Skip to main content Skip to navigation

2004/2005 CeNTRE Seminars

2005 CeNTRE Research Seminar Programme

Innovation

 

Learning using concrete virtual analogs of powerful abstractions: Lessons from ToonTalk, Playground, and WebLabs Ken Kahn, Institute of Education, London and Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
Tuesday 14 June 2005 4.30pm  

Many have extolled the benefits of learning by building and exploring computational models. But typically computer programming requires a mastery of complex computational abstractions. The research I'll be presenting describes a way to replace these abstractions with playful, animated, game-like, virtual objects without sacrificing expressive power. I'll present via live demos three systems that have explored this idea. ToonTalk is a general-purpose concurrent programming language that presents program building blocks in terms of familiar objects.

A ToonTalk programmer trains robots to manipulate boxes containing numbers, text, pictures, sounds, birds, trucks, robots, and other boxes. Birds are the means that program fragments coordinate and communicate. Trucks are used to spawn new sub-computations. The Playground Project provided tools to children 6 to 8 years old enabling them to make their own computer games. Playground built upon ToonTalk. It provided the children with transparent components and behaviours that could be assembled or broken down into for modification and reassembly. The WebLabs Project is providing children 10 to 14 years old with components and learning materials to explore science by building computational models and mathematics by building ToonTalk programs. Children publish their reports which typically include runnable models or programs on the project web site. Other children across Europe read and post public comments on these reports.

 

Designing for Building and Sharing Knowledge Richard Noss, Director London Knowledge Lab
Tuesday 31 May 2005, 4.30pm  
I take as a starting point two assumptions: that there is a rising demand on individuals and communities to understand something of how social and technical systems operate; and that increasingly, it is becoming more and more difficult to catch sight of how things work, as the mechanisms that drive them become ever more hidden in invisible computer code. Put simply, competence in constructing, interpreting, sharing and critiquing mathematical models has become a core part of social and professional life in the twenty-first century, but it is becoming more and more difficult to achieve that competence.

The implications for the design of learning systems are manifold. I will focus here on just two. First, we should try to design learning environments where people can make models of things, either physically or – my focus in this paper – virtually. Second, learners need to experience how to share and critique their models, to talk about interesting mathematical phenomena that underpin them.

Drawing on some recent research projects, I will illustrate the challenges we face in developing new representational infrastructures for expressing a range of ideas, and a prototype system with which students can share – not just the state of their evolving understandings – but working models of what they know.

 

Agile Development for Demanding Users John Dale, Assistant Director IT Services, University of Warwick
Tuesday 1 February 2005, 4.30pm  
Developing web tools to support staff and students in their teaching, learning and research is challenging at Warwick, because we have a large, heterogeneous population. Traditional models of software development, where requirements are gathered, a spec is written, and then software is developed to that spec, don’t work well where requirements are complex, heterogeneous and fast changing. Agile development aims to facilitate a better, more responsive way of developing tools to meet users’ needs, and we’ll look in this session at how Agile Development is used in e-lab, and what the tools and services developed using it look like – and why.