NOTES OF 11/19/01 LAPTOP SUPPORT GROUP MEETING George Markowsky I am once again circulating notes based on the most recent meeting or our group. This meeting took place on 11/19/01. As before, this is not a set of minutes, but rather a summary of important announcements and decisions. To give us more space and to not interfere with the graduate seminar, I have decided to move the meetings of the Laptop group to the Business School Building D. P. Corbett (DPC). I have the following rooms reserved -- we don't necessarily need to use all of the meeting times, but I thought it would be good to have the space reserved. The schedule for the remainder of this semester is: 11/26 2:10 - 5 PM 115 DPC 12/ 3 2:10 - 5 PM 115 DPC 12/10 2:10 - 5 PM 115 DPC NOTE ROOM CHANGE BELOW 12/17 2:10 - 5 PM 105 DPC As before, these notes and other information are available at the temporary website: http://www.cs.umaine.edu/~markov/laptop.html There is also a link to this page from my home page at http://www.cs.umaine.edu/~markov Once we get the website operational, we can move these materials there if we wish. The 11/19/01 meeting focused on the some sample materials for the workshop. 1. Larry Latour presented some StarLogo and MicroWorlds Logo demonstrations. The demonstrations illustrated various models with multiple agents. Much of the time was spent with a model showing termites carrying wood chips and trying to predict the outcome of their efforts. 2. Eva Szillary presented some overheads showing how to calculate the number of paths in a taxicab geometry and illustrating how Pascal's triangle can be uncovered. 3. Yuhong Sun presented a multimedia program about the Cold War and some of the key figures in it. She discussed how it was presented in some local school districts. There were many points that were discussed, and I will not attempt to summarize all of the discussion. Some key points follow. 1. Seymour felt that the emphasis should be on powerful ideas and one such powerful idea is that of probability. There was quite a bit of discussion of how to present probabilistic ideas to best advantage. Some ideas were in the selection of colors for various programs and in games. Another arena for displaying probabilistic thinking was in modeling. A variety of models were presented including the spread of gossip in a school and the probability that lobsters escape from traps. 2. Seymour told of a charismatic art teacher in Des Moines Iowa who got the kids to look at Jackson Pollack from a probabilistic point of view. 3. It was felt that materials should satisfy the following 4 criteria: 1. They must accommodate the entire spectrum of teachers and students. 2. Nobody should feel put down by the materials. 3. Materials must permit the growth of teachers. 4. Materials must have a long time perspective. 4. There was a lot of discussion about the workshop that was originally proposed for January. It appears that the January date is not good and that the workshop will be moved, but no alternative date was settled upon. Various suggestions were put forward for the structure of the workshop. In particular it was felt that there should be some materials provided for the teachers, but also overall perspective offered on how to put this together. One possible structure for the workshop would have portions devoted to: 1. Programming: Mathematics and Randomness 2. Information Design and Multi-media 3. Web Resources 4. Networking Technology and Technological Possibilities 5. Higher Level Criticism and the Teacher's Role Mike Scott and Raphael DiLuzio are very eager to help with the Information Design section and will prepare some notes on this. Larry Latour and Eva Szillary are very eager to help with the Programming section. It is clear that the next meeting of the group should focus on the design of the workshop. 5. The winner of the RFP will most likely be known by November 29. This will definitely be useful to know. Below are a note from Max Crain about the workshop and a note from Nick Ourusoff about how the state computer science meeting might help the laptop effort. ====================================== Dear Workshop Committee, As you know, much information that we need to plan the workshop in detail is not available at this point. Judy McGeorge, of the Seymour Papert Institute, is trying to reach Bette Manchester to help resolve some of the unknowns. Bette, however, may be occupied with vendor selection, so that it may be a week or two before we get a response. Funding -- both the extent of our need for funding and sources of funding -- remains an open issue. In spite of the uncertainties, we will need to provide Bette Manchester and her group with a description of what we plan to offer. I propose that we meet sometime before 2:10 on Monday, 11/26: how about 1:30? Larry, can we meet in your office or lab? Below, I've included a rough workshop outline for discussion. If you will comment on this via email, I can revise / refine before we meet. --- Max p.s. Apologies if your receive a duplicate of this message. Strands a) Logo programming. May include projects rich in probabilistic ideas. For example, visual patterns, computer games, or virtual creatures within microworlds. Alternatively, projects could center on story telling and/or animation. b) Hypermedia (web, Hyperstudio, etc.) for student