Characters presentation – Scratch

The animations we made in Scratch are ready and on the Scratch website: http://scratch.mit.edu/.

I picked 4 of the 12 animations.

The main ingredient of this activity was the motivation to work with the Xo and Scratch, because the mere fact of having an Xo generates a great attraction, interest and curiosity of children.

Hope you enjoy! – the goal is to create a short story with the characters.

Rigaud School – CE2 (8 – 9 years old)

Rigaud School – CM1 (9 – 10 years old)

Saleilles School – CM2 (10 – 11 years old)

Saleilles School – CM2 (10 – 11 years old)

Advertisements

What is done, What is next

Done

At this point, despite some problems, the kids from the Children’s Home, in a certain way, they already feel comfortable with the Etoys and Sugar environment. They know how to take photographs and videos, import and use them in their book, enlarge and reduce images inside Etoys (the halo), duplicate them, use the Supply Box to import items that they can use, etc.

Something extraordinary so far is that little awakening of creativity that is still in process. In addition, another amazing thing, are those questions that have been generated in childrens:

• Can we make our school activities in these computers? (Asks a little boy)

  This question is very valuable and interesting because it is through the kids who started this change to a different education through new technologies and arts, with the effective integration of both (technology and arts) and not simply as a course that does not do too much, as it happens currently (of course, in schools that can afford to have a center with computers or other similar tools).

• Can i make a game? really? I want to make a game! (Asks another little boy)

  This is one of the most important things that have happened. Why? Because here comes the issue of motivation, being able to create their own game, motivate them so much that they could be hours and hours learning how to do their game. Using this motivation to transform education is invaluable and in my opinion, the potential tools to achieve this are the new technologies, specifically in this case, the game production.

• Wow! I want to do the same! (A little boy comment)

  Again we enter to the subject of motivation, but this time through the simulations for learning. As Alan Kay said, is much more fun and productive learning through simulations. For example, to better understand the story of the 35 camels i created a simple simulation where the kids could interact with this little story to understand and analyze it better, my attention was on how they love to move the camel with the joystick, everyone wanted to move it!

• Will the school let us use computers in class? I think not … (A little girl comment)

  
  One of the biggest obstacles i encountered on this path is the vertical mindset of the school, a process which I believe will take a long time to change and need everyone’s effort. This is like the activity of the particles in Etoys, we have to go spreading one by one to the people all over the city (and the world 😉 on this new form of creative education through new technologies and arts.

What is next

Now comes the moment of a great challenge to integrate older kids and make a game with Etoys. Through the book “The Man Who Calculated” we were seeing some basic things to achieve interactivity, but the truth is that this activity (scripts) has some complications to understand some concepts (this is normal and i expected some of these “problems”), so i thought it is a good idea to make the Ping Pong game (thanks to University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign).

I think through a project like this in Etoys (the game of Ping Pong) we will address many important concepts not only in the technical part (programming logic, gravity, etc..), but also concepts of organization and planning of our project.

Done

Contact with students of the University who are coursing the first semester.

What is next

This Saturday at 8:30 A.M. We will have a workshop with these students to explore the Xo, Sugar and some applications like Etoys and Scratch. Showing the potential of these and other activities and verifying the perceptions of the students. Do you think we can generate creative knowledge through these activities? How?. In addition to the research objective, another important goal is to generate interest in students to create a platform for research, exploration and production environment for new technologies to creative education.

In addition to this, there are two extra activities that i hope to summarize and organize efficiently, in a few days I’ll have more news about it. I want to finish this post with some thoughts of Seymour Papert that i just saw in this website [http://dailypapert.com]:

“Any adult who thinks one of these games is easy need only sit down and try to master one,” he writes. “Most are hard, with complex information–as well as technique–to be mastered.” Video games empower children “to test out ideas about working within prefixed rules and structures in a way few other toys are capable of doing” and “teach children what computers are beginning to teach adults–that some forms of learning are fast-paced, immensely compelling, and rewarding.”

Realities

A couple of days ago I was reading something that wrote Beth Santos at the Waveplace blog, amazed by how I identified with what I read, I would like to portray it again:

Mon, March 28, 2011 (beth)

Restavek Going Great

Just got an email from Shawna, one of the Restavek Freedom mentors. She says that they have reached Lesson 4 and that the students are learning really well.

After hearing from the other mentors about the work they’ve been doing with their kids– telling stories, doing math, perhaps long finished with Etoys– it might seem odd to be happy that the Restavek kids are only on lesson 4 of Basic Etoys.

But I want to explain to you why this is perhaps more miraculous than you may expect.

Restavek children are children that work for families for food and shelter. They are orphans, or have been sold by their parents. They are child slaves, offered no pay, and often treated with disrespect. Restavek Freedom is a remarkable organization that has worked wonders convincing families to allow these children to attend school and to gain a basic education. Their participation in the Waveplace program is, itself, astounding.

These students have never seen, let alone touched, a computer. Imagine how difficult it was for them to understand how a touchpad coordinates with your finger, or how you click on something to view more information about it. The students are hardly literate; can hardly type their names. Knowing this, the mentors were a little bit worried about how the students would come along in class.

