses. For future studies an enhanced school version of Pocket Code will be designed using the results and insights gathered at schools with pupils and teachers.

ABSTRACT. Music Blocks software is designed for teachers and learners to explore the fundamental concepts of music in a visual-coding environment. Music Blocks is both innovative and beneficial to music education in a number of ways: On the one hand, it is a new method for understanding the fundamental concepts of music; on the other, it is a tool for learning coding and logic skills. It integrates both music and STEM fundamentals in a fun, scalable, and authentic way. Lastly—and very importantly—the tool itself is Free/Libre Software, which we argue is the best choice for an equitable and just education because it gives students the freedom to study, without restriction, both how to use the software and how the software itself works, i.e., how it transforms their instructions into their musical inventions.

ABSTRACT. This project examined learning in a series of three, week-long Scratch summer camps intended for novice kids aged 10-13. In this paper we share our approach to building a more rigorous and equitable constructionist learning environment by applying an art studio design model of pedagogy to computer science. Our goals are: 1) to articulate our application of the studio model of design to learning programming in the Scratch Camps, 2) to investigate how widespread and deep campers’ learning was, and 3) through this investigation to consider lessons learned that can be applied to future constructionist learning environment designs. Our study applied quantitative and qualitative analysis to a combination of automated backend saves of campers’ projects, observational data, and frontend saves of campers’ projects.

ABSTRACT. This contribution presents a junior high school workshop on designing physical interfaces with Scratch, the PicoBoard and Sensors. The students first implement several starter projects, try out sensors, pick a project and extend and improve it by adding the PicoBoard and sensors.

ABSTRACT. In this theoretical paper, I react to a comment made by Papert in relation with the "sort of right" answer he obtained with a Logo program he made to solve a mathematical task. I argue that mathematics and mathematical activity are often sort-of-right, despite the usual impression that mathematics is the culprit of "perfection". I give examples of the presence and importance of sort-of-right mathematics in the discipline, and in school. I conclude with a reflection on the possibility to give more importance to sort-of-right mathematics in regard with teachers and students vision of mathematics, and its resonance with Papert’s writings about what education ought to be.

ABSTRACT. Constructionism is described by diSessa and Cobb as a 'framework for action’, and is built upon the orienting framework of constructivism, together with an assumption, born out of practice, that engaging students in making activity (bricolage) is especially felicitous for learning. It has been further elaborated through the work of Noss and Hoyles to include constructs such as situated abstraction and webbing, and through the work of Ainley and Pratt to include purpose and utility. However, constructivism is increasingly being criticised as a model for learning (Roth, 2011): a major issue is that it tacitly endorses the Cartesian mind/world split in which learning consists of constructing knowledge (representations) of the world in the mind. Furthermore, constructionism seeks to add the affective to the account of intellectual development proposed by constructivism without providing theoretical underpinning for this addition. Hence constructivism no longer serves as an adequate orienting framework for constructionism.

We suggest that contemporary work within philosophy (Brandom, 2000; Bakhurst, 2011; McDowell, 1996) provides a more fitting narrative. We argue that the idea of learning as initiation into the space of reasons (Bakhurst, 2011) provides grounds for a synthesis of the affective and the logical. We argue that inferential reasons and reasoning encompass not only the powerful ideas of mathematics and disciplinary knowledge of modes of enquiry but also the extra-logical, such as in feelings of the aesthetic, control, excitement, elegance and efficiency.

ABSTRACT. The constructionist theory of learning offers useful ways for thinking about how computers and digital tools can be included in education. Deconstructionism as an extension of constructionism is a natural way in children behaviour while exploring new tools. Constructionism and deconstructionism can be applied both in the classroom and in outreach school activities. To support constructionism and/or deconstructionism, we need to focus on supporting teachers. This paper explores a main question: How teachers may learn in a constructionist and deconstructionist way. We discuss this question from the perspective of the Bebras challenge on informatics and computational thinking. A contest and supplementary activities have been performed for more than ten years by many countries. We focus on one side of the challenge – the development of tasks. We present our experiences from several years of Bebras teachers’ workshops. In this paper, we provide two task development stories focussing on teachers’ constructionist and deconstructionist learning.

