Computers 4 kids spring 2024 showcase recap!

Octostudio allowed us to create a true immersive and interactive "Exploratorium, that brought "tech to life" and not the other way around! In fact, I had a solid following of 4-5 year old learners Friday (siblings of the c4k makers) and they showed me how to make the kaleidoscope project better!

Stay tuned, as I'll continue work on integrating triggers you can script using Octostudio iPad device functionality for plug in using micro bit and Arduino. And true to MIT Media Lab, they take rather complex concepts:

The accelerometer sensor measures constant (gravity), time varying (vibrations) and quasi static (tilt) acceleration forces, which affect the device on the three axes (x, y and z) in meter per second squared (m/s2) [14]

[Bluetooth ... exchanges] ... data between fixed and mobile devices over short distances and building personal area networks. In the most widely used mode, transmission power is limited to 2.5 milliwatts, giving it a very short range of up to 10 meters.

In mathematics, a variable is a symbol that represents a mathematical object. A variable may represent a number, a vector, a matrix, a function, the argument of a function, a set, or an element of a set

and make native phone and iPad features ("tilt", "shake", "beam", "make a variable") super approachable and fun so that it all makes sense and "sticks with you" to generalize when kids encounter these ideas down the road to higher math concepts and just overall, "I wonder what if..." thinking!

I've contacted the MIT Media Lab Octostudio team to present Frisbee golf to see if they might consider highlighting its features (we at c4k added score and multiplayer scripts) as a remix from their original "catch" game I discovered on their YouTube channel!

And as if that wasn't enough in my lesson plan development, the Octostudio graphic edit allows for some really cool optical illusions that I replicated from the team's community post. Using their examples, I worked with a c4k mentee to create a  bike safety gif to send to a local non profit that provided this dedicated middle schooler a bike!

"You don't need the right to be forgotten until technology can remember us forever."

Tristan Harris, Center for Humane Technology.


Stay tuned for more AI discussions on this blog. But I wanted to post a link to a recent podcast interviewing Tristan Harris. So much to unpack that I'll use as topics for at least several coming posts!

 Citizen STEM educators needed!

My 2024 goals include a pivot from resource teaching STEM to pursuit as a full time Educational Tech/Research career commitment. And right on the heals of this goal, this week's Education Week article, "STEM Jobs Aren't Students' First Choice. More Hands On Experience Might Help Experts Say  supports the need for those of us in the field to make STEM more "real" and "achievable" to young learners as viable future career options when they plan courses of study down the road. I mean, that's the point of all these one-off K-12 STEM events we all spend so much time planning and teaching, right? In summary the article closes with:

"The findings point to the fact that despite students’ interest in STEM, they’re not finding viable pathways to those careers, or something prevents them from pursuing those careers, and we need to understand what those barriers are and address them,” said Maud Abeel, a director for Jobs for the Future, a national nonprofit that develops programs and public policies focused on boosting students’ college and career readiness."

What can we do? In my humble opinion:

We need to professionalize the career path for STEM citizen educators to make the very transition I'm undertaking! In my dedicated job hunt of late, I find absolutely no consistent strategy schools use to define such a role, much less incentivize folks with these talents. Lots of volunteer opportunities, very little, if any actual paid positions beyond $18/hr positions/event opportunities without insurance benefits. Keep in mind, STEM professionals start at $40/hr and up in their professions of training, many of us with advanced degrees.

Clarify/simplify the alternatives to STEM teaching credential path. One locality advertised their STEM position as a vocation education path, others as a librarian, mostly though, schools deferring to their science teachers or after school clubs to fill this STEM skills need.

Kids say they want to "code", but the reality is that we need citizen educators to demonstrate and shadow the thinking skills it takes to script code for their projects beyond slick graphic and audio rich drag and drop coding platforms, that frankly, bear little resemblance to what emerging integrated development environments are like in the real STEM world.

We have a LONG way to go in the real STEM world to make careers attractive beyond at best, a traditional young male reality, or at it's worst, employment outsourced to low wage countries that it largely represents today.

