Simply Interactive:
20 Things to Do With a Computer: MicroworldsDavid Longman, Senior Lecturer ICT, Newport School of Education
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Draft
20 Things To Do With a Computer
LOGO Microworlds: designing online learning materials for pupils to use.As with other elements in Simply Interactive the formal aim of these materials is to get students to think about designing something that might help someone learn something.
But in a particular way.
The title of this part of Simply Interactive is a direct quote from an early research pamphlet by the MIT Education Group. They worked out one of the very great paradigms of educational computing. As with many important ideas, this paradigm was worked out quite early in the development of computers - (long before the PC when computing meant using a timeshare system).
The activities in 20 Things may seem now to be rather tame in some ways. But they were important new features of computers in the 1960s and the excitement of this new kind of interactivity based on a combination of improved hardware (CRT monitors and keyboards) and software (high level programming languages such as Logo, Pascal, Fortran, SQL etc. etc.) generated a lot of thinking and experimentation about the mind.
The MIT Education Group exemplifies the character of many similar groups. It was an interdisciplinary, an 'applied computing' group. It combined interests in computer science, logic, cognitive psychology, and a few other disciplines (all broadly structuralist at that time) to explore key problems such as how to get a computer to learn (perhaps to think). This necessarily involved a close study of what learning is and an engagement with the definition of pedagogy.
So, if you are interested in the formal aim - for these projects have been developed for teacher training courses in Wales - here it is:
At Level 8 trainees should "…design and implement systems for others to use."
- In this project students create materials that could be part of an online elearning 'classroom'. In particular this project explores aspects of microworld design both as useful resources to develop for use with pupils, but also as useful projects for pupils to undertake in their KS3/KS4 ICT studies.
At Level 8 trainees should be able to discuss "…in an informed way…" issues about the use of IT by people.
- In this project students must consider the ways in which the materials they create are "fit for purpose", or are "appropriate in the context". These considerations can only be examined in the light of observation of the materials in use. To take this project to completion some of the materials would normally be piloted in use with a small sample of the target audience (KS 3/4).
What is a microworld?
A microworld has two kinds of interpretation: the strict and the not-so-strict (though all microworlds are - or should be - interesting to some degree)
Turtle Graphics is a paradigmatic microworld in the strict and purest sense.
My Traffic Microworld is really a simulation or model - it is a not-so-strict microworld.
Watch this space for a discussion about this distinction. You may like to figure it out for your self.
What is similar about Turtle Graphics and Traffic? What is different?