ABSTRACT. Constructionism is a practice that has developed alongside computing. In addressing a conference of educators in the 1980s, Papert himself recognised that “the new technologies are very, very rich in providing new things for children to do”, that a child who used LOGO to make a picture would be unlikely to say “I’m programming a computer”, and that “nobody knows how computers will be used in 10 or 20 or 30 year's time” (Papert, c1980). Thirty years later, despite many generations of development in LOGO, and the advent of other programming languages such as Alice and Scratch designed with constructionist aspirations in mind, there is scant conceptual support for computing that is not in essence based on a paradigm of ‘programming the computer’. In this paper, we outline an alternative constructionist practice that is based on exploiting computing technology in a way that cannot be accounted for merely in programming terms. A crucial ingredient in this new practice (“making construals”) is an epistemological stance that is constructivist in character and derives from the radical empiricism of William James. Adopting this stance enables us to regard the contention by Ben-Ari – fundamental to the idea of programming – that the computer is ‘an accessible ontological reality’, as itself a construction.

ABSTRACT. Principle-based reasoning refers to a problem solving strategy that is based on principles. Literature on principle-based reasoning suggests that it is more commonly employed by experts than novices and that it provides a means for advancing one’s designs. Furthermore, principle-based reasoning is associated with object-closeness, in that it enables a more embodied interaction with a given structure. However, effectively leveraging principle-based reasoning has historically been challenging. Nonetheless, we argue that constructionist learning, especially in the specific context of engineering design, can be a fertile space for promoting principle-based reasoning and object closeness, even among novices. In this paper, we propose a new model to advocate engineering expertise in novice students by encouraging them to engage principles. Our report includes results from two studies both with novice students: One study (N=22) was implemented in a classroom with first grade students. The second study (N=20) was conducted with high school and undergraduate students. Across these two studies we used a very similar model for engaging students in the opportunity to leverage engineering principles in approaching open-ended engineering design tasks. Two particular interests of this study were to: 1. Examine ways to effectively evoke principle-based reasoning from novices, 2. Examine if the principle-based reasoning strategy has utility among novice students. Results show that the model employed enabled novice students to demonstrate expert-like practices; novice engineers, first grade as well as high school students, can effectively make use of principle-based reasoning.

ABSTRACT. In this panel, we will showcase some activities in which we have constructed communities of workshop designers in Japan in recent years. Through hundreds of thousand years of human history, construction of products have been supported by human relations in the community of people who designed, produced and used the products. It is only very recently that our products are designed to hide the production process and we have lost these relations. The panelists have been active in reconstructing communities in which designers of workshops can exchange ideas and find possibilities to collaborate so that production is supported by human relations. The contents of workshops range from hand crafts, creative arts, computer programming, to community building, and multi-cultural collaboration. In these workshops people with different experiences and skills collaborate to construct creative expressions that are meaningful to everyone involved. We have found out that in these communities in which production is supported by human relations, the constructed meanings gain larger perspectives that are beyond individual workshops and designers. The four panelists will share their experiences of constructing four of these communities of workshop designers that are closely related with each other: Workshop Collection, Programming Education Gathering, Aichi Workshop Gathering, and World Museum. They will then describe how constructionism in Japan has expanded from construction of products to construction of human relations, meanings, and to communities, and discuss about some principles underlying this expansion.

