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Assignment for Nov 11: Final Draft of Project Proposal
Submitted by kbrennan on November 6, 2009 - 7:14pm.
By Nov 11, please post the revised draft of a short proposal describing your final project. Keep it less than a page.
By Nov 18, please provide feedback on two proposals from other students in the class. To determine which proposals to respond to, please start with the two people following your name in this list. For example, Debbie will provide feedback to Duks and Emily, and Vicky will provide feedback to Amos and April. You're welcome to provide additional feedback, but please start with those following you in the list.
Amos
April
Daniel
Danny
Debbie
Duks
Emily
Florence/Kumiko
Huang
Jenn
Jin Joo
John
Kathleen
Kent/Pol
Lass
Marie
Rita
Ryan
Sam
Takashi
Vicky
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For the final project, I would like to envision a music learning tool, particularly in learning to play the violin.
Building on the concepts and technological capabilities of Apple's GarageBand Learn to Play, Microsoft's Project Natal, Wii Muisc, social networking, search, and mobile platforms, I would like to design interactive lesson plans for beginning string instrument players.
Lessons: It will be targeted towards children, ages 5-8, and will focus on the first three introductory lessons. The lessons will be divided into three parts- sound, theory and style- and each lesson will be consisted of three stages: guided tinkering, structured learning, and performance. During the tinkering stage, the suggested activities will focus on inviting the students to the world of sounds and helping them focus their ears and minds during the structured learning phase. The level of structured learning will be based on the assessment information during the previous phase (the assessment will be disguised as fun interactive activities) and will be tailored for the level of musical aptitude of the learner. Using the motion-sensing abilities of Microsoft's Natal, I'm hoping to include a function where the movement of the body (stiffness of the muscles and balance of posture) as well as the pitch, rhythm, and tone will be monitored and made available to the students as well as their mentors for their weekly in-person lessons. The technology will also provide opportunities for the students to to connect with peers in the same system globally to give feedback or perform together through the internet. It will also allow them to view or post any live concert information, share recommendation for recordings and resources for further learning.
Technology: Ideally, this should seamlessly work on a TV through game consoles/home theater, mobile phones, PCs and a dedicated learning center. The level and progress should be stored in the central system and accessed through the internet connection on any of these deivces. I mentioned Microsoft's Project Natal, although the platform is in its early stage, because I believe it provides a way to combine educational potential of the internet with the hands-free motion sensing controller system that detects the physical motion that the violin player.
Mentorship: I would like to include periodic events, such as orchestra, chamber music and intensive camp. Also, each student will be matched with a peer to help each other learn/practice and possibly gain access a local professional violinist to receive direct coachings. Having the technology support this model reduces some of the inefficiencies in the classroom teaching (time spent on disciplining the kids) yet maximizes the effectiveness of the time spent with the private instructors.
Links to my inspirations:
1. Microsoft Project Natal (hands-free motion-sensitive controller system): http://www.xbox.com/en-US/live/projectnatal/
2. Apple GarageBand Learn to Play (PC-based instrument learning application): http://www.apple.com/ilife/garageband/
3. Wii Music (controller-based music performance/entertainment): http://www.wiimusic.com/launch/?ref=http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&s...
Marie
Hi Marie,
What a nice idea for a learning technology! And thank you for introducing me to Natal—a super user interface. I now have a few ideas for that platform as well…
After looking at your inspirational links and thinking about your project, it seems that you are targeting learners who are fairly serious about violin lessons. I make that assumption based on your reference to their weekly, in-person lessons, which represent a substantial commitment to learning the art of playing the violin. Do you see this as a tool that a violin teacher might use to help the student between lessons, or as something a student uses out of his or her own interest?
The answer to that question may make a difference in how you approach the design of the tool.
The program sounds like an informal learning tool in that one uses it outside of a school or formal environment. Yet it also seems fairly formal in the ways that a user learns about sound, is assessed based on performance and can include coaching by professionals. If you are attracting informal learners, the formality may be a bit intimidating. But for young people serious about the violin, I think your idea provides a wonderful way to dive fairly deeply, even with 3 lesson plans.
Some of the strengths of your approach can be found in the use of information from the Internet, paired with peer feedback, and occasional professional feedback. Entry into a community of practice as a beginner is interesting, and if you can design the program to require some consistent level of peer interaction, say critiques and/or performances to the community, this can be a terrific draw. I think many people feel a bit alone when taking music lessons, and this kind of interaction would give learners a social context and feedback that they would find meaningful, outside of the teacher’s weekly lessons. On the other hand, you need to be careful not to try to do too much with one program. You are attempting to do several things at once here it seems, teach someone to play the violin, introduce them in general to the world of music, and build a community of practice. Choose what you think you can execute well, and then build out the program based on that success over time.
Lessons: Dividing each lesson into sessions that build from guided tinkering, to structured learning, to performance also seems like a nice approach. Each phase is related to the kind of learning found in a community of practice. This is a realistic exercise for future workplace interactions in general, and specifically allows one to dive more deeply into the violin as interest and time allows.
What kind of assessment are you thinking of? Is this invisible/background assessment or is it assessment that the learner can see and use as feedback? Sometimes assessment can be discouraging, and take the fun out of the process. This is a trait seen in bad computer tutor programs. You might take a look at some tutor programs and see what you think of their assessment strategies. There is usually assessment that the student can see, providing immediate feedback, and another level of assessment that happens in the background-- artificial intelligence determining the next serious of questions or activities, based on how well or badly a student performed in the previous section. As we all know, regardless of how you approach assessment, positive feedback is essential.
Technology:
Each of your inspirational references has different strengths. Natal is a very cool, natural interface, and seems the best fit for all three lesson types: guided tinkering, structured learning, and performance. But I doubt it exists quite yet in the seamless, real time environment that the video demonstrates. But this kind of technology is what designers have been wanting forever as interactive and user-friendly interfaces. Garage Band, looks like a very good learning tool for structured phase learning, not so good for tinkering (not enough fun), but really great for performance. The fact that you can play with or without the voice, the band, whatever you choose is fun and helps the learning process immensely. Oddly enough, Wii was the least successful interface as it didn’t seem like an effective tool for learning the instrument. It did, however, seem great for learning to imitate correct posture and motion. Wii seems more tailored to guided tinkering and is not as satisfactory as a learning tool for the violin. Learning with virtual instruments just isn’t as interesting as getting feedback from real instruments.
