CONSTRUCTIONISM 2016: CONSTRUCTIONISM IN ACTION 2016
PROGRAM FOR FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 5TH
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09:00-10:00 Session 16: Plenary 4
Location: Main Auditorium (2 fl)
09:00
Constructionism Lifetime Achievement Award

ABSTRACT. This is a special interview of Cynthia Solomon who have been selected to receive an award for her achievements in and contributions to Constructionism and the use of computation in learning. This session will be an interview by Richard Noss.

10:00-10:30 Session : Break
Location: 2nd fl open space
10:30-12:30 Session 17A: Papers: Math, Programming, Robots
Location: Main Auditorium (2 fl)
10:30
Summer League: Supporting FLL Competition
SPEAKER: unknown

ABSTRACT. In the years 2013-2015, we organized three years of a comptetition in building and programming robots in Slovakia named Letná liga FLL (Summer League of FLL). We invented and designed the competition format. All the tasks are our original ones. The competition has a unique format allowing the teams to compete remotely, eliminating all travel costs. It drops the requirement of time-demanding preparations lasting many weeks that is present in most common robotics competitions, such as RoboCup Junior, FIRST LEGO League, and World Robot Olympiad. However, this competition stimulates an unprecedented level of creativity and provides an early and manifold feedback in a repetitive fashion. All solutions of the teams are published after the deadline, each being unique and special. After extensive, but well-motivated work on every task, each team compares their own solution with a plethora of other ways of thinking about the same problem. Children learn from each other on a great scale. We experience an euphoric shock and a feeling of nirvana when evaluating the various solutions after each round. The feedback from the participants has been positive and the dedication of many is beyond our early expectations. This format stimulates a regular and goal-oriented work in the after-school robotics clubs. An additional valuable outcome of our work is the set of 30 creative activities focused on various aspects such as robot design, robot control, programming, use of sensors, navigation, manipulation, physics, art, and other. Each taks has multiple and inspiring solutions. Activities can be solved in 1-3 club meetings. Everything is freely available on-line.

11:00
Learning Intentions and Educational Robots
SPEAKER: Dave Catlin

ABSTRACT. Some teachers run excellent lessons with educational robots. Others fail. Good teaching practice, is the key to success and prevails despite diverse and difficult challenges. What is good practice? How can we make sure teachers apply it to educational robots? In previous work, I proposed Assessment for Learning (AfL) answered these questions and provided a way to improve the success of educational robots. Learning Intentions is one strand of AfL. In this paper I review teacher and expert opinion on this topic. I review the previous publications on AfL and educational robots. Finally I suggest some guidelines, illustrated with examples, on how to apply these ideas to educational robots.

This paper is based on experiences with Turtle type robots the Valiant Turtle, the Classic Roamer® and the Roamer®.

11:30
Math-based Coding Education in Korean School
SPEAKER: unknown

ABSTRACT. Recently, the Korean Ministry of Education announced three policies for education -software (SW) education, free semester system, and character education - to strengthen the future skills of learners. The implement into schools of the policies, however, has been hindered by the absence of curricula and the ambiguity of the assessment that meet the purpose of each policy. A way to resolve the problem is proposed in the study by reflecting Constructionism. An educational program, based on Constructionism, will foster the future skills of learners through 'learning by making'. (In Fig. 1,) where the program is summarized, exploratory activities through symbolic coding lead to meaningful experiences through physical coding, which in turn leads to another exploration on the next level. Within the process of coding, symbolic coding exploration is expected to promote learners’ computational thinking (CT) competencies and physical coding experience is expected to enhance their career skills and communication competencies, respectively.

12:00
3D turtle coding activities for Korean primary education
SPEAKER: unknown

ABSTRACT. The recently revised national curriculum for primary school in Korea inserted constructive activities with "linking cubes" for 6-th grade math class to improve students’ spatial abilities. In addition, with the worldwide trend to regard coding education as great important, the Korea Ministry of Education announced that the class for coding be mandatory at primary schools after 2018. However, due to the absence of appropriate expressive systems for the shape of 3D cube stacks and the paucity of coding educational tools for primary school students, the schools will be suffered from a lot of difficulties to teach it. (As presented in Figure1,) 3D coding activities with the 3D turtle representation system and the 3D printer were designed to present the solution to overcome the hindrance. Moreover, the 3D turtle coding activities are expected to play the role as a bridge between primary schools and middle schools in both mathematics and coding education, which will make the students possible to enhance spatial abilities in linked curricula.