ABSTRACT. An ordinary, non-scientist person’s exposure to science through pop-culture is ever growing. However, science is still believed to have a high threshold of entry. For most people, doing science means going through rigorous training of literature, specialization, and learning formal mathematics. Many people feel that they have no means to figure out which idea is scientifically accurate and which one is inaccurate. More importantly, they only have the trustworthiness of the source as heuristic for believing or not believing in a particular scientific message. In this paper, we argue that agent-based modeling has the potential to lower the threshold of entry to science and to empower just plain folks against the flood of scientific messages in pop-culture. To demonstrate our theory in practice, we conduct a thought experiment in which we extract a much debated scientific theory, the evolution of sexes, from a BBC Earth documentary and show how one can easily recreate and explore the assumptions of such a theory using the NetLogo agent-based modeling environment. Then, we compare traditional formal mathematics based scientific analysis approach with our agent-based modeling approach and show how the latter affords people with little or no training in high level formal mathematics or evolutionary biology literature to challenge scientific ideas.

ABSTRACT. The paper discusses the case of Dimitris, a secondary mathematics teacher, who selected three micro-experiments from an institutionalized portal, re-mixed them and then gave his version to his students who in turn made their own changes and constructions. The case is discussed in the frame of the potential for institutionalized portals and digital infrastructures to afford constructionist activity for educators, designers, teachers and students.

ABSTRACT. The ScratchMaths (SM) project sets out to exploit the recent commitment to programming in schools in England for the benefit of mathematics learning and reasoning. This design research project aims to introduce students (age 9-11 years) to computational thinking as a medium for exploring mathematics following a constructionist approach. This paper outlines the project and then focuses on two tensions related to (i) the tool and learning, and (ii) direction and discovery, which can arise within constructionist learning environments and describes how these tensions were addressed through the design of the SM curriculum.

ABSTRACT. The panelists work in real schools in New York, Los Angeles, and Hong Kong to make constructionism come alive on a daily basis. This panel will explore their triumphs, failures, and lessons learned for moving an entire school in a constructionist direction and sustaining such progress. Each of the participants teaches programming, robotics, mentors colleagues, develops curricula, and is active in the maker movement. In addition to their day-to-day work of inspiring colleagues, creating productive contexts for constructionist learning, and leadership, each of the participants has spent many years involved in leading Constructing Modern Knowledge, the summer institute for educators built-upon the principles of constructionism.

ABSTRACT. In this paper, we report a research project in early algebraic thinking with students of primary school (10-12 year old) who have not yet been introduced to algebraic syntaxes. Using the software eXpresser (Figure 1), we introduced some algebraic ideas, along with the idea of generalization. This was carried out through problem-solving activities in a didactic sequence. Even though students in this age-group are in transition from additive to multiplicative thinking, our study revealed that students were capable of understanding the idea of sequence, and that they were able to identify the general rule and express it in pre-algebraic terms.

ABSTRACT. JS-Eden is an environment for learners to build software artefacts that relies on construction by ‘making construals’ using observables and dependencies. JS-Eden is proposed as an alternative to procedural or object-oriented constructionist environments. In this paper we present a small experiment in which JS-Eden is introduced to 25 high school students. The observations and feedback suggest that although there are improvements to be made to JS-Eden’s user interface for learners, the principles of constructionism by making construals can be readily applied in a classroom for domain learning. Comparisons are drawn with existing constructionist environments, and it is argued that making construals in JS-Eden is a better paradigm for children engaged in the “instructing”, “animating” and “modulating” activities that are key in working with digital media.

ABSTRACT. The affordances of microworld simulations to promote student engagement and motivation are well documented in the literature. These technologies which can be highly have the potential to enhance a student’s learning experience. Nevertheless their widespread use in mainstream secondary school classrooms remains limited as these technologies do not sit well in conventional classroom settings, where short class durations, didactic pedagogy and an emphasis on teaching to the test prevail.

The problems in secondary school STEM education, such as declining number of students considering a career in science related disciplines, have often been linked to didactic teaching styles in classrooms, with an emphasis on transference of knowledge from the teacher to student and where text books are the main source of curriculum content. In physics, teaching is often focused on the application of mathematical formulae and lacks context and applicability to real world problems. As a result many students find physics a ‘difficult and hard subject to study’ leading to poor motivation and low engagement with the subject. This research brings three key elements together - microworld technology, a constructionist, contextualised pedagogy and a 21st century learning model – to investigate their combined impact on student engagement and confidence in physics. Students worked in teams using a constructionist microworld simulation to build electrical circuits. An exploratory case study was carried out involving 39 secondary school students (aged ~15/16) participating in 4 separate physics workshops.