 OctoStudio Geek Out!

We had a wonderful Girls Geek Day 9Dec sponsored by UVa's Tech-Girls initiative and put MIT Media Lab's new OctoStudio to the test! 10 K-5 girls created projects in our 45 minute sessions and it was impressive how intuitive and engaging they found the platform. I also located an online OctoStudio manual, but mostly, there's more tips and tricks to discover by just clicking around ;)

I'm in the process of creating an OctoStudio lesson plan series for Computers 4 Kids (C4K) so in my early drafts, please see below for some early FAQ to get started:

I would suggest going directly to "Explore" for new learners. You'll see 7 sample projects to get started. Tip: 

If you click on "Try", a project will open and when you exit after making changes (which the platform saves for you automatically as you go along unless you "undo"), it will ask "do you want to save"? I would suggest at the outset, creating a copy from the Explore home page first, by going to the far right next to the sample project, click on the “...” and click on the double square icon (2nd from the left). This way you have a clean copy and this preserves the original project template - otherwise, you risk overwriting the sample if you click on "ok" to "do you want to save?".

As I find when I teach Scratch, kids really gravitate to the OctoStudio graphics editor to create their own sprites (characters) and backdrops (stage). And what a nice editor it is! With the added bonus in OctoStudio, that you can take a photo directly on the device you've downloaded OctoStudio, and the image automatically appears in the graphics editor and with a simple touch of your finger, you can trace around the image that snaps precisely around the object you want to turn into a sprite.

A couple of things to watch for:

If you have OctoStudio open for more than an hour, sometimes it will crash, meaning the editor screen locks up and you can't do anything. What we found is that if you exit the entire platform and restart, this resolved this issue.

The MIT Media Lab is still working on Android compatibility with their release, so sounds may not play, but "speak" blocks, which have a call to a nice text to speech API does work very nicely and was suggested by the MIT Med Lab advisor I contacted via Facebook (Programming in Scratch - Teacher Group)

Also I find the user interface (UX) vastly different using my phone vs using a tablet. More objects are visible and easy to access using a tablet (specifically i-pad) so I would strongly suggest using that approach for the most positive early experience playing around in OctoStudio.

Stay tuned as I release my OctoStudio lesson plans in Jan 2024 for middle schooler use, where I'm sure we'll uncover more scripting gems to share!

 OctoStudio!

24Oct, MIT Media Labs, the same group who brings us Scratch, released a new mobile version of Scratch called OctoStudio. I've tried it out in preparation for my 9Dec demos at the Tech-Girls Girls Geek Day event.

Here's a quick summary from MIT Media Labs about it:

Designed especially for children and families in communities with limited or no access to computers and internet connectivity…Children can create OctoStudio projects offline, without any data charges..

(KIds can) also integrate their creations into the physical world. For example, a child can place a phone in their pocket and program it to play sounds when they jump or dance ..

You will need an internet connection to download the app. The download is under 30MB in size. 

Once installed, the app is offline, no internet or network data is needed! So does not use data in order to create.

OctoStudio is not supported yet on computers, web browsers, or Chromebooks. 

Here are my early creating impressions using my Samsung A32 v13 phone ;)

Pros:

It is cool to integrate the native phone functionality, like "buzz" and "tilt" and "beam" into the familiar Scratch commands. However, "shake" does not work using my phone?

The graphics feature is really amazing, in that you can create sprites by snapping a picture and then tracing the outline directly with your finger on the image in a way that "snaps" to the edges of the object you want to make a sprite from, then auto cuts to create a custom sprite!

If you click on "Explore", there are 7 base projects with nice coding examples kids can open and remix to create their own versions to follow along with your demo. For instance, I plan to use "Virtual Pet" to create a "scored" game with 2 sprites interacting with each other.

Cons:

The Blocks are really crowded using the phone and you can't really tell what they do until you select them and they appear in the code editor.