10:30-12:30 Session 17B: Papers: Emotion & Engagement
Location: Library (9 fl)
10:30
Beyond lesson recipes: first steps towards a repertoire for teaching primary computing
SPEAKER: Chris Shelton

ABSTRACT. In 2014, the UK government introduced a new National Curriculum for state schools in England with a greater emphasis on computer science and computational thinking. Teaching this new curriculum presented challenges to many primary school teachers and led to a demand for professional development and exemplar teaching resources. This paper argues that many of the resources created in response to the revised curriculum are ‘recipes’ for lessons that fail to prepare teachers to teach challenging and purposeful computing lessons. It argues that, instead of providing recipes, we need to develop teachers’ ‘repertoire’ of strategies for teaching computing and that our approach to doing this should take account of the context in which primary teachers now work.

The paper describes professional development practices designed to help less confident teachers take their first steps away from model lessons and towards computing projects that reflect the needs and interests of the pupils they teach.

In particular, this paper will focus on two aspects of these practices: a teaching sequence intended to scaffold teachers in planning and teaching computing, and an approach to meeting the needs of the range of learners in a primary classroom through self-directed challenges. These were intended to support primary school teachers in improving their confidence and capability to plan and teach computer programming.

11:00
Assessing Interpersonal Relationship Among Peers in a Constructionist Classroom: a Probabilistic Method
SPEAKER: unknown

ABSTRACT. This paper proposes an alternative approach to probabilistically assess some aspects of learner’s interpersonal relationship with their peers in classrooms using minimal information. We collected the data in a constructionist classroom of 8 students in Grade 2 at Darunsikkhalai School for Innovative Learning in Bangkok, Thailand. Total time spent with peers and the number of peers surrounding a student whose interpersonal relationship we are interested in studying were recorded on a random 17 days in one semester (comprising 60 days). We presented a probabilistic analysis to estimate the expected number of peers surrounding any student who is not the one we are interested in. In this way, we can compare the amount of peers surrounding a student of interest to that of a generic student. The preliminary results showed that a student of interest expressed varying degree of interpersonal relationship in different classes, or learning environments. This method allows us to maximally explore the potential of extracting maximum information from minimum data collection. Moreover, it can be a useful tool to help facilitators identify or design learning environments suitable for certain students.

11:30
Learning Emotional Aspects of Digital Competence By Creating Artefacts
SPEAKER: unknown

ABSTRACT. This contribution presents a 45-min workshop on media education designed for 11-years old children (grade 6). After a brief introduction offering some background information, the children are challenged to be creative. They work in groups of three or four plus a student from a pedagogy class (grade 12) as “gamemaster”. Using “task cards”, the children create stories or images individually and then present and discuss them within the group. After that, each group creates a drawing or Lego sculpture collaboratively. Workshops of this kind covering “cyber-bullying” have been conducted with 120 pupils

12:00
Samba School of the 21st Century : Learning in the Break Dance Community in Bangkok

ABSTRACT. The objective of this study is to observe the mechanics of learning in this dance community. I have also analyzed one case study in depth from observations and an interview of a dancer who found that Bboy dance experiences transformed his life and helped him improve his academic achievement in school. This study might give us some ideas on how to redesign learning and intervention in order to deliver “Samba School” (Papert, 1980) learning experiences in formal school context.

10:30-12:30 Session 17C: Papers: Tools & Powerful Ideas
Chair:
Location: Constructionism Lab (10 fl)
10:30
Exploring randomness and variability in statistics through R-based programming tasks
SPEAKER: unknown

ABSTRACT. In this paper we present a computational programming activity using R code (http://www.r- project.org/), for exploring randomness and variability in statistics, as carried out by two pairs of 2nd-year university environmental sciences students in Mexico. This activity is part of a larger set of over 30 R-based constructionist and collaborative programming activities, developed over the last 5 years, for the teaching and learning of experimental analysis and statistics, which we presented at the 2014 Constructionism conference (see Mascaró, Sacristán & Rufino, 2014), and that have so far been implemented in 13 university courses in three institutions in Mexico and Portugal, with successful results. Through these activities, the students carried out explorations in R that helped develop meanings for the concepts of randomness and variability, as well as introducing them to statistical functions, tools and representations, in a “functional” way that they can eventually appropriate for their future research activities.

