Edutainment Community Edition Build, planning thread

[PaulDaMacMan]

--- PLACE HOLDER MOSTLY ---
I have an idea about doing a build that's a simplified custom Community Edition 9.6.3 build, geared towards Edutainment, younger to pre-teen children. My 12yr old video game obsessed son will be my test subject.

[ClipArtGuy]

IDK if my comment went through on your FB post, but I like "Open xtalk".

[richmond62]

Why does both the word 'Edutainment' and the concepts attached to it make me want to throw up violently?

[Lagi Pittas]

I would say as portmanteau words go, it’s a very nicely expresses the two blended concepts of education and entertainment (fun) in one succinct word. What’s to hate?

[richmond62]

Quite a lot as it gives children a false impression about learning.

[Lagi Pittas]

Pray tell?

[richmond62]

Learning is not always 'fun', and when learning is presented as fun children, often, do not
take it seriously and as a result do not acquire anything beyond a superficial understanding
of what they are studying.

[Newbie4]

I like the idea.

You can it is fun but don't over-emphasize it. The student's reaction depends on their age. When I would say this is fun in class, some students would smile and agree, others would just moan and groan. Sometimes saying this is fun took the edge off what we were doing. By making light of a hard task makes it a little more bearable.

Another slant: What is fun to me is work to others, like programming, finding bugs and solving problems. What my wife considers fun and relaxing, I consider boring. If it is not your "cup of tea", then it is hard. But that doesn't mean that it can't be made easier and maybe more fun.
Just acknowledge that some students may find it fun and others do not and they may have to work a little harder at it. They will take it seriously if you do.

[PaulDaMacMan]

Let me preface this with I'm certainly looking for help with this, I'm not an educator, I'm a lifelong student teaching myself (and my 3 sons) things mostly.

Learning is not always 'fun'

'Hey kids we're going to be working really hard at this difficult thing that may make your brain hurt' will get nothing BUT groans from every single student in the class.
Every individual human is different, unless you're a completely identical twin everything about us is unique. But if they do find something fun or amusing and that individual learns how it's made and how easy it can be to achieve modest goals, then they might just enjoy the process enough to continue with it (that is exactly what happened for me as a preteen and again as teen). Don't just feed them information, teach them how to learn more on their own! They will learn that learning is not always 'fun' along the way, if they haven't already figured that out long before being taught about coding. And if they advance beyond that "USER LEVEL 5" (I think for this edition, it would be good to renable the userLevel keyword), and try for something really fancy that requires a lower level language, they'll may learn that learning can really make your brain hurt!

Cleaning out my old office space, I think learning can be downright dangerous! Just look at the battle scars of some of my collection of old coding books, I literally nearly died from reading that ResEdit book:

The back of that book has much more fire damage.

[PaulDaMacMan]

Why does both the word 'Edutainment' and the concepts attached to it make me want to throw up violently?

I was initially reluctant to bring up that old phrase, but different reasons. To me the "Edutainment" market as a whole was too commercial. Back in the 90s when that was a popular advertising word to attract those parents, many buying computers for the first time, all too often it seemed titles were more about making money, and parents giving themselves a pat on the back for throwing money at their child's education, than it was about actually teaching kids anything. Not that there weren't a few good ones.

At any rate, the nice thing about there being this open source GPL3 base to work from is that you are free to take whatever I do with it and modify it to suit your teaching needs. Tailor it towards a specific age group or towards your specific teaching style. You can turn it into Richmond's CodingIsNoFunAtAllCode and release that if you'd like.

[richmond62]

Richmond's CodingIsNoFunAtAllCode

I'll leave instructions for that to be carved on my gravestone.

[richmond62]

'Hey kids we're going to be working really hard at this difficult thing that may make your brain hurt'

Well, I for one, am not so daft as to start a class like that.

BUT, I would point out that learning to program a computer involves some hard work,
but with the hard work things can be fun.

Personally I think it is insulting to tell kids that learning WILL BE fun, and may cause them sufficient disappointment
when they get to the "crunchy bits" to stop them wanting to pursue things.

This has been my approach through 32 years of teaching both ESL and computer programming.

For the sake of argument, getting one's head round the logic of several nested conditional loops
may not be 'fun', but it is a necessary thing to do to start making ny sort of program beyond
the "Oh, Look, Another Moron has got a computer to flash 'Hello World' on the screen." type of
exercise that always strikes me as an utter waste of time.

[PaulDaMacMan]

Personally I think it is insulting to tell kids that learning WILL BE fun, and may cause them sufficient disappointment
when they get to the "crunchy bits" to stop them wanting to pursue things.

