“Programming and Creativity – Tools for a new education” : my research about the project in Bolivia

I just published in my Ubuntu One account my research about the project that I developed in Bolivia last year with the title: “Programming and Creativity – Tools for a new education.”

The main objective of this document is to serve as a way to plant a seed of thought toward a more creative education that make effective use of technology in countries like Bolivia.

It also reflects my own research on topics such as education and creativity, showing how I built all the project and trying to expose in the document the most basic concepts about some topics.

The link to the PDF document: http://ubuntuone.com/0VlxsjseKNnRvUIeLS5u7u (the document is in Spanish).

If you want the fonts of the document, soon I will upload them with the following format: .sla (because the document was done in Scribus).

The photographs shown in this post are pictures that I changed a bit and they show the richness and diversity of the OLPC projects around the world, from Uruguay and Peru to Nepal or Afghanistan. It is from this seed that children will begin to positively transform our rich and diverse planet.

 

The last day

Yesterday was our last day at the Children’s Home. What we did this last time was to deepen into some programming concepts (the most complicated throughout this project), and that are not yet fully understood.

A quiet Sunday where we spent the first hours finishing the project (understanding the concepts that were more difficult for children). Then we play and experiment with a new game for the Xo: Chess and Legends. A great game produced in Uruguay to learn how to play chess.

The past few days we realized that the “recycle game” that is on the web is quite difficult to beat, unlike the same game on the Scratch environment that is relatively easy to beat. Despite this, it is still possible to overcome it and after a lot of practice some children were able to do it (on the Web of course :-).

Here ends this great experience. Etoys and Scratch actually prove to be great creative programming environments with which children can create whatever their imagination wants. In addition, it is very important the facility for children to create things in other environments such as Pygame. They are really great tools for creating and sharing our work with the world.

The XO and Sugar are two great environments to work in this direction. I will finish (hope very soon) a research document about this project which identifies good and bad experiences with all the tools we worked with (the Xo, Sugar, Etoys, Scratch, and even pygame).

Also comment that in a University of Santa Cruz (NUR University) that was a participant in this project, began to take shape a “Research Center” through the career of Computer Science, which was inaugurated after the conference that I gave about the experience of our work at the Children’s Home. I hope over the coming months, this center will be consolidated and will have committed students who can give support to future projects like this. So, we will see how everything goes as time passes.

I will still blogging here, but this time from another reality: France. I will post more information soon because from France I will continue to investigate and mostly experimenting with the same tools that I used in this project and with another technological and artistic tools which I want to experience.

Say good bye and the Recycle Game in Scratch

The Videogame

Our Game is a little story – game made in Scratch that you can play it from here: http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/LuisGalindo/1945412

What we try to show in this story – game, is the recycle workshop that we did and that we hope it will continue and grow with the work of the children themselves, especially at the end of the year, in Christmas times, where children can make cards, books, notebooks and other materials with recycled paper generating profits for themselves and somehow putting their bit to solve the waste pollution problem.

Most game characters were drawn by one of the girls living in the Children’s Home: Wendy, and the story was worked with other girl: Evelyn.

The first part is the presentation of the story – game, the animation did not give many problems. The biggest difficulty in this first part was to understand the part where you click on your character for the story to continue, but in general there were no major difficulties.

In the second part (the restaurant), for the part where the characters talk to each other, there were no difficulties and everything goes well. Once the dialogue between these two characters ends, we can move Lunara (the character who visits the restaurant) forward and backward, then we can position Lunara on each “set of dump” and we will receive an explanation of another important character: “El Hombre Misterioso” (The Mystery Man). After reading the explanations of the “Mystery Man” appears to us a key on which we can click to move to the third scene. The biggest difficulty and so far still not clear is the use of variables in programming, a very important aspect of programming that is becoming clear as we practice (like everything in this World). The reality is that kids still do not handle well the issue and lack lot of practice to do so.

The problem of understanding variables became even bigger when we entered to the turtle game, where the use of variables becomes a very important aspect in building this part of the game.

In this third stage, our little turtle must collect 35 bottles or cans and avoid colliding with the red line that leaves behind as it moves. You have to remember that you have 15 seconds to collect each bottle or can. The good news is that you can click 3 times in the green trash that you have in the top to wipe out all the red lines left.

Understanding this third stage will continue to take time, so I will make 2 more workshops dedicated to the understanding of this stage that is clearly very difficult to assimilate.