Can you find a way to attach the violin to the program such that feedback is based on real time activity , tone, timing, finger placement on the fretboard, the string activity as well as body motion? If so, I think you will have a killer application.
Mentorship:
Peer matching and access to professional feedback is a nice aspect to the program and to building a community of practice, but be careful not to spread the core concept too thinly, as the project might loose engagement by trying to do too many things. Remember the young Scratch programmer’s advice from a paper several weeks ago: “Keep it simple!” The addition of online connections to others, to information, etc. while offering wonderful opportunities, could also blur focus of the lessons. (My own proposal suffers from trying to accomplish too many things with one tool.)
One last question…when can I sign up for lessons?!
Lass
As the sister of a professional violinist, [and granddaughter too...], I couldn't help responding to this project proposal. Indeed, I grew up in a house that throughout my childhood and teenage years resonated with the sound of my brother practicing his violin and rehearsing his scores. He was also learning the piano and trumpet, albeit less seriously. Now, his two little boys are learning the violin too, as well as the piano and, cello for the eldest.
First, I can say that focusing on the first three lessons of learning the violin and on young learners [age 5-8] is a smart move [pun unintended:)]. Compared to other instruments, the violin is especially difficult at the beginning. It takes long and painstaking hours to learn to play correctly just a few notes, and usually you start by learning to play just one note ['sol' in French] for about a month or more. This can be quite off-putting for most kids and many give up quickly, in this early phase [unless forbidden by their parents to do so]. [I'm one of them by the way:), that's when I decided to go to ballet school instead]. With an instrument like the piano, children can quickly start playing little tunes early on in the learning program. So this is much more encouraging for young learners. However, according to what my brother told me and what I have observed, these different initial levels of facility/difficulty in acquiring the skills to play these instruments are reversed later on, with the piano becoming more arduous to master and the violin becoming easier once you have reached a certain level.
So those first three lessons are indeed critical in retaining the students of violin and ensuring they have a positive, encouraging experience. Thus I think it is very wise to focus on that period of learning.
One question that came up to my mind is what the system does to the students' learning style and acquired methods. Even if they are beginners, we can assume they will come from cultures [through their parents, etc] that have very different ways of learning music. Japan for example, uses the Suzuki method which does away with learning solfege, which is quite different from the traditional system in European music schools.
My question for you Marie is whether her music learning tool seeks to replace those existing methods and practices, or on the contrary complement them and build upon them.
If to complement them, are you going to try to integrate your tool in today's music schools and in private tuition sessions? In this case, it would be useful to develop the tool in such a way that it can be used not only by learners, but by their teachers too.
Another question is what is the learning curve for using this tool efficiently?
Another question that relates to your mentioning the possibility of connecting with local professional violinists: this is a great idea, only how does it work economically, in other words, how do you pay them? - unless you have found a way to attract volunteers.
But generally I think it's a great project idea. You should check the work of Xao Xao, a student here at the Media Lab, who has done great musical instruments projects, most recently a tool to learn the piano remotely.
Florence Gallez
Terrific proposal Marie! You've outlined a very comprehensive and ambitious program that has both depth and breadth. I especially appreciated the links to your inspirations which helped provide a technological context for your proposal.
My comments echo many of the observations made by Lass and Florence:
One of the most powerful learning experiences I had in my adult life was in a class on Celestial Navigation (CN) at the Smithsonian Astrophysics Observatory. This was in 1993 and the class make-up was primarily graduate students from Education interested in ways to teach very basic and abstract foundations in astronomy. CN taught some of these foundations through locating self in time and space and through plotting the way forward based on that knowledge. In the U.S. our public education system (pre-university) doesn’t address astronomy very well in curriculum, and uses geography skills chiefly for mapping purposes—concentrating on local, state, national and global locations in the context of historical and contemporary issues related to wars, trade, population and migration patterns. By developing navigation skills, using the stars as guide, one began to physically and perceptually locate self in relation to the earth, solar system, galaxy and universe. Time is essential in this exploration, so understanding time, and its whys and wherefores is a fascinating and important learning goal. And that understanding can be useful in many circumstances (piloting, global economic markets and collaborations, climate change, etc.). For my final project I would like to address a serious lack of curriculum in astronomy in primary and secondary education by creating an informal, collaborative learning tool that in some ways imitates the experiences I had in Celestial Navigation. My target audience would be ages 8-14, grades 3 through 9.
Scratch is a learning tool, a powerful and engaging learning tool for programming. Over time Scratch has produced a community of learners and content creators. Scratch members use the community for like-minded feedback on their programs and projects, and in some cases to collaborate on projects. To build on the success of Scratch as a collaborative, learning tool for a community of practice and to address the need for some astronomical foundations, I’d like to design an interactive Scratch module for the iPhone, based around wayfinding. I’d like for users to explore and learn about where they are in the world, in the solar system, how to navigate using time, the stars and positioning techniques, and how space, place, and time are related. In thinking about my celestial navigation class, and about the sextant, my object-to-think-with in that learning environment, I realized that the iPhone can approximate many of the capabilities found in a sextant, plus some. (For example: compass application, motion and position sensors, time keepers, etc.) I’d like to design a Scratch gaming environment in which players participate in a global game, interactively locate themselves, other players, and places using a sextant-like device (iPhone), and add their own content to the global game for others to play and to build upon.
A user would informally learn about time, planetary motion, and global positioning, and create content in this module. The module should build on the programming skills that Scratch users have developed, and on the social networking aspects of the community. I am partially inspired by Ocarina, the beautiful iPhone application that imitates the ancient flute of that name. Ocarina allows the user to learn to play the instrument, record their own music, upload it to the Internet, and share their opus with other Ocarina musicians around the world, the network of people who happen to be playing and creating at the same moment. It’s a very powerful sharing experience. It would be terrific to duplicate this kind of real time experience for the Scratch community.