On our last day, I had a little talk with the mentors before we left. I told them that these students were guaranteed to be slower than other students, simply because they had never really experienced formal education, basic literacy, or any sort of computer knowledge. This class would be challenging for them, but also exciting. The students will learn in leaps and bounds.

So imagine that these students are now actually learning how to coordinate their hands enough to draw objects, and then are able to change their settings so they can rotate, stretch, repaint, and move them in other ways. These students who didn’t know anything about what a computer was or how it could respond to human touch are now interacting with objects– that they created themselves– on a computer screen. These students, who are told day by day to work long hours with little rest, are now the ones telling an object what to do. With their computers, they are in charge.

Can you imagine how empowering that is?

In this case, beyond the differences, it is the same thing, these kids never touched a computer, so they never handled a mouse or type on a keyboard, and now by working with Etoys can make their own stories, with some difficulty for now, but as time goes by, they develop various skills.

The best thing about this is that they enjoy what they do, what they create. This is noticeable at several points: when it’s snack time (5:00 PM) the kids are so entertained by what they are doing, that they do not want to go down to eat! After several attempts, they go down to eat, but after 5 minutes, they’re back!. The same is true when I have to leave the Children’s Home, the place is a little out of town, so I prefer to return early while the sun is still up there, but the kids are doing something and usually say “hold on!, i will finish this little thing!”.

Sometimes I have many questions around about if it’s worth and not worth what are we doing with this or with that, but I think the way we are sowing this dream in many parts of the world, is the most appropriate way, and is a long, very long way.

The walls of inequality: walking into a creative society through creative education

Yesterday was a lovely day in the Children’s Home. From early afternoon we experienced working with Sugar, the XO and Etoys with children of different ages from 8 to 15 years old, using different approaches according to the age.

The goal of this workshop was to identify which activities would want to do the kids, showing them different proposals, ranging from school activities with Etoys to create a website by themselves to connect their future blogs.

In a talk, i gave a glimpse of the possibilities that gives us the Internet through websites and blogs. Then, the work was focused on exploration, principally on Sugar and Etoys.

What we did was have a base Etoys activity to work, a story with characters, drawings, games and animated elements, that they could explore, modify and do whatever they feel. The most significant changes in this exploration were the drawings and also the change of the texts to create their own stories. In my opinion, their first contact with Etoys (and in many cases a computer) was very positive, without any fear, especially the youngest that made many changes to the baseline activity.

So for the next week we have a concrete plan to work: do their homework with Etoys and if possible, carry the work forward to their school, so everyone can see the work done by the kids. The idea is to start with the work of stories. Through each story, we can embed photos, videos, pictures, text, animated characters, and even games, to simulate a more entertaining and creative homework by developing other skills such as logical thinking, team work, organization, design, planning, etc.

Another idea, that in fact is an idea that appeared in the list of OLPC – Sur (where i also want to share the work done) is the simulation of the book “The Man Who Counted” by Júlio César de Mello e Souza (Malba Tahan) in Etoys, made by the kids themselves, showing a different way of teaching math. We could call this work “math in the real life”, where kids study instead of complex formulas (that costs a lot to find it a meaning and utility), work through the application of mathematics in real life, in an entertaining way. This is an idea that kids will develop when they acquire a base in the management of Etoys and feel more comfortable with the tool.

Another thing that caused a lot of enthusiasm in the kids, is the fact that they can make their own games, activity that over time i have the confidence that it will be done, after acquiring several skills regularly.

After reading everything described above, may be you are wondering why the title of this Post?. Next, a little explanation.

At night, after saying goodbye to the kids, i went to eat pizza with some of the people that are helping on the project, in a crowded avenue of the city of Santa Cruz, “La Monseñor Rivero”.

On Saturday night, in this avenue we often see many young people from a social and economic status very different from the kids of the Children’s Home. In my head were spinning a lot of things, including the inequalities around access to education. Most of the young people that i saw in the Monseñor Rivero avenue have full access to smartphones, laptops and to the latest technologies and other resources in general.

The kids we work with in the Children’s Home can barely manage a computer keyboard, because they saw one, just a few times. Although many of them (over 14 years old) usually have a Facebook (thanks to the Public Internet Places where you can pay a few coins to have access to the Internet), they have very limited access to new technologies, so for them, have access to the Xo 24 hours a day, would be like an impossible dream.

Unfortunately, in my opinion, the authorities and some organizations have a confusion about this issue, thinking that training people with low economic incomes in computer tools is the solution, and spend many kinds of resources on projects with just this objetive.

At the end, the education that receive most of the kids that i saw last night at the Monseñor Rivero avenue and the education that receive the kids from the Children’s Home where we are working is just as conductive in both cases, maybe the first kids have air conditioning and a computer room, and the other kids do a great effort to have a desk in the classroom, but education in the background is the same, with or without technological and other new resources is an education from the XIX century.

In my heart i have the hope that this experience, beyond how small (tiny very tiny) it is, with kids who have no parents, forgotten by society, is that these kids will expand this initiative, working for a XXI century education, creative, free, innovative, fearless, giving them alternatives they can use in real life, breaking down the walls of different forms of inequality through creative education.