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Book Launch Invitation   Sunday June 2, 2013 from 2:00 PM to 4:00 PM EDT Add to Calendar

Where Baden Academy Charter School Media Lab 1016 W. State Street Baden, PA 15005 Driving Directions

21st Century Parenting: Grow a Generation is ready to launch!  You are invited to join me in the celebration. Bricks4Kidz will be on hand with Lego and other activities, so feel free to bring you kids (or grandkids).  Thank you for being part of this terrific journey.  If you can’t make the launch, the book will be online that day through Amazon.   If you can come and help celebrate, click on the link below to RSVP.  I hope I see you soon!  I really appreciate all the support and encouragement you have offered me over the last year.  WATCH BOOK TRAILER HERE Get more information Register Now!

]]> http://www.ellencavanaugh.com/2013/05/22/book-launch-21st-century-parenting/feed/ 0 http://www.ellencavanaugh.com/2013/05/11/augmented-reality/ http://www.ellencavanaugh.com/2013/05/11/augmented-reality/#comments Sat, 11 May 2013 19:18:25 +0000 Dr. Ellen Cavanaugh http://www.ellencavanaugh.com/?p=1342

Continue reading »]]> “Run! Run from the dragon as fast as we can!”

When my children were very little, so little their little legs moved quick but traveled slow and their attention was enraptured by every pebble, line and shadow, I grew impatient and a bit frightened by backing cars on the walk from the car to the entrance of the grocery store.  And so I pointed to the hill rising beside the grocery store and asked if they saw the dragon. We pretended together and ran a good sprint hand and hand to get to the safety of the store entrance where we high fived and whooped at our success once again evading a worthy adversary.  Caveat – they always knew to hold my hand and never run on their own.  They also became very adept at spotting other mythical creatures when they wanted to hurry me along.

I’ve always been fascinated with the ability to take what was happening in our own imagination and share it with another. We’ve been augmenting reality with constraints and perceptions of others since our brains struggled to make sense of the world. Now, we have the chance to start programming augmented reality into the line of sight of anyone who can afford something like Google glass. Can my children graphically design a grand firework dragon (think Lord of the Rings opening scenes) to surprise their grandchildren visiting a storefront?

Google glass, which portrays information available on a smart phone in the corner of your reading glasses, is now in the hands of tech bloggers and being parodied on Saturday Night Live and numerous YouTubes.  I participated in a Google Science Fair Hangout on Air this week on Photography.  Trey Ratcliff was featured in his discussion of the science of photography and his awesome use of High Dynamic Range Photography.  While fascinating, I was caught up in a moment where the host, Robert Scoble, briefly demonstrated augmented reality binoculars through which you could see a computer generated fake person standing on the ground (go to 26:44) outside his studio.  I went to search and found some incredible “AR” (Augmented Reality) tools being developed.

Ten years ago we were talking about a digital divide, a separation of people with internet access and those without.  The Smart Phone is slowly closing that gap, but it still exists.  There is another divide that is happening, the divide between those who are simply entertained by technology, and those who are co-creators with it (the difference between being a passenger in the car and knowing how to drive it). I encourage you to surf with your child the Google Science Fair Hangouts on Air, both past and future, and help them envision becoming drivers of technology.  These are free resources to whet your appetite about some of the incredible work being done in STEM.  For those interested in photography, I recommend the session with Trey.  On top of excellent information, you also receive a free code to download some extraordinary tutorials on HDR photography.

As the young people I work with learn to program and design virtual worlds, and  I watch as they can superimpose these Virtual Realities onto Reality itself, augmenting reality, I am challenged by the eternal questions of what is worth our time, what type of designs are worth creating and integrating into our reality, is there truth, a “T” that combines with AR to make it ART?

Some of Trey’s Images…

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Your mission: To design an unmanned aerial search vehicle to locate a scout lost in the two mile radius of the Philmont recreation area. That was the challenge given to hundreds of teams across the country. I had a chance to sit down with the 2^nd place national winners, the CCA Innovators, and learn more about this incredible challenge. The seven high school students attend Commonwealth Connections Academy, a cyber school in Pennsylvania.

