We could do a simple extension of Papert’s turtle
geometry activities from Logo or Boxer in Scratch to incorporate CT and geometry concepts. Those activities are well-established and seem to work well
for learning both the math content (at least exploring geometry in a new way)
and some programming knowledge. Although you can easily do the turtle geometry activities in
Scratch, the more flashy parts of Scratch kind of make the geometry stuff seem
boring to kids. Why would kids want to keep playing around with drawing shapes
when they can paint sprites and backgrounds, play with characters and sound,
make stories, etc.? I think it would be fine to use Scratch in this way in a
math class, but doing it in an after-school or more informal space seems less
appealing to some kids (some would enjoy it – and there’s one girl in
our math group now who’s been enjoying drawing really complex shapes – but some
would be bored). But maybe if we actually followed the activities that Papert created for the Logo turtle in Scratch, it would be interesting (he seemed to have lots of success with those activities with kids).
To assess their CT skills, we can start by looking at the code included in their projects to see what skills they use, then interview them about it (how they
developed their projects, if they got any help with the ideas, if they used
pieces from other projects they found on Scratch, what they did if they ran
into trouble/found an error, etc.). The interviews are important to reveal if
kids actually understand the concepts they’re using in the code. Really, we
should have a “system of assessments” (Grover, Pea, & Cooper, 2015) to get
a more comprehensive view of student learning, rather than just relying on
students’ code or multiple-choice tests. In that case, we’d want to look at
students’ projects, interview them about their projects, and give them
additional programming problems to solve. This is like what Brennan and Resnick
(2012) talked about in last week’s reading.
I wonder if giving them a chance to review other students' programs would be a different/good way to assess them. For example, we can ask students to play with a peers' program for a little so that they understand the concept of the design. Then, have them look inside and see if they can figure out what the function of each code is. This would help them in their collaborative, social community/participation (a la Kafai) as well as work on their ability to read and understand the actual code.
ReplyDeleteHello Amanda,
ReplyDeleteI can totally see your point about how boring drawing shapes could seem to some students who would rather do something else with Scratch. I also believe that the type of problem that students are given makes a big difference in how engaged students would be in it. For instance, Papert's exercises were extremely stimulating and exciting and I think might very well attract students even on Scratch. But I am not quite sure how to come up with similar attractive ideas!
I wonder if the system of assessments should be used as a way to confirm what we think they know - to see if the knowledge matched us - or if they should be used to measure different kinds of knowledge or different types of performances. Do we look for/count the same things in the different assessments or are we looking for/counting different things?
ReplyDelete