As example, the game starts with a player at sea on his/her ship. The player is assigned a challenge or task by the game, and he or she has to solve clues and overcome obstacles on the way to meeting that challenge. In order to figure out where your ship is located, you have to log the time of day, the position of the sun, north or other star, and the last known position, direction and speed of your craft using the iPhone capabilities referred to above. A player would use the iPhone motion sensors to move his or her vessel through the oceans of the world, using the compass function to guide them. ( I envision creating a mashup of a bunch of iPhone and Google applications to enable the global game. ) The global game design should incorporate multiple levels of play and content creation, allowing easy entry (as in “pimping” or creating your own vessel and avatar/identity) and a high ceiling for learning and collaboration (as in creating your own game or trick within the global game, and/or participating in larger, networked collaborative goals like building and supplying a community on a fictitious island somewhere on the planet.)
Challenges to engage individual players or constellations of players might include: delivering a valuable cargo to deliver to X island/location, carrying a message from the King to a remote island without communication capabilities, tracking down pirates on the high seas who are hijacking ships, going on a quest to find a sunken ship, mapping the sea floor, or
building a community together on an island.
Though as yet unclear about the mechanics of how this would work, I’m leaning toward a model where Scratch users would build their vessel, avatar, and any game or trick elements in their home computer environment and then upload them online to a Scratch wayfinding gallery where a central authority (like Amos) would vet them for appropriate content before incorporating into the global game. There would be a reward scheme as well, such as points or recognition for accomplishing missions and goals. The public display and/or use of the avatars, games, tricks etc. that the Scratch member uploads to the global environment would also serve as reward within the community.
This is admittedly ambitious, but some version of this is what I have in mind. Participating in this game would use the learning spiral that Resnick outlined early in our class: imagine, create, play, share and reflect. But key to success will be the level of engagement inherent in the story and challenges, and the simplicity of the game design and goals.
Feedback will be greatly appreciated…
Hey Lass,
This project sounds beautiful and imaginative and really fun! I'm confused, however, about one thing. I understand that a player would input his or her "location" into the iPhone, and it sounds like (from your description) that location would be where a player actually is at the moment of data input. So how does that mesh with the imaginary or virtual voyages the player will undertake? I mean, the players aren't actually going to be out on the ocean (most of them anyway), and therefore all their "coordinates" of their journeys will be "fake". So why does it matter that they enter real information when they initiate game play?
You mention the need to have someone like Amos vetting avatars for content appropriateness, and the economics of that are something you might want to explore. How many professional people are needed to administer the big MMOGs, like World of Warcraft? How does needing any kind of ongoing human staff support work with open source gaming and creative online communities like Scratch? Do you need to apply for grants or find sponsors to get a game like this going? The target users add to this complexity, because it is crucial to run sites for children in ways that protect them, and that usually means costly staff.
I don't have an iPhone, and most tweens don't either - another problem, perhaps - but I thought I heard that iPhones are not good at running real-time apps, or maybe that's multiple real-time apps. Isn't that the supposed selling point of the Palm Pre? I don't know about Ocarina, but I'd like to. I've asked Santa Claus for an iPhone for Christmas, so hopefully I'll be better informed about iPhone apps in the future - not that that helps you now. I promise to buy your game if it makes it into the Apple app store!
I love this idea and I can't wait to see what you make of it. Smooth sailing!
Kathleen
Hi Lass -
Love your game idea! I think a mash-up using Google Maps/Earth, and Scratch on the iPhone could open up a lot of learning possibilities.
A few observations:
A BRIEF ARTBOTICS EXPLORATION FOR EDUCATORS
MOTIVATION
The motivation for this effort is to introduce educators to alternative methods for exposing youth to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) concepts through robotics. Art and computer science may appear like two unique fields without overlap. Animation, gaming, and computer graphics are obvious examples of where art and computer science overlap; the robotics field is another, albeit more subtle, example. There is an inherent need for creativity, visualizing, and interaction design within the robotics field; thus blending art and robotics is natural and practiced. Approaching robotics from an artistic perspective may prove useful in exposing youth to STEM concepts.
QUESTION
Is it possible to give educators a motivating and useful introduction to the Artbotics concept in a three-hour timeframe?
OBJECTIVES
1. Using the Artbotics high school and college classes as inspiration, design a three-hour program for approximately 50 educators.
2. Incorporate progressive techniques discussed in class and utilized in the Artbotics class: project-based activity, group collaboration, and intrinsic motivation.
3. Evaluate the program impact through solicited feedback and observed educator involvement.
APPROACH
There are logistical constraints under which this program is to be designed:
1. Timeframe = 3 hours
2. Audience = ~50 adult educators (assume they are not familiar with the hardware)
3. Hardware = standard Artbotics kit containing a Super Cricket board, motors, and sensors.
The program will have three primary phases: introduction, activity, and presentation. This is the general flow employed in the other Artbotics programs. It will provide the educators with a sense of being in a full Artbotics program.
OUTCOMES
The three-hour Artbotics program package will contain the deliverables from this effort:
1. Activity documentation and surveys
2. Hardware references and necessary code base
3. Finished art piece for showing at the workshop
This material will be implemented during the STREAM Workshop taking place in June 2010.
FUTURE WORK
The focus for this effort is ultimately executing the three-hour Artbotics program during the 2010 STREAM Workshop. The evaluation of the program will determine activity usefulness in giving educators a sense of being in an Artbotics class. The evaluation results will be used to drive improvement. Alternative activities should also be explored for future workshops.
DETAILED PROPOSAL AVAILABLE HERE: http://docs.google.com/View?id=dfdfdbj5_24fhmntshg
I think this is a well thought out proposal, here are my thoughts:
1. Will the art be focused on a certain topic or in a certain style? This could perhaps enable comparisons and growth.
2. Is it a good idea to show examples of previous pieces? Or to allow them to discover what is possible on their own? How important is discovery as part of the process?
