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

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