[math4] So, what shall we do?

[Greg Dekoenigsberg]

Copying and pasting my latest blog post to stimulate conversation. 
Comments very welcome.  :)

Also, perhaps we should consider getting people together for a kickoff 
meeting.

* * *

Having presented fourth grade maths as a rallying cry, I suppose I 
shouldn't be surprised to discover that Karlie and David have taken me up 
on it -- to spectacular effect. David has XOs at the ready to hand out to 
the faithful, and Karlie has convinced a professor in Rochester to connect 
students to the project.

Guess it's time to figure out what that project looks like, in a bit more 
detail than we've heretofore offered.

First order of business, though: if the notion of creating Sugar 
activities that connect directly to a larger educational framework and 
offer content, activity and skill assessment, all in self-contained 
modules that can be used for self-directed and self-paced learning, then 
join the Sugar mailing list for fourth grade maths.

Now that we've got that out of the way: what should we be *doing*, 
exactly?

Let me tell you what I'm doing, and why.

* * *

I'm working on a Sugar activity I call "Dungeons of Mongo".

See, I'm a sucker for Rogue-like dungeon games. Always have been. Dungeons 
of Mongo will be a fork of a game called "Mines of Elderlore," which is a 
Python-based Rogue-like. I'm just getting started, and it's slow going, 
because for one thing I don't have nearly as much time as I'd like, and 
for another, I don't know Python nearly as well as I'd like.

So what's the point of this fork, then, anyway? Simple. Unlike MOE, Mongo 
will have an educational twist (albeit an admittedly corny one): you fight 
monsters with knowledge. Aw, yeah! BRING THE KNOWLEDGE! "You dare to 
attack the domain of the Fraction Troll, puny weakling human child? Well, 
riddle me this: in the fraction 3/4, what is the DENOMINATOR? 4, you say? 
Ack, that's correct! Fie, I am stricken! Woe unto me, now I die!"

Brilliant, right? I know! Okay, maybe not. But it's a start. One thing I 
do like about the dungeon metaphor is that it's got that immersive, 
exploratory element to it -- which is why I played so much Rogue and 
Nethack and Larn when I was younger. Sure, it's no Second Life or WoW, but 
it hardly needs to be -- and to run on a cheap netbook, couldn't be 
anyway.

Somehow, I've got to fit the following four elements into this activity.

1. Content. One can imagine the Six Tomes of Fractions. ("What's a tome? 
Oh, it's a fancy word for book? Cool.") Each tome has content that teaches 
a lesson, and each tome builds on the lessons taught in previous tomes. 
Maybe it's words, maybe it's pictures, maybe it even spins off an Ogg 
player -- but I'm sure we will start simple. This is obviously where we'll 
need the most help from teachers.

2. Drill. Practice, practice. Level grinding in an RPG can be pretty 
boring, but you do it because you want to see what comes next. What's the 
next monster? What's the next treasure? What cool thing is waiting on the 
next level? You've just got to know, so you fight enough monsters to get 
to that next level -- and if you're anything like me, you stay up until 
3am to do it. Why shouldn't drilling math concepts work the same way?

3. Assessment. In the end, does the kid know what 3/4 + 3/8 is, and does 
he know how to get there? In the classroom, that's what tests tell us. 
Now, the thing about a pen-and-paper test in the classroom is that you 
give the same test to 25 kids exactly once, and the overhead of creating 
that test, administering that test, and grading that test is what takes a 
significant chunk of any teacher's time. Doing it repeatedly is all but 
impossible, so if a kid falls behind, there's no time to help him catch 
back up. But for certain classes of tests -- especially math tests -- the 
questions can be infinitely variable, administered by the Boss monster, 
and instantly graded pass/fail. If you slay the Big Boss at the end, you 
win! And if you don't understand how fractions work, the Boss kills you, 
and you start over. What kid wants that?

4. Alignment. Remember: all of this stuff should align with a useful 
curriculum framework, or educators won't have any incentive to use it. 
We've chosen to work with a derivative of the Massachusetts 4th grade math 
framework, so dungeon level one could be all about 4.N.1 and 4.N.2, and 
dungeon level two could handle 4.N.3 and 4.N.4, and so on.

5. Customizability. Ultimately, Mongo should be a simple game to model 
some simple ideas. If they are good ideas, then people will either 
customize Mongo or build their own games with similar ideas. If we do it 
right, it should be a trivial matter to plug in different content, 
different drills, and different assessments. Of course, because all 
content and code is open source -- that's the point, after all -- people 
are free to rip off these ideas and move forward with them. And boy, do I 
hope that people do exactly that.

Needless to say, patches welcome. I've got a hosting request in the 
pipeline with fedorahosted.org to host Mongo; as soon as that goes 
through, I will upload what I've got so far. (Which, fair warning, isn't 
much.)

A couple of other wrinkles I'm thinking about:

* I don't know nearly enough about Moodle, but I should. The quiz data 
formats are especially interesting. Standards make life easier for 
everyone, and it would be nice to be able to take content from Moodle, or 
any LMS, and drop it into Mongo. My first targeted question format for 
Mongo will, in fact, be the Aiken format used by Moodle for simplified 
multiple choice questions. Human readable, easily parsed, somewhat 
brittle. I can live with that for now.

* I haven't even bothered to Sugarize my work on Mongo yet, and because I 
haven't tried to write a Sugar activity in, oh, two years, I don't even 
know where I'd start. I hope that the instructions for Sugarizing a simple 
Pygame-based activity are clear and easy to follow. And if they aren't, 
that's obviously a worthy project for someone to undertake.

Anyway. That's what I'm working on.

* * *

Now, what should *other people* be working on? There are basically two 
options. Option 1: help me with Dungeons of Mongo. Option 2: start another 
activity project aimed at fourth grade math, maybe with a completely 
different approach.

Notably, Mongo does not yet align directly with any of the fourth grade 
math framework objectives. The questions and content, for now, are 
placeholders. Someone could certainly work the content side in parallel.

If some enterprising people want to start another project, that's great. 
The principles should be the same: modular activities that encapsulate 
content, drill and assessment, that allow a self-directed learner to 
demonstrate mastery of a particular unit of knowledge that is aligned to 
the 4gm (that's my acronym for fourth grade math) curriculum framework. 
With a strong preference for Python, since that's the heart of the Sugar 
principle of hackability. Python activities can be brought up in Pippy 
right now. Java applets can't, and neither can Flash activities.

Whatever you do, potential contributor, don't overthink it. It doesn't 
have to be perfect. Working code and loose consensus: that's what moves 
open source software projects forward. Let's get out there and screw 
something up. It is very dark, and if we don't move forward, we are all 
likely to be eaten by grues.

(Don't forget to join the list, where will be talking more about this in 
detail, and soon.)

--g

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