[Its.an.education.project] Further training

[Bernie Innocenti]

Bryan Berry wrote:

> We didn't want to teach teachers about programming when many of them
> hadn't yet used a computer in their lives and most have extremely
> limited English skills.

Heh, this is exactly how people of my age (I'm 33) were exposed
to computers for the first time (I'd play with my friend's VIC20
when we were around 7 or 8).

Nothing to do with it other than programming in BASIC, and no
previous exposure to English.  The user manual, however, was an
excellent example of a hands-on constructionist course, with funny
drawings and an easy language that little kids could grasp.

It was continuously rewarding because we could get something cool
on the TV screen within a few minutes and then experiment with
parameters and try to understand how it worked.

That said, I don't think programming is for everybody.  My friend
quickly lost interest and gave up within a couple of days, while
I'm still having fun to date.

The nice aspect about constructionist learning is that we don't all
have to learn the same thing.  One kid can be a programmer, another
one a musician.  A school that fails to put this diversity to its
advantage has lost much of the potential of the students.



> [...]
> My comments above are in regards to training teachers. We have no doubt
> many of the kids will figure out programming on their own. In regards to
> constructionism in general, we believe the kids will get it either way
> so we put most of our efforts into making sure the education system in
> Nepal gets it. 

A friend of mine, an engineer, thought Pippy to his 8 years old kid.
First thing, he tried to write an AI program so he could chat with
his laptop.  It didn't come out very well, but I liked the attitude!

It would be great to have Eliza on the laptop in some form!


> we want to be disruptive but not so disruptive that we alienate the
> teachers that will sustain this project in the long term. w/out the
> support of teachers, there won't be any electricity at the school, the
> School server won't be maintained, the XO's won't be maintained, and the
> local parent associations won't support this project.

You are right on this!

So maybe we should eat our own dog food and apply constructionism
with teachers too: some of them will like programming, others will
just hate it.  Let's not force-feed them with the same stuff.

I must admit I had very little luck teaching Linux to a bunch of
high-school teachers a few years ago.  I had never met such an
unwilling class in my whole life!  Some were even a bit disappointed
that my course did not look alike the "computer basics" course they
did the year before on Windows, where they were thought how to use
Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer and Microsoft Outlook.
They thought learning Linux meant starting over; Learning these
same things from scratch on a different operating system.

:-(

When I told them: "look, you already know everything, you just need
to learn about a few differences, not the same things once again!"
they looked really confused and stopped taking notes.  In retrospect,
this is probably where I had lost many of them.

-- 
   \___/
  _| o |  Bernie Innocenti - http://www.codewiz.org/
  \|_X_|  "It's an education project, not a laptop project!"