Sugar Labs/Current Events
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This page is updated each week (usually on Monday morning) with notes from the Sugar Labs community. (The digest is also sent to the community-news at sugarlabs.org list, blogged at walterbender.org, and archived here.) If you would like to contribute, please send email to walter at sugarlabs.org by the weekend. (Also visit planet.sugarlabs.org.)
Sugar Digest
1. Twitter-style: Hello from Squeakfest in Wilmington, North Carolina. We just had a demonstration of some Etoys projects done by 7th graders; pretty amazing. One student, when asked what she does to keep from getting frustrated said: "Damn computer." But she is an accomplished problem solver.
This is the first conference I have been to in years where the majority of presenters are not using PowerPoint. Naturally, by-in-large, they are using Etoys for their talks.
It is great to see how teachers have incorporated the tool into their curriculum and the realities of school: even the kids built "quizzes" into their projects. But most of the learning is guided discovery.
In many cases, kids use Etoys from a USB drive, so they could take their work home and turn in their homework.
Bert Freudenberg showed an eloquent way to make animations in Etoys. I am inspired to finally add animation to my sprite library (the one I use for all of my activities: Turtle Art, Abacus, Visual Match, etc.) "Simply" a matter of adding paths and a timer. Yeah right.
Avigail Snir, a teacher from Illinois, showed a great example of exploring the modeling of gravity based on a simple basketball simulation. A remarkable thing was her use of a "book" to show the progress of her thinking along the path to discovery – the closest to a "lab notebook" as I have seen with Etoys (or any other learning program, for that matter). Lots more at [1].
Mahnaz Moallem talked about the challenges of making a transition from a well-defined, one best answer, discourage making mistakes classroom into an ill-defined, many answers, making mistakes and developing problem-solving skills classroom. She and her colleagues make extensive use of scaffolding and guiding to help kids stay motivated. Etoys "Flaps" are used for documenting what the kids have done. The consensus among North Carolina teachers at the conference is that there is a terrible constraint in the schools in terms of tightly-scheduled problem-based requirements imposed on the teachers.
Chandra Roughton posed a tough question: "Is this a model or is it [just] a visualization?" Etoys teachers think and do and demand a lot of each other and their students. What a breath of fresh air.
In the community
2. There is a new and improved website describing teacher resources (in Spanish) here: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Recursos_en_espanol
3. There will be a Turtle Art Day at the Arlington Career Center in Arlington Virginia on 7 August.
Sugar Labs
Gary Martin has generated SOMs from the past few weeks of discussion on the IAEP mailing list.
2010 July 10th-16th (66 emails)
2010 July 17th-23rd (36 emails)
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