CAS Scotland

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Today, I attended the first Computing at School’s Scotland Conference in Edinburgh. This was a marvellous event on many levels.

1. It was over subscribed, yet over 100 Computing Teachers paid £20 probably their own money plus travelling expenses to give up their Saturday to meet with each other to try and progress their own subject.

2. There were a good range of speakers, all suitably qualified, well respected in their field who gave some of the best advice, guidance, thoughts or opinions about different challenges which face computing in Schools.

3. This wasn’t a greeting meeting! Everything was positive and constructive, forward looking and being for the benefit of and with the focus of learners experiencing computer education in the next few years.

4. It was a fantastic representation of support from the Government agencies, Universities in Scotland (and Kent), from Industry including Google, Microsoft, Adobe, Runrev and last but by no means teachers.

5. It was supremely well organised! Friendly, relaxed and everyone talked to everyone else.

I think that computing teachers sometimes get a bad press as being geeky, unapproachable and moaning. Well, certainly not those who were their today. We were proud and professional and I was glad to be one of them.

What did I learn? What will impact my learning and teaching? Lots! But that’s for a different post!

To all those who contributed, organised, presented or to those in the tweetisfere who I had the chance to meet in real life.

Thanks,

Colin

Greenfoot

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Many people I have spoken to have raved about the greenfoot development platform for Java.  I’ve been looking for a coherent stepping stone for pupils movingfrom Scratch/BYOB to a “real programming language.”  My first attempt has been a look at AppInventor with it’s Mobile Phone App appeal and commissioned materials from the Royal Society and backing from Education Scotland it certainly sounded like a good idea. However,  to get into AppInventor there are several hurdles to be overcome.  For example with google’s sign-in tests and the fact that every pupil would need to have a google account, the issue of domain name/website testing and general meddling I am more than a little disenchanted with the whole AppInventor thing.   This may not sound like an in surmountable issue but the fact that Google Apps for education do not allow for more than 50 accounts from a single IP address then forces schools into registering a domain,  completing a couple of tests to prove domain ownership before they will allow you to administer accounts for your school.  And there is always the issue about what do you do if somebody else in your establishment has already signed you up!!!!  issues barriers coupled with the fact that we are on the beta version treadmill and currently on Beta version 128 and counting and the possibility of having to constantly repackage and redeploy the downloadable elements of the package at expense to the school every time mean that I have gone seeking better solutions.  Greenfoot was next on my list.

Greenfoot is a project in the Programming Education Tools Group, part of the Computing Education Research Group at the School of Computing, University of Kent in Canterbury and is well supported coming from the same stable as BlueJ the well established IDE Greenfoot Logofrom Java used in many Universities around the globe.  Many of my colleagues have already looked at this and recommended it to me but as you all know it takes time to evaluate these things properly and I’ve spent the last fortnight downloading and watching snippets from YouTube whilst considering Greenfoot.

There are many videos to get you started from Professor Michael Kölling one of the developers of both BlueJ and Greenfoot and his mini series the “joy of code“ shows many transferable coding techniques which can be used in your own scenarios.  Coupled with the gallery of downloadable programs written by others from the greenfoot website make this a very attractive proposition in my opinion.

We currently use Scratch from MIT in S1-S3, it is amazingly accessible for youngsters learning Computational concepts.  However, you reach a point where you need to move on from this very simplistic environment and introduce programming with code and associated constructs.

Greenfoot fills that gap in my mind.  Greenfoot is based on Java and  provides a simple Java based programming environment where pupils can transfer their skills from Scratch and implement them using actual code allowing them to develop some debugging skills and some programming style along the way.  I have watched all the videos on youtube by Professor Kölling and whilst doing so could easily identify lots of reusable blocks of code which could be used in my own programs.  I have been recreating the scenarios demonstrated in the video and this is an excellent way of developing understanding and building my confidence with the environment and syntax.  I’ve also ordered a copy of the book!  I’ll be interested to see what’s in that too!

What I’d Like to do!!!!

Eventually, I’d like to develop the games of my childhood.  I’d like to use greenfoot to see if I can emulate; Pacman, JetPac, Trans Am, Manic Minor and Chuckie Eggs of my childhood!  Would these be projects which pupils of today could experience as a result of our own coding sessions?  It’s an aspirational target at least!

The downside? Well it’s a lot more complicated than Scratch.  Can we bridge the gap.  I’d eventually like to bridge a further gap towards Java as I believe all the Scottish Universities all use Java in their first year Computing Science Courses.  And my first thoughts would be to head towards BlueJ again developed by those who have brought us Greenfoot.

What’s Next?