This was Courtney Thurston’s second year on the team. She is a sophomore who served as the team’s technical writer and researcher motivated by her goals of becoming a systems engineer. “This type of long term project teaches you a lot more, more about project management and skills that cannot be exercised in a short term project.  It is really beautiful to see it all come together, nine months of work.  You don’t get to experience this often, kind of like a baby to be proud of!”  The technical writing of the project came together in a 78 page report.  The first part of the report addressed how the team was formed, acquired mentors, set-up and mastered the technical tools, and set their immediate project goal within its larger framework to impact STEM education.  

Rick Ciora, a junior planning to study chemical engineering, was a third year veteran.  He talked about the software they used to select and test the various possible configurations of wing and tail geometries, propulsion systems, fuselage layouts, structural designs, sensor payloads and telemetry selections. The team spent time before the competition started mastering Creo Elements, a 3D CAD software used by professional engineers. “This is the most realistic experience I’ve ever had.  All the problems come up last minute in real life, even with the software. Iterations continue as you keep trying to improve. There is always stuff you can change to make it better, you just need time. You can spend years changing minor details.”

One senior was new to the Real World Design Challenge Team.  Alexis Amelotte was able to add her literary skill to make the report and presentation clear, concise and professional. “The whole experience has been so enlightening about how much is involved in this process.  I don’t think I’m cut out for engineering.” What she did gain in the process, and the skill that will stick with her as she continues her education and prepares to become a pediatric oncological surgeon, was “ connecting with so many exceptional people, seeing them in action and working alongside them.”

Ian Cavanaugh, a freshman and neophyte to the RWDC team, held firm to the advice of senior and 4^th year veteran, Athena Kao.  Athena assured him that she, too, found the software and mathematics involved very difficult to learn. She suggested patience, to keep on trying, watch the video tutorials, and to remember that little things matter a lot.  Ian commented, “It was great to be on a team with so many people who knew what they were doing.  I am just beginning to learn the software and read through their reports over and over until I finally saw how the pieces came together.”

Athena finds the design and mission planning the most interesting part of RWDC.   Just a few slides from their presentation give you a glimpse of the depth of research and testing that went into each design element of the two UAVs the team eventually proposed.

The slides merely summarize the research and proposal of sensors attached to their UAVs.  Other slides illustrate the fuselage, electrical drive motors, and airfoils (which included Searching the UIUC Database, experimenting in JavaFoil, and verifying the performance in MathCad).

Athena’s favorite part of the RWDC competition is the mission planning.  The design must serve the mission, and the mission is affected by the design.  The choice of 3 UAVs with two different designs enabled the team to divide the mission to search for the lost scout by creating a search grid that took into account the geography, the mathematical calculations of sensor scanning widths, and engine stall speeds. Athena’s attention to detail is seen in each calculation. The team will miss her as she blazes new paths in software engineering.

Helping with the mathematical calculations was teammate Jacob Antonio, a sophomore in his 2^nd year of RWDC participation.

The final piece of the competition is a business plan. Devin Slaugenhaupt recruited the help of a family friend and college business professor to learn the elements of a good business plan. His goals include attending West Point after graduating next year.  This junior served his second year on the team and was key in identifying targeted commercial applications, calculating amortized system costs, and market assessment. Devin spoke of “learning how to look at stuff from other people’s perspective (engineers butted heads with business).” He expressed the attitude that took this team to nationals, “You have to be really dedicated. It is not something you can spend just a little bit of time in. Many of the team members and I suffered lack of sleep, stayed up until 3 am.”  He appreciates working with others who are serious about the challenge,  know what they are getting into, and act professional.

