User:Tonyforster

http://tonyforster.blogspot.com/

forster at ozonline dot com dot au

Interests: Activities which maximise the opportunity for self-directed learning: low floor, wide walls and high ceiling with particular emphasis on the walls and ceiling. My favourites: turtleart, scratch, etoys.

Currently user testing turtleart and Sliderule

Preschool student Activities

Radia Perlman in the 70s when at student at MIT did extensive experiments with preliterate children and the LOGO turtle and built a number of interfaces for them. She also spent some time at Xerox PARC and did many similar experiments with chldren 3 years on up.

http://www.formatex.org/micte2006/virtual/pdf/582.pdf see fig 3 with plastic cards showing visual images of turtle commands

http://www.formatex.org/micte2006/virtual/ppt/582.ppt similar image

http://logothings.wikispaces.com/ towards the end, photo of Radia Perlman's Button Box for Pre-Schoolers

http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~mcnerney/personal-ubicomp.pdf more discussion than the above

Turtle Art - text free

To what extent could pre-literate children use Turtle Art?

Are graphics on blocks really better than text?

Does keeping text labels help develop literacy?

What graphics are best?

Some features, eg. the heap are unlikely to be used by pre-literate children, should they be omitted or retained with text labels?

The following graphic is a discussion starter

or another [suggested layout]

Text-less outdoor lesson

Sliderule

• http://tonyforster.blogspot.com/2010/09/pippy-sliderule.html Pippy File:Pippy sliderule.doc
• http://tonyforster.blogspot.com/2010/09/turtle-sliderule.html Turtle art
• http://www.freewebs.com/schoolgamemaker/#lobject Game maker
• File:Slideruletute.pdf tutorial

Software Freedom Day Melbourne 2010

File:Softwarefreedomday10.pdf presentation

http://luv.asn.au/sfd2010/ photos

Sea Surface Temperature Mapping

Sea surface temperature mapping Inspired by http://oceanpc.org this reads temperature data available at http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/sst/sst.html

The data format is described at ftp://eclipse.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/ersstv3b/README

The first record in the file reads:

-9999 -9999 -9999 -9999 -9999 -9999 -9999 -9999 -9999 -9999   -19    13    18    11     7    25    64   132   255   427   607   791   990  1198  1408  1616  1816  1999  2149  2258  2327  2360  2365  2355  2347  2359  2393  2443  2500  2568  2654  2736  2789  2826  2869  2904  2911  2903 -9999 -9999 -9999 -9999 -9999 -9999 -9999 -9999 -9999 -9999 -9999 -9999 -9999 -9999 -9999  1489  1432 -9999 -9999 -9999 -9999 -9999   713 -9999   656   715   780   796   744   669   596   476   298   156   113    70  -134  -180  -180  -180  -180

-9999 represents land, the other numbers are degreesC x100 This record represents a line running from the south pole through to the north pole in 2 degree increments at lattitude 0 for the first month and year. The next record is for lattitude 2 degrees east and so on.

Challenges

• Display the other months and years in the file
• Display the month and year in the title bar
• Animate the display
• Do a legend
• Map other data
• Error checking
• Display partly corrupted data sets without crashing

File:Write Activity sst.odt Pippy code

http://www.box.net/shared/3jgpkdibgq this zip file contains a surface temperature data set