An attitudinal questionnaire was used for quantitative data capture, while focus groups and observation provided rich qualitative data for triangulation. The findings from the study indicate positive changes in student engagement, confidence in physics and attitude to the use of technology for learning. The qualitative data provides context for these findings, which while being based on a modest sample in terms of the number of participants and duration of the learning experience, nevertheless support the hypothesis that a 21st century pedagogical approach is a suitable framework for exploiting the potential of microworlds to promote engagement and confidence in physics.

ABSTRACT. This workshop addresses all educationists and education scientists who are interested how school students can learn informatics (computer science) concepts and Computational Think-ing through a contest. The International Bebras Challenge on Informatics is the world’s largest contest on Com-putational Thinking. In the 2014 contest more than 925,000 students participated in 36 coun-tries of all continents. The students have to solve 15 to 21 tasks within 40 to 60 minutes. To solve these tasks, students do not need specific pre-knowledge. Tasks are developed for different age groups, from primary school to upper secondary school students. The tasks contain concepts of about nearly all areas of informatics. Usually a short story in-troduces a task and states a problem, termini technici are not used, but to solve the task some kind of computational thinking must be applied. There are tasks about concept categories of information representation, algorithms, programming, logic, encryption and many other. The other point is teachers’ constructionist and deconstructionist learning by creating and explaining Bebras tasks.

ABSTRACT. We use products and energy from all around the world. We have constructed a global community connected physically through the products and energy we use. However, we have not connected our hearts globally and created many global problems concerning food, energy, environment, often resulting in conflicts (Miyata et al. 2015). Collaborative music making has been a powerful means to connect our hearts. We would like to connect our hearts globally by making music together globally. We propose a workshop in which the participants will be able to experience the process of creating music in collaboration with many partners around the world, all singing lyrics they have created expressing peace in their own languages. We welcome participants with many different nationalities, native tongues, ages and genders, to express their feelings and thoughts about world peace in their native languages, and sing together in a global chorus with World Museum partners around the world who will be listening to us online and send messages to us in real time.

ABSTRACT. Our workshop would be a hands on introduction to Music Blocks, software we designed for teachers and learners to explore the fundamental concepts of music in a visual coding environment. Music Blocks is both innovative and beneficial to music education in a number of ways: On the one hand, it is a new method for understanding the fundamental concepts of music; on the other, it is a tool for learning coding and logic skills. It integrates both music and STEM fundamentals in a fun, scalable, and authentic way.

ABSTRACT. This community agrees that Seymour Papert is the father of constructionism and although his constructionist activity ranged from 1968 - 2006, much of the discussion at the past few Constructionism conferences has been focused on the "Mindstorms period" of the early 1980s. This workshop represents an attempt to broaden the lens on Papert's work to the last two active decades of his career and his seminal early publications from the 1960s and early 70s.

Over the past several years, the presenter has transcribed more than a dozen Papert speeches and interviews from 1990-2006. Many of the Papert speeches began as video recordings now being published online. Once the transcripts of these "publications" are fully edited, the text and associated media files will be archived online at The Daily Papert (http://dailypapert.com), a site curated by the presenter.

In addition to the newly discovered Papert documents being made available, the presenter has been searching for and sharing elusive papers and articles chronicling Papert's earlier foundational work.

Participants in this workshop will have the opportunity to explore, read, watch, and discuss "new" pieces of the Papert oeuvre. Powerful ideas gleaned from the works may be shared online or during the presenter's related paper presentation.

It is critical to have fresh eyes approach these documents, not just for the sake of constructionism research and sustaining the legacy of Dr. Papert, but to ensure accuracy and make these artifacts available to the entire world.