Real World Design Challenge is a truly comprehensive and engaging project based learning opportunity. Bob Camp, one of the team mentors (and husband of the phenomenal CCA teacher and lead coach Ann Camp), advises potential mentors and coaches to take the leap and invest the time in project like RWDC. “We need to give kids some kind of exposure to real world engineering at this level.  They are going to be making career choices very quickly. Without that exposure, they have nothing to base that decision on.  It is such a profoundly significant decision.“

Programs like this push students to study, focus, teach themselves and do far more learning on their own. There is no template, no fill in the blanks.  They have to go off and learn on their own – a skill integral to any career.  Innovation, STEM skills, collaboration, resilience skills all emerged from every team competing!

Continue reading »]]> How do we create a map and find a way to get where we want to go? A trip to the Beaver County Airport became a lesson in the history of navigation, the importance of collision alerts, and the technology of mapping a way there and back again. Second and third grade Baden Academy Media Lab students visited the airport this week, getting a tour of the air traffic control tower and the Air Heritage museum. The trip was an extension of our lab unit on DED Reckoning, the method of robotic mapping our Groma robots use.  (DED or dead reckoning starts from a home base and followings compass bearings that are oriented from home base – the further you travel, the more mistakes you make!)

We discovered a screen similar to our mission command program, one that marked north and south and a unit circle.   Our tour guide, Charlie, welcomed us up the four flights of stairs reaching to the tower and began to explain the air traffic controller screen that filled the center of the displays.  He focused our attention on three helicopters from the local television stations leaving the scene of a morning accident and taught us how to interpret some of the shorthand.

A red “CA” appeared and the students’ concerned voices listened to Charlie’s explanation of a collision alert.  We talked about the programming behind the alert system. What would the computer need to calculate?  Do you think that the airplane has one also?

Two planes seemed to collide on the screen and one of the girl’s asked if they just crashed. Charlie explained altitude.  This was a new sensor we hadn’t talked about yet.  Kids listened to explanations of air pressure to understand altitude, and how local barometric pressure affects the “indicated” altitude readings on a plane’s altimeter and needs reset for different air spaces and control towers.  Charlie described the radar tower at the Pittsburgh International Airport and how it used sound waves to calculate the positions of planes in the air.

The tower serves as an educational setting for CCBC’s Air Traffic Control Terminal program and is a fully functioning tower in collaboration with the FAA. Kids learned about the career path to Associate Degree in Air Traffic Control, but also saw behind the screens to the programming of the equipment and the development of more sophisticated sensors. We asked Charlie about dead reckoning and he told us stories of the earliest days of flight when pilots would take a compass bearing and look for beacon fires or landmarks that would tell them where they needed to turn. It served as a reminder to the types of sensors we study with robotics: line of sight (from the historical invention of an astrolabe to our modern light sensors that can react to color), measurement (from the tallow dropped into water by sailors to our sonic sensors (and radar sensors) that bounce radio waves of objects), and direction (the four corners and degrees of rotation of a magnetic compass reading and the air pressure sensor needed to measure altitude).  Next year we’ll study how GPS (the global positioning system) works!

Our next stop was the Air Heritage Museum on the other side of the airport.  This working museum had many reconstruction projects out for the kids to look at as well as a sampling from aeronautical history.  Our tour guide, Ralph, a veteran and volunteer, patiently steered us through as we determined our own navigation limits (stay within a holding pattern of a 10 foot radius of Ralph, watch our ground speeds, stay in a line of sight, watch our altitude ducking under wings, and keep chatter to a minimum to hear instructions from our flight controller Ralph…).

We learned about engines. One of the 3^rd graders started naming the turbine and spark plugs (recognized from model building). We saw the difference between wings made with steel, aluminum, and carbon fiber. The most fascinating to me was the nylon and butyrate dope for adhesive. A high point for the kids was stepping inside C-123K Provider cargo plane from World War II with seats for paratroopers and a rear open hatch from which they would jump thousands of feet to do battle (the paratroopers not the kids!). Everyone took a turn sitting in a Cessna cockpit and admiring the replica of the Wright Brothers 1903 flyer.  One of the girls could have sworn that flight was 1000 years old, but Ralph set her strait!