So my next challenge is to try and incorporate some of these coding techniques into a coherent course which covers all aspects of the new National 4/National 5/Higher courses and see if this is achievable for our  students in the timeframe permitted.  If not, it might be on to …. Alice …?

However, lets not jump the gun.  I have enjoyed using greenfoot so far and urge you all if you haven’already to have a look.  If I come-up with some resources then I’ll see if can share them with you all.

Colin

Raspberry Pi – First Boot!

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After registering with RS Components and Element 14/Farnell on the launch day of the Raspberry Pi way back in February I can finally report that the second of the Raspberry Pi’s have been delivered today. This was just in time as one of the those which I ordered I was giving to a friend of mine – Andreas Ronge (@ronge). Here is a wee photo of our excitement of the first boot up of his Raspberry Pi.

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I have been waiting for this moment for months and was worried that I wouldn’t receive the second Raspberry Pi in time. The best bit! Andreas didn’t even know he was getting one! It was a compete surprise! Wasn’t it!

Anyway we are both now enjoying our first foray into the world of Raspberry Pi. Although, thanks to the blogs, wiki’s and YouTube articles the downloaded Debian squeeze images onto the Level 4 San Disk SD cards worked first time without hitch.

I’ll give a full run down of the setups used at a future juncture.

For now! I’m just happy when a plan comes together.

Raspberry Pi and Scottish Software Development in Education

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Where do I expect my use of the Raspberry Pi to go?

Well there has been much play of the use of the Raspberry Pi to re-establish programming amongst youngsters in school and the need to bring back computing in school. This issue is different for those of us who live in Scotland as our education system never let go of Computing.

In our junior school we teach programming using scratch and have done for a few years now. This is the most recent addition to programming within the curriculum. 20120426-005240.jpg
The raspberry pi can further help pupils play with scratch as can be seen on some of the youtube videos demonstrating Raspberry Pi. More traditionally most Scottish Secondary Schools teach Computing Studies at Standard Grade which includes an introduction to programming which includes sequence, selection and iteration. We use Visual Basic to deliver this element of the course. However we have previously used pascal, comal and basic in years gone by.

At Higher, we further teach parameter passing, modular programming and simple searching whilst at Advanced Higher we study Searching Techniques, Sorting Techniques, File Handling, Record Structures, Classes, Polymorphism and Encapsulation and pupils create a project which encompasses some of these features.

Many schools, like ours, elect to study the Artificial Intelligence and use prolog to allow pupils to develop their knowledge.

Are we overly complacent about this? No!

That’s why we agree wholeheartedly with the philosophy of the Raspberry Pi. I’d like to see them used to allow pupils to develop their programming skills and having watched many tutorials from many YouTubers like Liam Fraser (RaspberryPiTutorials) and Metalx1000. I’ve spent many hours learning python using these tutorials and others from MIT via iTunes U. Personally, this has been a very interesting learning experience but even knowing a lot about computing my main observation is that for a large number of learners there is a large learning curve.

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One of the other nice things is that the open source cross platform nature of python allows pupils to continue to develop their skills outside of school. This is a hurdle with respect to Visual Basic which we currently use. If pupils can program at home as well as school then we can further develop the curriculum beyond that which we currently offer.

In that direction I’d like to start a Pi club which pupils could come to at school.

Our curriculum is moving on… We have a new national curriculum, a Curriculum for Excellence, which is gong to take us a further step forward. Programming will increase in this new curriculum and the development of computational thinking will develop further. One of the further considerations which I have in this respect is given our finite allocation of time and what language should we teach. Yesterday, I attended the Learning Through Technology conference at Our Dynamic Earth by Holyrood. At this conference, I had a brief chat with a senior professor who shall remain nameless. Whilst computational thinking should be our focus rather than any specific language the reality is that the 14 Scottish Universities seem to rely on Java as their language of choice when is comes to teaching programming. This begs the question should schools be teaching this? This could potentially create a more coherent joined up approach to computing and allow the Universities to elevate their expectations and starting level to beyond the current benchmark but Java is not the easiest language to get started with conceptually for pupils. Is it within the reach of pupils to understand Java as a post scratch experience? And does this meet the needs of our curriculum!

The computing outcomes within Curriculum for Excellence have a strong focus on games development which is easily achieved in Scratch. But what next? Does Java easily allow development in this way within the time allowed at school? I’m sure the answer can be yes! But how easily can this be achieved and how much CPD will be needed or provided to allow this to happen? Python has a number of extensions which in my limited experience of them look attractive, PyGame as already mentioned, PyGTK+, PyQt4/5 etc

I have no answers at the moment but lots of questions. Will Raspberry Pi save us? I doubt it but that does mean that it’s not going to be fun to play with.