Jenn,
I have read with much interest your proposal. The first thing I have to say is that even though I had heard of the tricky interface between arts and computer science, which is, I agree, still poorly explored, I hadn't heard of the Artbotics concept and I wasn't sure to how much extent it was an established concept, known across the country or only locally to a small group of people. This wasn't clear to me. I did a search on Google and found that the University of Massachusetts in Lowell is conducting such Artbotics workshops, but again, I didn't know if you are referring to these, or a new one that you plan to create from scratch.
All this to say that if indeed you feel constraint by the 3-hour time frame for your proposed workshop, then it might be worth ensuring that you selected participants are at least familiar with the concept of Artbotics before they start the program. This is not to say that it couldn't beneficial to complete Artbotics novices. But just a little prior knowledge would help make the most of the time available. This could be done via some mini online tutorial or readings that participants would have to do beforehand.
Now that I've pointed out a potential weakness, I want to say that this sounds like a great and needed initiative, precisely because it's a refreshing approach to the study of computer science and engineering, and also because it would bring a different set of people in the community f learners, namely artists and other creative talents.
For interesting projects at the intersection of arts and computer science, Geert Lovink's book, "Dark Fiber - Tracking Critical Internet Culture" is worth getting your hands onto - http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=9996 - This means that there are interesting projects that overlap in this area, but, as your description implies, they are little explored or understood. Most examples he gives are based in Europe, where there seems to be more awareness and interest about them.
All in all, I would give my full support to such a 'Train the Trainers' project, as after all, even if in the new model of education trainers/teachers/educators are not so prominent and the sole decision-makers, they will still be very much part of the picture, and rightly so!
Florence Gallez
Hi Jenn,
thank you for sharing your proposal. I am happy to read it because I am working on a similar educational project "for educators"! Mine is primarily focused on educators in Japan, and I think it would be very interesting to have chat again with you sometime outside class :)
Here are my comments for your proposal;
1. What kind of educators are you thinking to include? You said that one of your goals is to introduce them alternative methods for exposing youth to STEM concepts through robotics. Who could be the person who can give such opportunities to youth?
2. What would make educators excited about Artbotics and/or its concept? What would motivate them to start exploring alternative methods after the 3-hour session?
Thank you for reading!
hi, Jenn, thanks for your well organized proposal. i think the artbotics is really fun and i can imagine if i was still a child, i could really love it.
one thing i have a little different idea with florance is that i think if your main propose for this workshop is just to give educators a motivating and useful introduction to the artbotics concept in a three-hour timeframe, i would say, 3 hours is enough. Also, I think that is important and challenging since, realistically, we should assume that audience would not prepare anything for what you are planning to talk about. Thus, if this workshop mode works this time, it could apply to a lot of places in a certain universal way.
one thing i am concerning is that, I think the obsession with the work of artbotics is very different with the obsession with the working experience on artbotics. Somehow it depends on the people's background. If you look at the projects we did for this semester, some kids who has no technique background, are not interested in going deeply, or even do not want to figure out clearly if some one in his/her group can figure out. In your cases, your target group is for those educators. The background of the educators are very different from the kids. So there is a tricky point for evaluation based on the working experience on artbotics instead of the final result. I would wonder if it is possible, even it is a workshop for the educators, you could still invite a small group of kids to join the workshop and to see the difference between them: the way they are building and the final result they will build.
I am also interested in how people will start their project. What will inspire them as a beginning of the project. I would suggest you could bring a bunch of stuff as some physical object which people can start with. Even a small plant with nice leaves works in this case. or some paintings, interesting animations and so on.
anyway, i do think artbotics is a strong project and your workshop to the educators will be a great effort to promote it.
Final Project Proposal – Open Park Collaborative Workstation for Learning and Practicing News-reporting and Storytelling
Revised version
I. Intro - Identifying the Issues
One of the key issues I am trying to address through my proposed system for collaborative journalism [see Open Park project at http://civic.mit.edu/projects/c4fcm/open-park-a-model-for-collaborative-... and my initial draft for this project at http://mas714.media.mit.edu/node/53#comments -] is how to represent different perspectives and allow for diverse voices in news-reporting, personal storytelling, or other types of new media production. It is common even for people working in a group towards a common goal to end up with a finished product that reflects only one dominant voice or agenda. The news media does it all the time, with our daily news being replete with biases and one-sided coverage, especially of controversial topics. Be it print, broadcast, digital or other new media, they often tell a story that shows one specific angle and fails to encompass diverse opinions from a diverse group of people/media producers.
When working with others, how do you ensure that all voices will be heard and reflected in your final product [be it a decision or something more tangible such as a media or artistic creation, a business plan, etc]? How do you go about finding and including other perspectives than those readily available in your group? How do you work with people who are remotely located? What technologies or new media services and practices, such as sharing knowledge with strangers through online networks, might you need? And most of all, how do you engage these people [those outsiders who are not directly related to your project] to participate and contribute meaningfully?
These questions lie at the center of the participatory, representative, deliberative, democratic collaborative learning and work processes that I am seeking to create and implement for the news media and new media production. They are essential components of functioning communities of learners, co-workers and creative media producers. The key question, thus, is how do you apply this democratic approach to building healthy collaborative communities?
II. Research Questions:
In view of the questions and issues mentioned here above and the discussions we had in class, Kumiko and I have decided to address the following research questions in our final project:
1 key question:
When you want to create and/or work on a project, how do you get it to reflect multiple perspectives (whether you are working on your own or already with partners)?
sub-questions:
. How do you find partners, and how do you use those human resources?
. What are your criteria for finding, 'hiring' partners and collaborators? Should they have the same level of skills than you/your team has? Or on the contrary display a higher level of proficiency so that you can learn from them? Do you seek people who bring to the table strictly those skills you need, or do you accept collaborators whose skills go beyond what you need and encompass other fields of knowledge?
. What strategies do you use to include all of their perspectives into your/your team's work?
. How do you work collaboratively with people in remote location?
. How do you determine the tools and technological support you will need to work together?