Special thanks are extended to the Baden Academy Charter School for transportation, the CCBC Air Traffic Control school, and volunteers at the Air Heritage Museum.  The day was gorgeous with a blue sky and the kids were enraptured by the small planes practicing touch and go’s on the runway, touching down before building speed and taking off again. The kids stood on tiptoes and held their breath as each place slipped the surly bonds of Earth and climbed sunward to dance in the skies.

I invite you to virtually visit and try out with your kids the GEFS free, online flight simulator based on Google Earth. Have fun flying a plane in beautiful sceneries and doing your own touch and go’s on 30, 000 runways. There is even a chance for multiplayer flight and chat!

A second challenge is for parents to keep current on news, particularly the leaps in aviation technology that are happening in India and China.   Your children are growing up in a world with engineering graduates from across the globe, also fluent in English, capable of designing and testing 5^th generation fighter jets.  The U.S. need for students trained in science, math, engineering and technology is growing, and yet our students are falling behind in those same subjects by the eighth grade.  We have an infrastructure capable of supporting growth, entrepreneurship, and the strength needed to stand up for justice. Let us work together to Grow a Generation passionate about building these skills and using them to build a more peaceful and beautiful world.

Is your child passionate about aviation?  Visit the Grow a Generation page for project ideas.

Continue reading »]]> Did you know that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is the largest employer of engineers in the world? 37,000 civilian and military engineers under this one umbrella!

Katie Bates, a young, spirited, hilarious civil engineer with the Army Corps of Engineers spoke to a group of teens and parents, professionals and teachers gathered for the April Beaver County STEM meeting.  She shared stories of school, her decision to go into engineering and an internship opportunity that helped her decide she didn’t want to be a ‘behind the desk’ engineer.  She switched her major to civil engineering and proudly showed off picture of working at a local dam and helping the New York and New Jersey shores dig out from under Hurricane Sandy.

Kevin Logan, PMP, the Chief of the Project Management Section began the talk with an overview of this impressive organization.  The presentation included statistics of the USACE around the world and in the Pittsburgh region (640 employees serving 5.5 million people, preventing $13 billion in flood damages, managing 23 navigational locks and dams, 10 significant river systems, and millions of recreational visits every year).

One of the most impressive engineering feats was Logan’s description of the building of the Braddock Dam.  The Pittsburgh District, for the first time in civil engineering history, created a dam using innovative “in-the-wet” construction technology.  An inland navigation dam was created using float-in technology in which two massive concrete dam segments were fabricated on land along the Ohio river in Leetsdale. The construction site was flooded and the segments were launched, floated into place and submerged onto a previously constructed large diameter drilled shaft foundation.

Logan pointed out that there are quite a few repairs and projects needed in our region and that innovation and engineering skills will be crucial for our future. The USACE is committed to recruit and train young engineers. The U.S. projection is that there will be 2.8 million jobs for STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) professionals and yet not enough people to fill these roles. The U.S. is no longer the premiere destination to attract foreign engineers, and so we must pull from our own students and schools.  The ladder to STEM professions begins with higher mathematics in 7^th, 8^th and 9^th grade.  Currently, only 4 in 100 college graduates are engineers (versus 10 of 100 in Russia and 31 of 100 in China). Statistics regarding women, African American and Hispanic minorities are even more distressing.

In response, the US Army Corps of Engineers provides mentors for science and engineering fairs as well as engineering projects and competitions such as the Balsa Wood Bridge Building competition and eCybermission. The Society for Military Engineers offers construction and engineering summer camps for high school students (click for information on full scholarships!).  In January, the U.S. Army unveiled their new Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Asset Vehicle designed for recruiting civilian scientists (I’ll let you know if we’re successful getting it to come to Beaver County!).

