Meeting 10/5

Topics covered:

• IDATER content
• Learning, teaching and the 2 decades of technology darkness 
• The focus and purpose of prototyping for FYDP
• Resource and Prototype matrices
• Curriculum summary report

IDATER content:

Interviews happening next week, Wednesday. Prepare questions for then, run them past Tom.

Podcast - Not compulsory because not many people use them, but a good idea to encourage people to submit various types of media. Peter talking about recording it, really it can be done in our own time because of the basic technology that it needs. 

- Best done with two people discussing the subject and covering key points? Casual, very much like a friendly discussion, ad hoc.

Paper to be submitted to be my final year report. 

Trip to Limerick for the main event. Instead of a conference booklet, hand out CD's memory sticks. Alternatively, create an app (iOS, Android) that mimics the website, presents all the content inc. videos, picture galleries, etc.  No point creating it ourselves, can you get app templates? Similar to Wordpress templates but in app form? We pick a theme then add the content. Maybe several apps/volumes based on the subject area; reduces size and download time of each app.

Learning and teaching electronics- Discussion with Nigel:

Much of electronic teaching in design starts with learning the components first and then building up to the systems. Much of what Arduino and Sparkfun is about is only providing small subsystems that go together - no need to teach the individual component part.

Looking at it from a top down approach rather than bottom up. Grounded Theory.

Teach systems first > identify the system > what subsystems are required > what components make that subsystem.

Upside it is more efficient - more time is spent learning the system that is required for the project.

Downside is that the systems are understood but how they work is not.

2 Decades of Darkness:

During the 80's programming was taught on BBC computers, programming, creating games, devising problems. Papert, LOGO.

Then the 90's and 00's brought Microsoft based computers going into schools with word processing and spreadsheet programs - The idea of computing became to write reports and organise data. 

Only now with the introduction of Arduino and Raspberry Pi into schools are people realising what computing really is. Chance to properly implement Papert's ideas?

-Nigel is writing a paper on this.

Investigate Deep and Surface learning

- Link to that paper by that guy pulling apart PBL stating that it only works surface/shallow memory.

The purpose of prototyping in FYDP:

Shouldn't students be focusing their prototypes on delivering relevant user data, rather than focusing on making it at close to the proposed design as possible?

The FYDP prototype fulfils many roles:

Aesthetic, representative & showcasing lboro design

User testing

Representative of its functions

Demonstration of what has been learnt from many modules and disciplines.

A student might get more marks creating a prototype that has embedded electronics but still offers good potential for user testing, rather than a prototype that 'cuts corners' in regards to embedded technology but still has good potential for high quality user testing results.

Prototyping can't be reduced down to be purely user testing focused, but more focus can go on to user testing. More consideration at the start of each project the purpose of the prototype, embedded system based upon that while other criteria still met?

Resource and Prototype matrices:

Two matrices proposed:

1. Resources Matrix - a subjective representation of the relations between resources suitable for classroom teaching of electronics, prototyping and interace design. Ordered by skill level / ability.
2. Prototype Matrix - a graph used to mark the efficiency of any given prototype based upon the fidelity (overall finish, inc. cost and time spent on it) vs. the quality of the data drawn from user testing. 

Prototype matrix looks effective, could possibly be used in FYDP or form a basis of a paper. 

Resources matrix is a fine way of putting resources in context of one another. Subjective and some explanation for the boundary choices may be required.

Curriculum Summary Report:

Report to be written up summarising the collected curriculums from the selected universities and also from the FE subjects identified. This will make a portion of the final year report.

Jon Rogers contacted for module information, possibly visiting lboro soon, worth sitting down and discussing some of this.

Knowledge Is Like A Room Full Of People

This excerpt from Papert's Mindstorms really stood out to me as a good analogy of my studies, but also of the role teachers have the process of learning any new skill or field, and the importance of learning how to learn.

"Getting to know a domain of knowledge is much like coming into a new community of people. Sometimes one is initially overwhelmed by a bewildering array of undifferentiated faces. Only gradually do the individuals begin to stand out. On other occasions one is fortunate in quickly getting to know a person or two with whom an important relationship can develop. Such good luck may come from an intuitive sense for picking out the "interesting" people, or it may come from having good introductions.
Similarly, when one enters a new domain of knowledge, one initially encounters a crowd of new ideas. Good learners are able to pick out those who are powerful and congenial. Others who are less skillful need help from teachers and friends. But we must not forget that while good teachers play the role of mutual friends who can provide good introductions, the actual job of getting to know an idea or a person cannot be done by a third party. Everyone must acquire skill at getting to know and a personal style for doing it."

Problem Designers

Through my studies as a designer, I've been taught to solve problems using a design methodology. Now I'm being tasked to design problems to solve.

My task is to create problems that have features that guide the user (solver/learner/student) to experience certain things. Like an interface for a car radio must be designed so it is instantly intuitive, the problems within the learning resources must naturally and effortlessly guide the learner through certain actions, thought processes, discussions, dilemmas and internal dialogues inorder to teach them what is necessary to complete the task (and more).