11:00
Programming videogames with models of physical parameters: some examples
SPEAKER: unknown

ABSTRACT. In the past three years we have been involved in a project (Pretelín-Ricárdez & Sacristán, 2015) with last-year engineering students at the National Polytechnic Institute in Mexico, where they are presented with a sequence (stages) of individual and collaborative activities for constructing (designing and programming) videogames that have mathematical models (e.g. fluids, simple machines, robots, digital circuits, physical parameters, etc.) integrated into game mechanics. With this, we want students to apply their mathematical knowledge in their model and videogame constructions, and in this way learn to situate or contextualize it, as well as relate it to other disciplines, as is required in engineering in real life. In this paper, we provide four examples of students’ designs during the first stage of the activity sequence, which corresponds to the learning or familiarisation with a game engine (in this case, Game Maker Studio), its physics engine and its programming language. In this stage, we ask students to design and implement experiments to characterize a set of basic physical parameters used in the game engine: density, restitution, friction, linear damping, angular damping, velocity, force, impulse and acceleration of gravity. The purpose of this, is that during the design and implementation of experiments, students learn to relate the meaning of a command or piece of code, and other computational objects (sprites, backgrounds, sounds), with a concept (mathematical or physical) or mathematical equation. By assigning objects (Fig. 1) with mathematical or physical properties, they can develop a videogame (Fig. 2), where the correlation of meanings, helps build more complex models.

11:30
The Imaginatorium
SPEAKER: unknown

ABSTRACT. The Imaginatorium is a low-tech Maker Space being installed at De La Salle University in Costa Rica. It has its roots in the Fab Lab from the MIT Media Lab, the LuTec at the Institute of Technology of Costa Rica and the Patagonia Lab (Pata Lab) in Chubut, Argentina. With Constructionism at its heart, The Imaginatorium aims to stimulating innovative and creative people, mostly generous with their knowledge looking forward a more caring, equitable and peaceful world.

12:00
Turtles All the Way Down: Presenting LevelSpace, a NetLogo Extension for Reasoning about Complex Connectedness
SPEAKER: unknown

ABSTRACT. In this paper we present LevelSpace, a fundamental extension to the NetLogo agent-­based modeling language and software. NetLogo provides a low-­threshold, high-­ceiling environment for creating models of complex systems;; LevelSpace enables multiple NetLogo models to interact with one another in “model ecologies.” The LevelSpace extension does this by allowing curriculum designers, researchers, and learners to programmatically open, run, and close models from inside the NetLogo language, thus allowing entire models to function as agents within Multi-­Level Linked systems. The paper first presents existing research on using agent-­based models (ABMs) in education as a supportive environment for fostering complex systems thinking. It then argues that existing design tools are limited in the ways in which learners can engage with and question the assumptions built into ABMs or the conceptual boundaries that ABMs implicitly or explicitly draw around the phenomena they model. As a remedy for these limitations, we present LevelSpace and demonstrate how we have used it in two early studies to support and study thinking about Multi-­Level Linked systems. We argue that connecting models in this way is a powerful constructionist design tool, both for eliciting thinking about individual and linked systems and for building and refining such systems in educational contexts.

13:30-16:00 Session 18A: workshop
Location: Constructionism Lab (10 fl)
13:30
NetLogo Web: Bringing Turtles to the Cloud
SPEAKER: unknown

ABSTRACT. This workshop will be a hands-on introduction to the recently released NetLogo Web platform. NetLogo is a widely used agent-based modelling (ABM) environment that has widespread use in classrooms and research laboratories around the world. The NetLogo Web project brings this popular platform into the cloud, making it fully accessible through any modern browser. This means netbooks, tablets, and even smart phones, can now serve as platforms for designing, implementing, and running powerful agent-based models. The goal of this workshop is two-fold: (1) introduce learners to the next iteration of NetLogo and (2) demonstrate the pedagogical and expressive power of having a fully functional ABM environment in the browser.