The Blocks do not contain all of the functionality from Scratch 3.0, such as random glide, a command I like when creating games

It appears the settings on your phone/tablet might interfere with some OctoStudio functionality that aren't intuitive to enable? For example, none of the sounds from the OctoStudio library play currently on my phone.

The OctoStudio user forum was down this weekend?

I would say if you are planning to use Octostudio now, be prepared for glitches and I will plan to use it as a companion to my Scratch 3.0 lesson plan and hopefully the user forum will be up and running soon so I can post some tips and tricks!

 Is Chat GPT all that?

Never one to miss jumping in on exploring emerging technology to build lesson plans, Chat GPT is my 2023 summer project! And given it's "sentience", I should clarify, this involves me thoughtfully using it, not it thinking for me. And it's the "thinking for you" that gives many pause for thought.

Check out this Huffington article about a parent's experience co-building using it's story telling feature that captures this very concern. Whenever you standardize user experience prediction, you risk really missing the mark. What I'd really like to explore is working with kids to get "behind the curtain" to understand how AI "thinks" and how to influence that. This article give some great pointers such as making sure you define detailed prompts that I'll explore more to include:

• Ask it for a story prompt/outline and student writes the story
• Create a recipe and make the dish
• Help kids break down larger tasks and choose which tasks to tackle first
  
• Ask ChatGPT to quiz them to help them study for a test
• Create a trivia game for family game night
• Drawing prompts: Ask ChatGPT to write a description of a new creature and draw the creature based on the description
  
• Explore poetry by asking Chat GPT to generate rhymes or even a poetry challenge where AI and child alternate lines
• Kids interested in coding can use Chat GPT to seek help with programming concepts
• Children can discuss environmental issues with Chat GPT and brainstorm solutions for pollution and sustainability

In short, opening minds with the help of tech to see that "there are many ways to tell the same story".

 Tactility and the Metaverse

Check out this podcast with Jon Favreau interviewing angel tech investor, Matthew Ball, with a fascinating discussion about the ABCs of  the "Meta" concept, including a nice nod to the practical (or some may say, impractical) applications in the classroom.

What struck me is how the "Meta" movement dovetails so closely to my concept all along about teaching kids tech - the point isn't to learn a specific language, but to prepare young learners to embrace the "how and what if" mind. And so be it, that now "gamification" of most users' involvement with tech from your phone to smart technology in the home is the norm. And the podcast even points out: "75% of 9-12 year olds use a shared virtual 3D world at least 1x/week" (think Kodu, Tinkercad, Minecraft all things my blog and classroom sessions have covered over the years!).

In short, Matthew Ball explains that the metaverse is the internet in 3D that uses gaming infrastructure to communicate a virtual world. For example, depicting a virtual version of an airport layout to show folks safety options or how to get from one point to another interactively using a public touchscreen. Many associate "Meta" as virtual reality headset based (VR), but he explains, "Meta" is far from just that narrow definition.

Meta uses graphics based computing to do things such as how to show how if you have 18 people inside a room, to predict how that affects the environmental temp, humidity, etc. It essentially makes the physical world legible to software to improve our lives, such as defining energy efficiency to build 4D reality via 3D modeling.

As for education, which remember, we've discussed prior, where currently a teacher from 100 years ago could transport to a modern classroom (ha - is there a Meta answer to do that?), and see little difference in tools for how the basics are taught. Matthew Ball argues that Meta has the potential to disrupt the education space to reduce cost and increase who we reach. Increasing reach is a critical need we learned through COVID pandemic remote learning, where Meta addresses "tactility" to build virtual hands on and virtual "seeing" connections through personal avatars you "talk to/with" others in a shared immersed world that most kids now experience already and embrace in their weekly if not daily 3D gaming. Tactility keeps that basic hierarchy of needs to feel cared for and to belong, that 2 years of Zoom classroom encounters lacked leaving many kids, especially middle schoolers, out of loop and now behind the learning curve.

Click here to learn more about Matthew Ball and his metaverse primer.