III. Applications
With its unique opportunities for multi-perspectival news-coverage and storytelling, Open Park presents itself as an ideal platform to study and hopefully provide answers to these questions. As explained earlier, the OP system lets individuals and groups of people based in various locations report on local stories or produce a multimedia project locally and then combine their news/media production into one piece of work that reflects how the chosen theme plays out across these various locations and groups (i.e. across the county for an issue of national importance for example).
We believe there are three distinct types of activities and groups of practioners that this model could be useful for. These three applications are:
. 1] News-Reporting/Journalism
. 2] Personal Storytelling
. 3] Multimedia Creative Production
These three spheres of activities do not in any way exclude each other, rather, in today's digital age of user-generated content they often overlap and complement each other.
The News-Reporting/Journalism category includes all forms of reports to cover the news [print, broadcast, electronic, multimedia, professional, freelance, 'citizen' journalism reports, news blogs and discussion forums, etc]
The Personal Storytelling section refers to all instances of people [non-professionals] telling their on stories [personal blogs and webpages, family histories, shared moments with friends, learning experiences, personal accounts of events, etc]
The Multimedia Creative Production group also has a news and or/ storytelling element, but is often made up of artists seeking to tell a story/their message using any new medium [and oftentimes a combination of media]. It is broader than the first strictly news-focused group, and more likely to include professionally trained artists/media producers than the second group of individuals, which includes 'the man in the street'.
VI. Field Tests
For our field tests, we would like to keep those three types of activities in mind and offer them as possible areas of exploration and collaborative media production to our participants, namely the college/school students we are currently selecting.
The task they will be assigned is to collaboratively tell a story that matters to them [real or fictional] using creatively new media news-reporting/storytelling tools [such as online social networks, podcasts, video, etc], and produce at the end one finished piece of collaborative multimedia production [a series of articles, photo-essay, etc].
They will be asked to use Open Park's Drupal Wiki as their collaborative working space, and encouraged to use OP's new media news-reporting/storytelling tools. They will also be encouraged to design and suggest their own tools or ways to tell their story, which we may eventually include in OP's own list of tools.
An important part of the participating students' assignment will be to seek collaborators outside of their class/school's walls, be they professionals or informal resources such as friends and family, even if they are already working in a group with their classmates to start with. This is not an absolute necessity, but they will be encouraged to do so. For those who successfully sought and found partners, they will be asked to report on how they went about it [what strategies they used, where did they look for them].
They will be welcome to use the tools and methods of all three types of applications mentioned here above. For this reason, we have decided to extend the offer of participation to include, in addition to journalism students, students in other classes, such as arts, communication and writing studies, among others.
At the end of their work together and when they are ready to deliver to us their collaborative story/multimedia project, the students will be asked to document their collaborative work process, how they found the needed resources, what they learned from each other, and most importantly, what difficulties they had to solve together [be they technological, ethical or of a different order]. Here we are especially interested in hearing how they addressed the research questions mentioned here above.
This will amount to a careful and comprehensive analysis of how they worked together as a community, how they managed to give a voice to multiple perspectives in their collaborative media production, and what they learned in the process. They will be encouraged to conclude the experiment with their own ideal model of an effective learning and media producing community of news-reporters and storytellers.
As of today, Nov 11, we have selected a series of local high schools and colleges/universities they we will be contacting in the coming days for possible participation.
Florence Gallez
Your project is great and touches on a lot of things that are relevant to online journalism today. I understand the necessity to broaden the field in order to get a good amount of participation, but I think you may benefit from narrowing down the effort in terms of what you want to study vs. what you want to teach for instance.
I would exclude any teaching agenda, if you want to find out how hard it is in general to produce such collaborations. I would then also try to work with a lot of participants. I would alternatively focus on the teaching part by being involved and monitoring the process of only a few groups. Doing both might dilute the quality of the results.
I am also not quite sure what you efforts are geared towards. Is it the facilitation of collaboration? Is it the evaluation of multi-perspective work in any discipline? Is it supposed to be located in a more professional setting with other kinds of consequences than storytelling? Even if the system you want to use allows for all these things I would focus on one single aspect and document that along with your participants as I think you will learn more that way and might be in a better position to formulate a contribution.
The idea of having multiple perspectives on one concrete event is obviously very valuable. The Guardian (British Newspaper) had invited writers from all areas in the political spectrum to report on one single things and published at least a “right” and a “left” article. I personally think that an investigation into something like that in a less professional environment – let’s say in the world of unprofessional blogers for instance - might be broad enough. Finding out if individuals would be willing to participate in something like that and ask them to manage the content amongst themselves would already be controversial enough. This however is just a personal interpretation of what you might be interested in....
It sounds like you two have a lot of things you're interested in addressing in this project, which is great! I agree that we could all benefit from a more diverse range of journalistic perspectives and I love the OP website's mention of "Don't compete, collaborate!". It feels like there is such a divide between conservative and liberal media in our society and that a project like OP could help to bridge some enormous gaps.
I think it's great that you're interested in exploring such collaboration across many groups (news-reporting/journalism, personal storytelling, and multimedia creative production) and I agree that these areas can be fairly interconnected. However, for the scope of this final project, I think it might make sense to constrain yourself to evaluating one of those activities in particular. I agree with Duks's comment about focusing on a specific element of this project and that that may best enable you to effectively structure and evaluate your approach.
While I think it's a great idea to get lots of people involved in your evaluation, I again think it might be nice to focus on a smaller, more manageable group in the context of this course project. It sounds like the tasks you'd like students to complete will require a considerable time commitment on their part and I'm not sure if the participants will have enough time to give you comprehensive feedback by the end of the term. (I'm just thinking that since they're students, they are likely to be preparing for final projects and exams themselves.) That being said, I think that you could learn an incredible amount from thorough field testing in the way that you describe.
It seems like OP is a much larger project that will continue to be developed over time and I look forward to watching it evolve. In the meantime, I think that this course project is a great opportunity for you to contribute some really relevant findings!
Sustainable Toys: Physical Scratch
Purpose : How to teach sustainable concept for children ?