Katie stressed the importance of internships, both with the corps and elsewhere.  Search for an internship by going to usajobs.gov and search the bottom menu for “Students and Recent Graduates.”  A video explaining the Pathways program and links to further information on internships is available there.  The information is broken down for students (college or high school students), recent graduates (associates degree or higher), and the Presidential Management Fellows Program (for advanced degree candidates).

I encourage you to surf, with your favorite engineering hopeful, some of the USACE videos and discuss what they think are the most important engineering issues of the future…

• Green Housing
• Ecosystem Restoration
• Sustainability and Climate Change
• Disaster Relief – Supporting Sandy Recovery
• Technology on the Front Lines

Continue reading »]]> A Groma robot dressed with orange cape, googly eyes, and lab glasses invaded the Kindergarten, 1st, 2nd and 3rd grade classrooms at Baden Academy Charter School as part of a research project and April Fool’s joke by Ava Coups, a 3rd grader at the school.  Ava is part of the Baden Academy Media Lab’s Research Fellow program. The program enables students to pursue passion based inquiry projects with the help of outside mentors.  Ava approached her parents and officials from the school with her love of building things, learning to program, and practical jokes. Through research, trial and error, and a desire to have her project benefit the school and community, the April Fools joke was born.  RoPro Design, a local robotic prototype and design company in Bridgewater, Pa, provided the Groma robots for the Media Lab and the support for Ava and other 2nd and 3rd grade media lab students to learn to program and manipulate the robots. The curriculum unit blended together concepts of math, mapping techniques, programming logic, dead reckoning, and theatrical techniques of hitting the mark and script writing. After school sessions allowed Ava the chance to expand what she learned and map various classrooms, rehearse with teachers, and plan the first April Fools joke on the new school.

The project began when Ava reviewed with her parents her childhood dreams, an examination that uncovered a love of robots, building things, and over the top humor.  Overflowing creativity is just one way to describe this 3’8” brown haired ball of energy.  Ava and I talked about the Groma robots coming to the lab and she began to envision a grand practical joke.

Ava created the storyboard for her invasion with the CS2N curriculum aids as she worked it out in her Scratch game submission that all of the media lab students were working on.  Classmates chimed in ideas (and I contributed my own as a fan of Doctor Who and the Daleks).  Invading Kindergarten classrooms made Ava reconsider how scary she wanted to make her robot.  Originally thought of as dark and menacing, she decided to go a bit more comical so that no one was so scared they had nightmares.

Finally, the Groma robots arrived in the media lab and Ava started to learn how to program.  She said, “It was hard at first, but then it got easier.”

The first thing the students needed to master was a coordinate system, the four quadrants, and degrees of rotation.  It is amazing how quickly these concepts are mastered when a robot depends upon them.  Students, including Ava, put their skills to the test in completing a “Hit Your Mark” challenge that had their Gromas step into a staged area and land on green “x”s, performing beeps, dances, and pirouettes. Dead (or ded) reckoning was introduced as well as mapping and navigation systems.  The unit continues as we plan for a field trip to the Beaver County Airport Air Traffic Control tower and Air Heritage museum.

Ava learned about collaboration as she recruited teachers to conspire with to prank their students.       Ava also learned about script writing and directing as she created the scripts in the cloud and shared the link to her Google Doc with teachers to edit, revise and use in rehearsal.  Numerous evenings were set aside to map the eight individual classrooms, rehearse with the teachers, and build the robot.

The Groma robot is simply a modified Roomba with the Mission Control software for individual programming. On design night, Kelli Keriotis, the art teacher extraordinaire of Baden Academy, brought her creativity and ideas to Ava and a group of media lab students to created a four foot tall tin foiled creation with hair made from green duct tape and antennae from dowel rods covered in flaming duct tape.  Ooooh – spectacular.  The finishing touch was the walkie talkie hidden inside the “button” control center, through which Ava’s thirds grade sweet voice transformed into a mechanical robotic voice.