projects. c) Movie making. Social studies as contrasted with scientific applications. We should suggest possible projects. (One of my schools, for instance, is doing two separate projects that include movies: a local oral history project, and another ongoing documentary about how local people earn a living and how they learn what they need to know. Though neither of these examples seem particularly suitable for the workshop, it would be good to come up with some suggestions.) Duration I suggest that we hold out for a workshop that includes 4 full consecutive days, rather than shorter workshops. Participants need time to understand the motivation behind some uses of computers. They need to reach some level of fluency in the use of any given tool – otherwise they may not attempt to carry their workshop experience forward to students. Workshop components All participants Opening and closing remarks (Seymour), questions Demonstration and discussion of volunteered participant projects Discussion: Learning with computers, the Maine Learning Results and the MEA: conflicts, opportunities, and options Within strand Group and individual work on projects (70% of total workshop time) Short "lessons" (5 – 10 % of total time, depending on strand) Consideration of sample projects made by others Optional Demos from other areas: robotics, sensors and probes, StarLogo ======================================================== George, I've just forwarded you the status report that I had sent to Seymour on our Maine Higher Education Computing Conference that is planned for Friday, March 15 9:00AM - 4:00 PM, most likely at UMA's University College at Bangor campus. Our focus will be K-12 computer science curriculum issues in the context of the laptop initiative. We plan to offer K-12 teachers recertification credits for workshops in (i) Logo and (ii) HTML/JavaScript (and perhaps others). Seymour has agreed to be our keynote speaker (probably following lunch). I would welcome participation on our panel of any of the Laptop group doing the longer-term planning. I have tried to make it clear that we will do all we can to promote discussion of Middle school and High School computer science issues in the curriculum. We are looking for funding still - so far, the Vice Chancellor's Office has not been positive (they did fund us previously). So, I am wondering to whom to go in either the Dept of Education (Judy Cox?) or the Governor's Office. Have you suggestions here? That's what our Steering Committee is planning. Would you see if the group is generally supportive of this effort? We certainly do not want to interfere with/compete with/etc. But I believe we might be the "appetizer" for or "whet the appetite" for more important activities that will be ongoing. If so, perhaps you would pass out my email address to those who may be interested (nourusof@maine.edu). And we would like a contact point so that we can use our Conference to get information (Web links, etc) out to participants about other activities. Regards, Nick -- Nicholas Ourusoff Assistant Professor, Computer Information Systems University of Maine at Augusta 46 University Drive, Jewett Hall 146, Augusta, ME 04330-9410 (207) 621-3363(o) (207) 305-2711 (h) 621-3293(FAX) Home Page: http://users.uma.maine.edu/faculty/nourusoff Date: Fri, 16 Nov 2001 13:33:47 -0500 From: Nick Ourusoff Organization: UMA X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.78 [en] (Windows NT 5.0; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Seymour Papert CC: Diana Kokoska Subject: MHECC - progress report Content-Type: text/plain; charset=koi8-r Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Hello, Seymour - Just to report to you on our progress with the MHECC Conference scheduled for March 15, 2002 9:00AM-4:00PM. We will likely hold it at our Bangor Campus - this is because (i) we are going to arrange for K-12 teacher rectification credits for some workshops we will be giving through institutions in the Bangor area; (ii) the facilities for dining and laboratories are very good; and (iii) Diana Kokoska and colleagues at UCB will give the Conference a chance to make a very positive contribution to your efforts to impact computer science curriculum in K-12 throughout the State. We are working on our Conference agenda. To date, we are thinking about: 1. A panel on "K-12 Computer Science Curriculum Issues and the Laptop Initiative" chaired by Allen Tucker (morning) 2. Workshops: (i) Lego/Logo (ii) HTML / JavaScript and perhaps: (iii) Teaching the O-O paradigm: "Object-think" (?) (iv) Teaching logical inference using Prolog (?) 3. Discussion Groups/Brainstorming (i) Providing support to K-12 Teachers We would like to schedule your keynote for the end of lunch. Have you suggestions? We plan to invite K-12 teachers who are interested in impacting computer science education in K-12, in addition to computing faculty in higher education institutions. Some of our UMA faculty would be interested in helping to organize an institute for K-12 in Augusta or Bangor for K-12 teachers this Summer. I am scheduled to teach an introduction to computer science course over ITV (UMS interactive television system) this Spring. I mention this in case you'd like to use it as a forum to reach K-12 teachers. Let me know how we can best support your work. Cordially, Nick Ourusoff