Background : Energy is difficult to teach children and scientific knowledge does not change children’s sustainable behaviors. Numerious researches idenfited that a retention rate after taking a lecture is lower than five percent, on the other hand, the rate is over seventy five percent after learning by doing projects. The rate records highest as ninty percent when people learns by teaching. I want to make toys with which chilidren can learn fundermental knowlede in energy and share their own learnings by making Scratch games with wich children can teach sustainable behaviors each other.
Methods : I am interested in makng toys in which sensors, renewable energy devices are imbedded so they can promote interactions between users and environments. I want to make them programmable by connecting with Scratch. By designing interactive toys, children can learn sustainable concepts easy and the learning experience can be enjoyable. Initial approach starts with researching technologies to connect between physical computing and Scrath such as Arduino and imbeded systems instead of idea itself. As I become familiar with the Scratch-Physical computing, I will develop a detailed and doable project in later part
Initial Concept : What is the one watt ? How big or how small the one watt is? How easy and fast to waste the one watt? How difficult to recharge it ? The watt is a base unit for energy currently is being used in everywhere but it is not certain that people really know what it is. Understanding and getting the physical sense of one watt may help children to understand various scales of energy consumptions. Sensors in sustainable toys can collect energy consumption information around children’s living and the toys can visualize their readings so children can capture the sense of sustainable consumption. Scracth can help to re-arrange and share children’s learnings through Scrath website.
John Juhong Park
John,
This projects sounds really cool. I think adults and not only children have a poor sense of sustainability, especially something like a watt.
A couple of things:
As for the technologies, I know that investigating the limits of scratch and its ability to interface with hardware is important and part of the initial steps. But do you have any particular sensors/technology that you would like to use that you believe should be doable? Maybe LEDs?
I guess the picture i imagined when I read your proposal is: A child hand cranking a wheel to "generate power" in scratch, which will in turn power these LEDs. Harder you crank, more power/watts is generated, causing more LED's to light.
Also, it might be a good idea to think how your technology can teach other sustainable concepts for future work.
Final Draft submitted by Pol Pla i Conesa and Kent Millard
Introduction:
How can formal and informal learning approaches be used to build a community of people who are interested in learning how to produce and improve their video making skills? We propose to create an online community where people can get inspiration, share their creations, get feedback from others, and technical support.
We believe that knowledge is achieved mostly through experience; thus our idea is to create a learning tool that is a compilation of collected experiences. We expect solid knowledge to eventually emerge in such an environment. By building a community that helps members through the creative process we envision the creation of a substantial audiovisual database; essentially, the collective knowledge of that community.
Background:
As we discussed the common thread between our initial proposals, it became clear that we had somewhat divergent opinions on how people learn. Pol has created a number of public installations where participants figure out how the system works through exploration and collaboration. This peer-to-peer process keeps participants motivated to work together toward a common goal.
Kent has taught college-level classes in design for the past 5 years and found that providing baseline information within well-defined projects can provide a framework and motivation for students to scaffold their learning experience in a more focused direction. At the same time, he recognizes the importance of people to be active participants in their own education by being able to exert some control on the system.
In this regard, we both feel that we can provide the learning environment but it’s up to each person to discover the path that they want to take. As such, we would strive to create a system that enables as many different approaches as possible.
Project approach:
Evaluation:
At this point, we’ve not decided how we will field test our proposal.
Hi Kent and Pol,
Your project sounds very interesting, worthwhile and ambitious. As a professional TV producer, I would definitely bookmark your site. My feedback is this: I think it would be useful for you both to make a mock-up of what the user interface would look like, and to do it as soon as possible. When you start to picture where the clickable buttons would be and what they would link to, you really start to figure out what you're trying to do, and what functionality you need to have to enable the user experience you have in mind.
I would suggest also that you compare and contrast YouTube and Vimeo to help you determine what aspects of each you might want to incorporate into your site.
Finally, I've included two links. The first is to Creative Cow, a tech support website that a lot of pros use. The second, which I haven't used, seems to have more beginner video-making tips.
http://www.creativecow.net/
http://videoproductiontips.com/
Break a leg, guys!
Cheers, Kathleen
QUESTION
How can technology be used to enhance students' 21st century scientific thinking skills?
MOTIVATION
Using the materials learned in this class, I would like to reframe the educational implications of my findings from an earlier study (Liu & Grotzer, 2009), which identified emerging patterns of scientific thinking in the 21st century—namely, systems thinking, mechanistic (engineering) thinking, interdisciplinary thinking, quantitative thinking, and distributed thinking. The advancement of technology has been the biggest driving force in changing the way scientists think in the 21st century, and it seems only appropriate to look at how technology can advance science learning, focusing on the five particular thinking skills.
DESIGN
I would like to limit my scope to a couple of educational technologies, one being Scratch (the other unknown yet...recommendations?), and investigate closely how these technologies can be used by science teacher’s to help students think and work with complex systems, work across disciplines (e.g. math, design), and to think outside the individual mind.
SCENARIO
I would like to also provide an example of a lesson plan to help illustrate exactly what this looks like.
FUTURE DIRECTIONS
I hope to incorporate this work into a paper that will be presented at the National Association of Research In Science Teaching (NARST) 2010 Annual International Conference. Additionally, more lesson plans can be created to help provide teachers with the materials and knowledge they need to bring educational technology into the classroom.
Works Cited
Liu, Y. D., & Grotzer, T. A. (2009). Looking Forward: Teaching the Nature of Science of Today and Tomorrow. In I. M. Saleh, & M. S. Khine (Eds.), Fostering Scientific Habits of Mind: Pedagogical Knowledge and Best Practices in Science Education (pp. 9-36). Sense Publishers.
I think this is a great idea.
Another technology that you might like to consider is Vensim/System Dynamics for encouraging systems thinking. System Dynamics in Education Program
Another relatively simple programming environment is called processing.org
I don't know what scratch activities you are planning for your lesson plan, but I figured I could propose twi:
1. Using the sensor boards to understand conductivity.
2. Building a simulation of the planets (each planet is a sprite, and build a simple program to control their movement).
Debbie,
I think is great to use you previous theoretical findings in a new way. I think the "five particular thinking" you mention are very interesting. Yet I was thinking that they may be too much?? Maybe you should focus on one of them... you mention "math design" and that can be a starting point.
