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Virtual keynote, programming languages for kids and ICT in Education

Posted in: Blog, education by James on May 18, 2009

On Saturday we attended the ICT in Education conference at Tipperary Institute in Thurles. Our primary role was to ‘beam in’  Daithi O’Murchu of Gaelscoil O’Doghair who delivered his keynote address virtually through a combination of videoconference and virtual presence. Daithi’s slideshow was projected in-world behind his suitably mustachioed avatar, which moved around a podium and gesticulated in time to the talk.

I’m sure this was a first in Ireland and we’re delighted with how smoothly it went. The feedback we’ve received is that it enhanced and enlivened the presentation, without distracting from the delivery.

Simon Lewis has a terrific report on the rest of the day’s proceedings but I’ll just add a few notes of my own from the workshops I attended - “What’s the story Alice?: Making animated movies using a cross curricular computer programming tool”, “A model computer studies curriculum” and “Learn Scratch: An introduction to Scratch Programming”.

First, some background on the choice to attend those talks. Our next challenge here at Daynuv is to take our Virutal Europe sim to another level of sophistication by adding interactivity to the landmarks and objects therein. That is; make them do something. In other words it’s time to start programming. But with Linden Scripting Language (LSL)? Is it an appropriate language to introduce primary school children to programming? I think not.

Case in point, I wanted to take a static door on one of our buildings and make it rotate on touch. So I used various Google searches to find any alternative I could to LSL coding by hand and luckily came across Scratch4SL (which was my first exposure to Scratch)

So I downloaded the free sofftware, read the brief instructions and within 15 minutes had programmed a sprite to rotate around it’s center.  Now I haven’t programmed since leaving college (14 years ago) so the ease with which I accomplished this task was entirely down to the software and interface.

Next step was to convert the Scratch script to LSL, a one-click process which spat out 480 lines of complex code! Imagine how long it would have taken to learn, compose and debug that LSL by hand,  from a standing start. More like 10 days than 10 minutes. Finally, I attached the code to my in-world door, re-compiled and voila - I had a nifty revolving door.

Thus my interest in attending two Scratch workshops at ICT in Education. The first, delivered by Eamon McQuade and Muireannn O’Brien, was really about desiging a computer studies curriculum but took the example of Scratch, followed by Visual Basic, as the most appropriate route to presenting software design concepts and pricinples to second level students. They believe that, for schools, computer language code should be readable, and development interfaces visual.

The second Scratch workshop, presented by John Hartery of CBS Tramore, was a real eye-opener. It was clear after 5 minutes that John is a gifted teacher as he had every attendee happily programming the cutesy Scratch mascot to jump and dance across the screen in response to various keyboard and mouse inputs. I was genuinely blown away by the capabilities of this application and started day-dreaming about the difference it could have made to my path through 3rd level education.

In CBS Tramore John uses Scratch as in introduction to programming and then progresses to Alice followed by BlueJ, the common denominator again being the emphasis on visual development environments. For anyone wishing to investigate further John has kindly published his course notes on Moodle.

The other workshop I attended was on Storytelling Alice. Jessie Bryne took us through the simple steps to create an animated 3D cartoon and again I was hugely impressed by what I saw. She explained how girls in particular are attracted by the storyboard driven interface and emphasis on creativity rather than programming. I don’t know if there’s any way to output LSL but it’s definitely something to follow up on.

All-in-all ICT in Education was a really excellent conference and tremendous credit is due to the organizers. Here’s looking forward to next year’s event.

 

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