If we get the 35 cans or bottles, we have the opportunity to enter to the last part of the game: the recycle workshop, where we can see the pictures of our work, recycling both paper and bottles. Also, we can see what we could do with other materials such as cans.

The whole project was a great experience, from our work with our games in Etoys to this new recycle game in Scratch. In just a few months is impossible that kids can make themselves more complex games, making a deeper use of programming tools, because the concepts are still unclear and they do not have a stranglehold on them. In my opinion this is a process that takes several years, and the research document that I’m writing about this pilot project will try to show the problems and successes in this experience during these months, I hope to have this document ready by September or October.

I think that working with videogames has a great potential in education, especially if children are playing an important role in the construction of games or simulators to represent or explain real life problems. This can be applied to almost all subjects, from mathematics, physics or literature, to music, art or design.

To create our story – game about our recycle workshop, we explored from how it is organized, planned and designed a project. We also work in the construction, design and interaction of the characters, in addition to the dialogue and the story itself, working with other software such as GIMP. And at the end one of the most important aspects of building this game for the analysis, problem solving, which involves entering a trial and error experience, was programming.

As we created this game of the recycle workshop, we could create small games or simulations on a myriad of issues that we have in school. It is a more enjoyable way of learning, because we are creating as we learn. One of the main words when we create something and see the final result is motivation. Of course, this work that mixes art and programming takes a few years of working with tools like Etoys, Scratch or the Python programming language itself, so I think it’s worth to follow this path of creativity.

We still have a couple of workshops for just deepen the management of Etoys, Scratch, and Python.

Say good bye

On Saturday, while the cold and rain was arriving to Santa Cruz, it was also the ‘Say Good Bye’ for one of the German volunteers who participated in the recycle workshop: Lena. I’m always grateful to Lena, Sabrina and Nicola for enriching this experience with the recycle workshop, which without them would not have been possible :-).

Pygame – Etoys: Simulations and balance

These days I was working on the comparison and evaluation when we work with learning-oriented simulations through two tools: Pygame and Etoys.

It is undeniable the power that simulations have when we show and explain something. It is much easier to explain something using a simulation than complicated and boring formulas. This applies to absolutely all fields and disciplines. But, if we create ourselves our simulations, the potential is even greater: enhancing creativity and motivation (we create something), plus the develop of different skills that we need to create our simulations.

For this occasion, I wanted to do a little test with Pygame, so i could compare different things with Etoys.

To enter the world of simulations, we have to understand different degrees (from zero to infinity) of Artificial Intelligence (AI). In other words we can create objects that replicate the real world, some of them just do something for what they are programmed over and over again, and others have the ability to react to different actions (they are “smart”).

I decided to take the example of a simulation made by Will McGugan in Pygame, the objective of this simulation is to show a nest of ants that collect leaves and defend themselves from other animals, in this case spiders. In this simulation, ants have the ability to think (Artificial Intelligence), as they are able to recognize a leaf, hold it, take it to the nest and go back to search more leaves, they are also able to recognize and attack a spider that is near to their nest.

Pygame, and Python in general, are very powerful learning tools, both for people who create educational materials or for the students themselves, they can create simulations as described above. In fact, the vast majority of activities in the Xo are made with Python.

One of the drawbacks of Pygame, that I also noticed in other activities for quite some time with the kids, but not only with them, but with most of the people, is related to the word “fear”. In this case, fear of “lines of code”, because we tend to associate “lines of code” with “something very complicated”.

Some time ago I read that this problem with the “lines of code”, was many years ago one of the most widely accepted criticals to the programming language for children created by Seymour Papert: Logo. And in my opinion, the evolution of Logo in the world of learning is strongly linked to Scratch or Etoys, focusing less on the code, and more on learning.

I think one of the great advantages of using Etoys in addition to their creative potential, is to encapsulate the “lines of code”, allowing us to create simulations, games, or whatever you can think, in a more natural way, so we can make big simulations without the need of many lines of code and in a more graphical way.

Of course, Etoys is oriented and designed for an education environment, but I think Pygame is infinitely rich if we go beyond the Etoys environment, searching a balance between both tools.

The mix of these two tools (Pygame and Etoys) when we work in a creative environment (in a creative educational world), in my opinion, has the greatest potential. The challenge ahead is to achieve this balance, between these and other similar tools.

I strongly believe that the balance between these two tools is the way to get in our hands a huge potential to promote creativity in education. It is for this reason that our work is focused strongly in Etoys and Pygame, plus some other activities that are in Sugar and contributes to the development of this challenge.