Additionally, I think it will be good to clarify exactly what do you want to do (the "Design" part) Do you want to analyze how the systems work now... or do you want to re-design them in order to enable one or more "particular thinking"? If you are redesigning it maybe good to focus in only one platform.
I think is a very good idea to frame your project as a paper...Also it will be nice if you explain your theoretical background (about the five particular thinking) through that paper... and of course to the class in your final project presentation.
you should check out: soda play... http://sodaplay.com/
good luck
Daniel
AGNE
Goal
To update and improve the LilyPad Arduino tutorials and evaluate the impact that this has on end-users with little previous electronics experience.
Motivation
Currently, there are a variety of LilyPad Arduino tutorials which were developed by my advisor, Leah Buechley. The website includes instructions for installing the Arduino software and programming for various LilyPad components such as lights, switches, and sensors. However, the tutorials don’t include any information on basic electronics concepts or learning to sew. Because the tutorials haven’t been updated lately, they also do not clearly outline the hardware differences between LilyPad mainboard (microcontroller) revisions. This affects which cables and hardware are needed for the end-user to connect the LilyPad to a computer for programming.
Approach
I will build upon the existing repository of LilyPad Arduino tutorials, focusing initially on bringing them up to date. I will then expand the collection of tutorials to include more information on introductory sewing, basic electronics concepts, and sensor calibration. Finally, I will migrate the tutorials to their future home, the LilyPond website. (LilyPond will be a collaborative web community for young people and educators using the LilyPad Arduino, although the rest of its development is beyond the scope of this final project.)
Evaluation
I propose gathering feedback from users in a couple of ways. Firstly, I’ll send out LilyPad kits to a couple of interested middle school students with whom I’ll have no face-to-face contact. I’ll ask them to make something of personal interest, relying solely upon the tutorials. I’ll then follow up in the form of an interview and a survey, asking the students to reflect upon what was challenging and/or empowering about the experience. Secondly, I’ll send updated tutorial information to an instructor at the Digital Youth Network charter school in Chicago who has specifically expressed interest in e-sewing tutorials for her after-school program on soft circuits. In order to get feedback on the usefulness of the tutorials within an after-school setting, I hope to connect directly with this instructor through an interview.
You have a very structured project in mind which is great and it seems like you know how to go about it as well. The LilyPad is actually a pretty complex thing and finding the things a student should know about it are not so easy as you might have to explain a lot about electronics in general before actually being able to explain what the MC does and how the circuit board is set up.
It may help to look for textbooks that go through the basics of electronics and try to post that as a separate page. I am sure a lot of interested users could use that as a reference on all their future projects. You can't include everything of course, but you might find links that peolpe can look into if they want to learn more. I also think think that a basic understanding of voltage and current would be good. I guess the 5V coming out of a USB port are not that dangerous, but a 9V battery can under the right circumstances cause a heart attack. A basic understanding of these things might be very useful.
Another thing that might be useful is a list of conductive materials, threads and all that. I am sure there is a lot of knowledge about that in your group already and you might be able to point students the right direction, even in terms of where to get what.
In terms of the evaluation of your tutorials you should maybe come up with a frame work that is somewhat theoretically grounded. You will then be able to ask questions that will in turn allow you to evaluate your own work in a better way.
I think creating "background" tutorials are a great idea. Will you be using video tutorials? I only ask because I worry if there will be a lot of text/reading in the tutorials especially those conveying basic concepts. This may make the activity less engaging and make the tutorials less helpful (because students don't use it) than it really is.
You might consider creating a short survey as a form of your evaluation (this goes along the same theme as to what Duks said about basing your evaluation on a theoretical framework). I think interviews are just as good. But two main advantages to a survey include: 1) giving your participants the survey questions before trying out the tutorial so that they are more cognizant of what they are looking for and are able to provide better feedback (especially since you mentioned that you will be interviewing the instructor--the instructor may not pay attention to things that you want feedback on--a survey would help in this case) and 2) somewhat standardizing the responses since the same questions are asked of all participants.
Emily,
I really enjoyed learning about the LilyPad Arduino and its potential as a creative media. Your project is obviously very organized and focused. I look forward to checking out your tutorials.
Jenn
Wow! Thanks for all of the comments and suggestions :)
I really appreciate the thoughts about videos versus text and inclusion of various resources (around both electronics basics and materials). These all seem like important things for me to think about as the project grows and continues, even if I don't get to tackle them all in the scope of this class.
Victoria Chao
I'm working on a project for a Educational Product Design class at Harvard called Jumpseewow, which is essentially a website of professionally-produced, curated, age-appropriate, documentary videos for preschool children. The idea came from my classmate, a mother of preschool-age children, who had trouble finding age-appropriate documentary style videos to show her kids.
After doing some research, our idea turned more towards teaching parents of preschoolers how to talk to their children in a way that encourages school-readiness. There's a method to talking to kids: you have to ask them lots of questions that encourage dialogue and expose them to your adult vocabulary. It turns out that kids develop most of their vocabulary from their parents, and kids who enter kindergarten with smaller vocabularies never actually catch up to their peers with larger vocabularies. This gap widens as the kids progress through school. Performance on literacy tests in 1st grade accurately predict school performance in 11th grade.
So our website has now morphed into a site of videos designed for parent-child co-viewing, where videos are followed by questions that prompt the kind of discussions that are good for developing vocabulary. Our research shows, however, that parents use the computer/TV as kind of a babysitter. They aren't interested in watching children's television (and let's be honest, it's painful to watch). They drop their kids off in front of the screen so they can do chores or cook dinner.