The invasion was a complete success.  Eight classrooms of giggling and screaming children, teachers hitting their mark as they shouted “Get back children it is an evil robot!”  Ava’s voice came through saying “Do not try to destroy me, or I will put you in a big giant box!”  Teachers would go back and forth with the robot asking the kids what to do.  Finally, they would aim a sonic screwdriver (a prop from the Doctor Who show) and send the robot on its way saying, “Chicken Feathers!  I am defeated!”  Some of the teachers did a victory dance before Ava came into the room and announced “April Fool.”

The whole project was a collaborative effort with Ava leading the way.  Thank you to Russ Dryer from RoPro Design for the mentorship and patient instruction.  Thank you to Lexi, Eli, Miriam, Veronica, Izzy, Kate, Courtney, Skylar, Erin, Casey, Owen, and Gavin for their help during lab time and after school.  Thank you to the parents!  Thank you, too, to “Mr. Steve,” the school’s CEO, for allowing such merriment to occur.  Special thanks to the teachers, Miss Preffer, Miss Pichelli, Mrs. Best, Mrs. Ray, Miss Altman, Miss Page, Miss Bianco and Mr. Gallagher. You hit your mark and played your roles well!

A special thanks to Bill Utterback, Amanda King and Kevin Lorenzi from the Beaver County Times for their wonderful article and coverage

For more information about robotic programs for kids, surf Grow a Generation’s resources pages at http://www.ellencavanaugh.com/passions/robotics/

Continue reading »]]> The ancient Romans celebrated Hilaria, the last day of the Festival of Cybele.  It was a feast of joy that followed a period of fasting and mourning, a spring festival of celebration and merrymaking. Hindus celebrate Holi, a spring festival of colors that lowers the strictness of polite behavior and fills the atmosphere with excitement, fun and joy as participant throw colors onto one another.  Medieval villages celebrated the Feast of Fools, a time when serious religious leaders were mocked in plays and satire was celebrated.  Geoffrey Chaucer, in his Canterbury Tales, describes the vain cock Chauntecleer tricked by a fox on the 32^nd of March. It turns out to be a misinterpretation of the date, but April 1^st became from Chaucer’s time forward a day of harmless pranks, practical jokes, and hoaxes.

Practical jokes can become a way of affirming group solidarity.  Good jokes, ones that do no harm and that clean up after themselves, become a community’s sense of pride.  MIT celebrates such great ‘hacks’ as a police car reassembled atop the large dome on campus (complete with a PI squad number).  Google pranks users of its calculator (convert to units in Beard-seconds, Potrzebies , Smoots, or donkeypower), its search bar (type in “the loneliest number”) and news outlets (Google announced in 2005 a ficticious drink Google Gulp that would increase inteligence and in 2008 Project “Virgle,”  a mix of the Virgin Group and Google with a mission to colonize the planet Mars to make it suitable for human living).

Sir John Hardgrave authored the creative Mischief Maker’s Manual and sponsors the web site www.mischiefmakersmanual.com where you can find ideas for foaming toilets, fake alien landings, and a massive catapult among other things.

I invite you to check out my Pininterest board of April Fool jokes and send me some images to add.  Watch for news of a joke underway at Baden Academy soon!  Let me know what pranks befall you and remember to teach your children to limit themselves to jokes that do no harm and clean up after themselves.

Shhhh… one I am playing on my son (who never reads my blog…)… I plan to stick a message into his computer’s system clock

Head into Control Panel –> Region and Language –> Additional Settings –> Time, and change the AM or PM symbols to whatever you want.  

I’ll let you know if he notices (and of course the calamities that await my April 1).  Happy Easter!

Continue reading »]]> March 14 is Pi Day and Albert Einstein’s birthday!  How are you going to celebrate?

Pi (Greek letter “π”) is the symbol used in mathematics to represent the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter — which is approximately 3.14159.

Around the world, people celebrate the universal language of math by recognizing Pi Day.