13:30-16:00 Session 18B: workshop
Location: Main Auditorium (2 fl)
13:30
And now for something completely different: ToonTalk - a programming language that is not textual, block-based, or procedural
SPEAKER: Ken Kahn

ABSTRACT. The motivation behind this workshop is to introduce some different ways of thinking about computation. As Marvin Minsky wrote “If you understand something in only one way, then you don't really understand it at all” (Minsky, 1984). Nearly all constructionist programming languages are based upon the idea of users defining procedures. In some cases those procedures are associated with sprites or objects but the range of computation models is narrow. Many languages support concurrent computation but the ways in which these parallel computations communicate and synchronise is limited. Logo pioneered a syntax that was easier for beginners to read, write, and understand. Scratch and other block-based languages introduced a new kind of syntax that makes the construction of programs simpler and much less error-prone. Text and blocks, however, are not the only kinds of syntax possible.

Seymour Papert once described Logo as the result of “child-engineering” the best ideas in computer science. In 1967 the Lisp programming language exemplified these ideas and strongly influenced the design of Logo. Computer science today contains many other ways of describing computation based upon logic, constraints, actors, higher-order functions, data flow, or rules.

ToonTalk (Kahn, 1996) grew out of the goal to once again “child-engineer” the best ideas in computer science. Concurrent constraint programming (Saraswat, 1993) was chosen as the framework for the design of ToonTalk. Another set of computer science ideas that were crucial to the design of ToonTalk was the work on programming by demonstration or by example (Kahn, 2001). Another idea is that the syntax of a program could be not only visual but animated.

This workshop will introduce participants to ToonTalk Reborn (Kahn, 2014) a new web-based implementation of ToonTalk. It runs on any device with a modern web browser, though it is easier to use on a laptop than with a touch device. More details in the paper "Integrating programming languages with web browsers" in the conference proceedings.

No prior programming experience required. Any number of attendees welcome. A projector required. A good Internet connection is very desirable but not necessary.

13:30-16:00 Session 18C: workshop
Location: Library (9 fl)
13:30
Videogame construction with models of physical parameters
SPEAKER: unknown

ABSTRACT. In this workshop, participants will construct videogames that require the use of models of basic physical parameters (e.g. friction, force, velocity, gravity, density, linear damping, angular damping) in the game mechanics within the story. It illustrates an approach where students can gain a deeper understanding of those physical concepts, their functioning and possible applications in realistic systems or situations (RSS) from physics, computer science, etc., in a fun constructionist (Papert & Harel, 1991) way (the videogame construction.

Figure 1. Construction cycle and model implementation in the videogame The workshop consists of a learning sequence with three activities (see further below) where the following construction cycle is carried out (see Figure 1): (1) A RSS is proposed related to engineering; participants will have to model this RSS for implementing it into the game mechanics of a videogame. (2) Participants will need to identify the physical parameters in those RSS and describe them through algebraic formulas or equations (help cards will be provided for this): this is a first mathematical characterization. (3) That first mathematisation of the RSS will need to be converted (abstracted) into a working model in the game engine computer code, in order to: (4) test it and validate it, in a first simulation. Here are two possibilities: If the implementation does not work, then (5) the model needs to be simplified or adjusted –i.e. abstracted again through the manipulation of computational objects and programming code, repeating steps (3) and (4). If the simulation runs properly, then we go to we have a model in context (6) that is ready for the final implementation in the videogame (7).

16:00-16:30 Session : Break
Location: 2nd fl open space
16:30-17:30 Session 19: Plenary 5
Location: Main Auditorium (2 fl)
16:30
Computational Thinking in School: reviving programming in the context of digital culture

ABSTRACT. Panel of specialists to discuss and understand: a) What is computation thinking? b) Can computational thinking only be developed through programming? c) What is the relation between what is being proposed as computational thinking and the powerful ideas of Papert? Are we just switching terminology?

The panel should be formed by 1) Specialist from East Europe 2) Specialist from the UK 3) Specialist from Italy 4) Specialist from the USA

17:30-17:45 Session : Closing
Location: Main Auditorium (2 fl)