From a PBL standpoint, the problems must aid learners to learn the subject knowledge so the information is concise and flexible so they can retrieve it when the opportunities come about.
They must stretch the learner's capabilities to solve problems and develop similar self-directed learning skills so they are applicable throughout their life.
They must induce natural collaboration inorder to find all the answers and most importantly (in my mind), they must cause the learner to be intrinsically motivated to learn - ie, when they work on the problem they are motivated by their own interestes, challenges or self satisfaction.
(Hmelo-Silver, 2004)

Due to the vast diversity in possible students, designing a problem is a huge task. Two encourage these characteristics from everyone who approaches the problems requires a lot of scaffolding that is strong yet flexible so that it can be added or removed depending on the abilities of the individual students. But ultimately, it will be up to the facilitating teacher or lecturer to decide where scaffolding is required/not required*.


*Can problems have built-in fluidity in regard to the supportive scaffolding? Can an activity itself judge the abilities of its solver and change its course to address skills that are lacking? Eg, Like a book that lets you choose the outcome based on your own choices, a problem could test a learner after a certain stage, but instead of saying "go back and learn that chapter again", it sets the next task in a way that addresses the lacking skills for a second time, but maybe from a different direction or within a different context.

//Quote

Tell me and I will forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I will understand

- Confucious

Child Driven Education

The last video of the day. Another TED talk, this one by Sugata Mitra.

Mitra observed that there are many places in the world which has poor education, and no good teachers want to go to teach there. This is also key areas where there is troubled communities and problems with poverty and violence.
However, Mitra found evidence of children's own willingness to learn, by installing a few 'hole in the wall' type computers, connected to the internet in one of the slums in New Delhi. He found that with no instruction, children who had never seen a computer in their life were finding information and teaching it to themselves. He found that "children will learn to do, what they want to learn to do".

This led on to other experiments, like putting computers in classrooms with speech to text software. After a few months children who could speak English but with very strong accents soon learned how to pronounce better, even if it was more like Stephen Hawking.

Schools who were lucky enough to have computers encouraged their students to use them to complete there homework, using any tools or resources they could find. The amount the children learnt increased greatly.

In the video, Mitra talks about other tests he done, in India, Africa, Italy and the UK, with impressive results. What he has found, is that with the right resources and within the right environment, children can learn much without the aid of a teacher.

EOTW

This is going to be the first of many 'end of the week' posts, covering what I've been up to in the past 7 days. Except this one is covering the last 2 weeks, and I'm writing it on the Monday of my third week. I'll get better at this blogging progress thing eventually!

The things that have been taking up my attention has been starting with the research and learning new skills.

The research I've been starting with is focusing directly at Problem Based Learning and Design Based Learning, both separate things, but sharing a lot in common.
Most of the PBL material I've been reading has been related to the medical industry, but there is also much written about PBL being applied to engineering disciplines. Both subjects are of interest, but interestingly, the medical papers touch a lot on PBL being used to teach ethics and morality; an interesting concept when applied to design, as you start to think about the ethical decisions a designer must face when designing a product. Is it something that would be thought about while hardware or interface prototyping? A medical product perhaps?

I haven't covered what Design Based Learning is on here yet, but I'll do a little post at some point explaining both PBL and DBL. There seems to be less written on DBL, but theres many sources of information I haven't tapped into yet. The most interesting paper I've found so far is entitled "Designing Learning through Learning to Design" (Mishra, Girod, 2006) which documents what a teacher witnessed when DBL was applied to her class, and an academic's interpretation of these observations.
It basically showed how an otherwise mundane subject can be turned into a very interesting and productive one when the tasks were to design and build models representing the core principles.


While researching different ways of teaching, I've also been teaching myself some new stuff.
In order to build learning environments around interfaces, it would probably be a good idea to learn how to create some interfaces to teach. So I've started with touch interfaces, and had my first play with Android App inventor.

Android App inventor is a very useful tool for people like me who are (at the moment) new to building apps. On top of that, it's also a very good example of the kind of stuff that would be good to put into the classroom, because of its very shallow learning curve. It works in two parts, like many app dev kits; It has a 'Designer' window and a 'Blocks Editer' window. Within the 'Designer' window, you layout the content of the app, buttons, images, sounds, moving elements and so on. But its in the Blocks Editor where you assign functions to each of these parts.
The 'Blocks Editor' function is the most interesting to me, because it is a good example of graphic-based code writing. In this, not a single line of code is actually written by the user. Instead, the logic of the program is in the form of blocks which the user drags into the main window. There, other blocks are attached to build up the code.
It is just the kind of thing I am looking for to introduce code to students who have never coded before.

One of the first apps I was able to create (thanks to the easy tutorials on the site), was a simple painting app.

OK, so maybe I was never good at finger painting at school...

Moving on from that, I've been diving into learning how to code with Objective C, which is what is needed to code iPhone and iPad apps. This is a little more challenging and is taking quite a lot of time to do. Thankfully, there are loads of resources on the web to help with this, the best so far being The New Boston on Youtube, who does a whole host of tutorials from C++ to 3Ds Max. I'm still at the early stages of this, no shiny apps to show yet!



This next week is going to be focused on progressing with very much the same things. Until next time...