Top Five Classroom Activities

• Sing a Pi song 
• Have a Pi memorization contest (winner gets a piece of pie!)
• Have an Einstein look a like contest. 
• Cut Pi (Wrap a string around the circumference of a circular object. Cut the string when it is exactly the same length as the circumference. Now take your “string circumference” and stretch it across the diameter of your circular object. Cut as many “string diameters” from your “string circumference” as you can. What do you notice?
• Create a daisy chain of circles to encircle your classroom with trivia, facts, history, and information about pi created by students.

Top Five At-Home Activities

• Surround yourself with Einstein quotes
• Watch a video about Archimedes of Syracuse (287–212 BC) or one of the other mathematician’s who helped us learn more about Pi. 
• Approximate Pi with the Buffon Needle Experiment
• Create an Infographic about the various fields of mathematics and science that Pi is valued (geometry, trigonometry, calculus, cosmology, number theory, statistics, fractals, thermodynamics,mechanics, electromagnetism, engineering, computer algorithms, etc).
• Create your own Pi Day Pininterest page (or add to mine!)

Top Five Individual Math Activities

• Bake a pie (then calculate its volume!)
• Celebrate with San Francisco’s Exploratorium by creating an avatar and joining other’s in the fabricated reality of Second Life.
• Check your inbox at Tau time (6:28 pm) on Pi Day for an MIT admission acceptance (What do you mean you forgot to apply?!?)  
• Solve Pi Day Sudoku

• Send a Pi greeting to a loved one.

Pi Trivia:

• Pi has been calculated to over one trillion digits beyond its decimal point.
• Pi is irrational and transcendental number.
• Pi will continue infinitely without repetition or pattern.
• Hold Pi up to a mirror and it spells PI.E
• 
• Pi has been known for almost 4000 years
• Twitter  #piday

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Photo by Robert Spencer for The New York Times

What does it take to inspire sustained interest in science and inquiry? On Thursday, February 28, 2013, the LRDC (Learning Research and Development Center) of the University of Pittsburgh opened their first lecture of the 50^th Anniversary Distinguished Speaker Series with the question.  Dr. Resnick was introduced by Chris Schunn of the LRDC who succinctly introduced Michel Resnick impressive C.V. with accolades including Director, Lifelong Kindergarten Group, MIT Media Lab and the Lego Papert Professor of Learning Research.  Dr. Resnick and his colleagues are at the foundation of the “programmable brick” technology many of us use in the Lego Mindstorm NXT and the Scratch Programming language and online collaborative community.

Design, Create, Explore.  Dr. Resnick stressed the need for an atmosphere of kindergarten playful creation to develop technological fluency.  He wants to see programming used not as a skill taught through scripted inquiry (today we learn the concept of iteration, follow these steps and create what I create).  Rather, programming for Resnick is like writing, a technical skill that opens the possibility of individual expression and creativity. He speaks of Coding to Learn – that is using computer code in a program such as Scratch to learn concepts in humanities and science. He pointed to examples of numerous interactive Mother’s Day cards, students in India animating someone traveling through the various layers of the earth, a student in Korea animating a tour of Rapa Nui (Easter Island), even an American student’s science fair project aimed to collect data as people played the student’s game online. He told the story of a student struggling to add a score to their Scratch game who responded with tremendous excitement when shown how to create variables in the game. “How many algebra teachers are thanked for teaching variables?”

Digital Natives.  Knowing how to text and play games is not the same as being fluent in technology.  It is as though they can read and not write.  Learning to code is important. We want our kids to not simply be passive passengers in the vehicles of technology, rather active drivers.

Creative Commons. Dr. Resnick emphasized that Scratch is deliberately designed with a Creative Commons License.  I can say from experience with third graders that this definitely inspires conversations of “my” game and “collaborative” games, copyrights, ownership of what an author or artist creates, and what can happen when others take what you started and add to it.

Code to Learn.  Coding to learn is not just about teaching concepts (sequence, loops, parallelism, events, conditions, operators, and variables).  It is about opening the possibility to learn computational thinking, expression and fluency.  It is about making the practices of experimenting and iterating, testing and debugging, reusing and remixing, abstracting and modularizing integral to how you approach all complexity in life.