I want to say this to you at least once: It may not always seem like I do, because I enjoy being a sarcastic smart-ass to try to get my argument points across, but I really do appreciate your cantankerous input.

I don't know what age group(s) that you primarily work with, but it may actually be a little condecending and insulting to children to act as if they don't already understand, at least on a subconscious level, that learning complex, unintuitive things can be difficult and not fun. If they've learned the English language then surely they've already gotten that message and I'd assume they've also gained some intuitive understanding that, once you get passed the learning curve of the unintelligible, it get's easier and may even become natural.

For the sake of argument, getting one's head round the logic of several nested conditional loops
may not be 'fun', but it is a necessary thing to do to start making ny sort of program beyond
the "Oh, Look, Another Moron has got a computer to flash 'Hello World' on the screen." type of
exercise that always strikes me as an utter waste of time.

Here you won't get much argument from me. I liked that LiveCode felt the need to include a "Hello World" in the Start Center stack, which must be meant for people that have already had some experience learning another programming language, BUT they've made it into an automated/interactive tutorial the user can either quickly, or at their own pace, get passed that always boring, perhaps necessary (debateable), "Hello World" exercise.

Every student is different and so I can only speak on what I know is true about me. When was in school I was not a very good student, at all. I think my biggest problem was that I wanted to ONLY learn things that I could see value in learning. I hated maths because maths can be hard and I would much rather have been spending my time getting better at drawing comic book characters, because fun was and still is valuable to me (and stuck with that to the point of having a career in graphic arts). The teachers most successful at teaching me anything are the ones that understood that need. The best math teachers, at least for me, used real world examples tailored to kids and popular kid-culture of the times. For example word problems like: "Paul earns $2 for each day he delivers newspapers, how many days will it take him to buy that new Atari Game cartridge that costs $60?", helped me immediately understand the value in learning to solve that problem. By the time I'd gotten to seeing my first xTalk with HyperCard, I'd already been introduced to several versions of BASIC and so I'd done the boring "hello world" at least twice, and so when my sister Nancy showed HC to me I was delighted that she could, with the quickness (Attention Deficit level) of a single, easily understandable line typed into the message box, induce a computer to play different sounds at different pitches to produce a melody. That's something I immediately found value in and here I am 30+ years later.

[richmond62]

because I enjoy being a sarcastic smart-ass to try to get my argument points across, but I really do appreciate your cantankerous input.

Long distance kisses.

[Lagi Pittas]

HI,

Without giving away my life story the way I got into programming was from my interest in electronics (from a ladybird book at junior school - i was 9 or 10 - I still have the book).

I then went on to build a computer - a Motorola 1Mhz 6800 with 1k of ram and a 32 by 16 black and white display bought and paid for by my patents (about £400 in the late 70s plus an extra £150 for expansion RAM (bought later) - about £2000 in todays money, ouch!!.

I was all ready to study electronics at university in a couple of years but I had so much FUN programming asterisks being shot by a carat in 6800 machine code, typing in a 6800 interpreter called WHATDUZITDO from byte magazine , writing an adventure in assembly language on my TRS-80 that i decided to study computer science.

Going to university was probably the biggest waste of time EVER except that I was introduced to Pascal wrote some software for the Local apple dealer with a loaned Apple 2 (they were over £3000 in those days with 2 floppy drives and a Pascal language card).

For payment I received an Apple 2 with all the trimmings and was able to do all my Pascal work using UCSD Pascal while the rest of the students had to wait for terminals.

With my Apple 2 the vastness of the software scene expanded moreso than my TRS80 and I learned (or got acquainted with) Pilot, Lisp, Logo and Graforth and other languages - again for edification (Edutainment??) not because I thought there was money to be made but because it was FUN.
I built a ZX80 built a ZX81, Acorn Atom (again not to save money but to learn - and have Fun). I bought a BBC Micro an Atari (with trackball ) so I could play missile command just like at Uni . Which was was all great but none of those later computers match the Apple 2 for expansion possibilities - except the PC (specifically the PC AT )

So FUN was the reason I decided to get into software NOT because it was better than going into electronics - it was easier to "Create" without destroying chips and burning fingers and I could see things happening in hours instead of days.

Secondly I found it was easier to teach others how to program easier than showing them how to solder. "Kids" I taught have gone onto bigger things than me - One has a Phd in Biochemistry but he used his love of programming on his Apple 2 for simulation software. Another went to work at IBM in Switzerland , yet another has worked for Morgan Stanley and Deutche bank - Not because I helped them to learn programming but they had Fun and it carried it on into a career.

The reason Scratch (ugh!!) is and Logo (was) popular as a teaching tool is that they are both fun to use there is instant gratification of things moving and doing things.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Construct ... education)
Seymour Pappert and LOGO
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Papert