MOOCs.  Dr. Resnick talked about his experiences so far running the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) “Learning Creative Learning” that began February 11.  24,000 people enrolled for this free MIT Media Lab course on creative learning.  They attend on the web, not in Cambridge, making new friends, learning from weekly live videos, readings, discussions, and project-based activities. While registration is closed, you can still log in for a list of resources and the syllabus.  It is on my radar to take if offered again and I can’t wait to hear what is learned from this big experiment! What interests me most is this atmosphere of interest based learning.  Those who enrolled in the class are seeking to make a contribution. Assessment can no longer be made through one individual professor’s assessment of one individual student’s progression in learning.  Assessment happens as contributions are made, increased roles and responsibilities in the community are adopted, and the individual learner takes charge of organizing portfolio examples of their progression in learning.

Gamification.  That leads back to the original question of the talk. What does it take to inspire sustained interest in science and inquiry? Badges, awards (degrees, certificates), and the language of gamification and leveling up may not feed long term motivation. Dr. Resnick recommended rewarding competency with an increased role and moved those of us engaged in educational research to consider the complexity of learning context as we seek to find assessment tools, standards, and analytics to help grow a generation of innovative leaders for a conceptual new age.

Fascinating talk!  Thank you to the LRDC for sponsoring it, the Kids+Creativity Network for promoting it, and Dr. Mitchel Resnick for sharing his creativity and passion for learning.

Continue reading »]]> How do kids learn to use new media?  A leading researcher in the field, Mimi Ito, has proposed three levels of participation: Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out.  Her work (alongside numerous researchers experimenting with this inquiry based learning model) has inspired the new movement of libraries and community centers to create HOMAGO Labs.

I am working with Jean Barsotti of the Carnegie Free Library of Beaver Falls to apply for a grant to install a HOMAGO Lab in a local library.

The Carnegie Library in Allegheny County has opened “The Labs” in its Oakland site and several satellites.  The Labs are four free spaces across the city of Pittsburgh for teenagers to geek out with digital media. They have drop by hours when teens can learn from one of our Labs mentors, experts in various forms of digital media and expression, or just mess around with the equipment and learn on your own terms. They also host free teaching programs; for example, QuickFlix: Teens Making Videos @ the Library, HEAR ME, and Hip-Hop on L.O.C.K.

Chicago Public Library has opened YouMedia Labs which includes an in-house recording studio featuring keyboards, turntables, and a mixing board.  YouMedia sponsors an online environment to share and collaborate with friends, mentors, librarians, and media experts. Much of their technology is dedicated to the arts; music, video, graphic design, and photographs. They sponsor Project Groups that produce a magazine, recordings, and specialized youth driven social entrepreneurship movements. Workshops include Digital Music Production, Digital Video Production, Radio + Podcasting, Graphic Design, Spoken Word, and Gaming and Blogging.  My personal favorite is their bookclub projects that include writing fan fiction, creating a soundtrack for the book, performing spoken word inspired by the book, and using video and photo documentaries to capture the themes.  This is not the library I grew up with!

It is not just libraries getting on board.  Our local museum is offering Oh Snap!, a collaborative photography project. They are featuring 13 works recently added to their photography collection and are asking for people (and kids) to take picture inspired by the ones in their collection. Every day, they are  printing out photos submitted and hanging them alongside their inspirations.

Here’s my idea!  Are there parents out there that want to open a Grow a Gen lab in their home – a space where your child (and possibly his or her friends) can gather once or twice a week and explore online with a mentor and other kids from around the globe a particular new media creation tool?  Let’s try it out this summer.  Let me know your child’s age and interest… Scratch programming, Mindstorm robots, SAM Animation (stop motion movie making, a photo scavenger hunt?), and I’ll design a trial for 3 weeks in June!  Send me a note or leave a comment!