I'm interested in figuring out what happens once the video ends. We want to give our users options to either engage in dialogue (which improves vocabulary) or indulge their curiosity in watching other videos. We've also identified 3 different user profiles: 1. parents who co-view with their kids and already engage in dialogue (aka don't need a prompt, or need the option not to have a prompt). 2. parents who co-view with their kids, but want to know how to talk to their kids better (aka need a prompt). 3. kids who watch alone while their parents do other stuff around the house. The challenge is, how do you present these options in a way that the preschooler can understand if he is viewing by himself or doesn't annoy a parent who already knows how to talk to their child. My paper will analyze different scenarios for presenting these options using the reading we've done in class.
I haven't seen this done before, but it would be almost trivially to implement and would significantly increase the amount of data you can collect. If you're interested in how parents and their children interact while viewing the video, provide them the option of letting you automatically record it. A large percentage of people have web cameras and microphones, and flash can connect to these.
When the user connects to the site you can ask them if they would like to provide data back to the researchers with the understanding that it will be kept confidential, etc... and you can let them position the camera and then have it record them watching your videos with their children.
Since the video/audio can be tied directly to the video, simple statistical analysis can be used to pull out areas of interest. For instance, at 3:15 in Video Y, there is a lot of talking (audio activity). You can then look/listen to the individual files and see what causes the discussion. Of course, you can do traditional labor intensive coding of the video and audio files; but with a huge data set statistical measures would provide a lot of low hanging fruit. Also, you would be getting longitudinal data as the child and parent come back again and again to the site.
Danny--
What a great idea for evaluating this project! I will definitely pass that on to the woman who's taking this project forward next semester.
I should probably clarify for the next critic that when I say "What happens after the video ends" I mean "what SHOULD happen when the video ends". I'm not sure what's the best method for presenting the discussion questions or encouraging kids to explore other videos without giving them too many options, or doing these things in a way that appeals to the different viewing scenarios.
Anyhow, thanks again for the feedback!
Vicky
First off, I love the name!
If I understand what you're trying to do correctly, you're interested in finding ways to motivate the kids who watch this show to interact with their parents and not just the other way around. I think that's an exciting idea but also very challenging.
As for getting parents more interested in watching videos with their kids, I hope you've seen Yo Gabba Gabba! http://yogabbagabba.com/
With some other classmates at HGSE, I’ve been building a website to facilitate informal learning about music for tweens. The website will work, ideally, in conjunction with a television program for tweens (also in development) about the members of a young rock band and their efforts to improve as musicians.
Problem Addressed: This program idea came about because of observations about the popularity of television programs and video games that give tweens an illusion of being involved in music, but not the real experience. Nor do they give viewers or users any useful information about music or how to make it. The media my colleagues and I have been producing are an attempt to change that paradigm.
Proposed Solution: Development of a website to facilitate informal learning about music for tweens.
My Proposed Final Project for MAS 714: I will build a new Flash learning game to add to the site. The curricular agenda behind this particular game will be to introduce and familiarize players with an array of Western orchestral and world music instruments. In addition, I will build a number of Scratch projects to introduce Scratch users to the site, and to encourage them to create their own music projects in Scratch.
Rationale for This Approach: Research (some of which we'll be reading for class soon) indicates that games are powerful mechanisms for learning, and that the ways that game play engages, engenders "flow" in, and motivates players can translate to real educational benefits. I'm hoping to use a game to encourage learning about musical instruments. But I also want users inspired by the games on the site to be able to make their own musical creations, and I'm planning to use Scratch to enable that creativity.
Design: The Flash game will be a timed, searching game. I am building it in direct response to earlier feedback from tweens.
Technology to Be Employed: Flash, Photoshop, Scratch, Final Cut Pro
Target Audience: Tweens (Ages 8-13) I'll be teaching some tweens about Scratch over the Thanksgiving break, and hope my project will get some traction with Scratchers. Time will tell.
Field-Testing/Feedback: I've arranged to take the new game out for testing and feedback at a middle school in Arlington in early December.
Kathleen,
Your project sounds like a lot of fun. I am looking forward to playing your game. I feel that your project will be a great tool in teaching tweens about music and instruments. I can imagine that there are many parts and features and extras that can be incorporated to your design/game, and it could get pretty complex (i'd probably get carried away). I would suggest to try to narrow down what you are going to implement just for this class project and how you are going to evaluate its success.
I've had previous experience in designing fun educational games for children. The hardest part was trying to get the children to play the game again... You have to consider what incentive/motivation they have in playing again. Are they beating levels? Are they trying to improve their score? Is there a scoreboard with the top 10 winners? Also, the games has to be challenging or increase in difficultly so that they will want to continue playing.
Looking forward to seeing your results,
Jin Joo~
In Mindstuff, Michael Eisenberg argues that "... the room, and not the computer screen, is the most tasteful and productive grain size of design for educational technology." This statement has resonated with me more than any other in the class so far for a number of reasons. First, he is refering to a way of thinking about educational technology that is intricately linked to the ideas of Papert's constructionism. Second, these constructionist theories mesh well with my own experience as a learner, and I see a progression in my own interests in building from the virtual scale to the object scale to an architectural scale. Third, while many have worked on creating "transitional objects" that are not just virtual but tangible, I am not aware of projects that explicitly link constructionism with the truly immersive potential of architecture - not even in the work of Eisenberg himself whose statement seems to suggest this to me. Plenty of constructionist projects provide kits for building things with which to fill rooms; I would like to explore the idea of a constructionist kit for building the room itself.
Conveniently, moving in this direction will allow me to build off an existing project I began last spring. The main idea was to design and build a temporary outdoor classroom that could be built, rebuilt, designed, and redesigned by the students who use it. A history of this project is here: http://classroom.mit.edu/about/history/ For my final project, I want to reinterpret and redesign this project using the new tools and contexts I've learned in this class.
When I began this project, I knew nothing about Papert's constructionism; I was working from my own intuition and experience alone. I would like now to analyze and adjust my design from a constructionist viewpoint. Specifically, I will consider the major topics of this class (i.e. constructionism, new media literacy, diversity and pluralism, tangible learning, communities of learners, reflection, etc) and elaborate on a portion of my existing work or design a new architectural-scale activity/object that addresses each area. How well do constructionist theories mesh with the construction of architecture? What elements of technology are appropriate to include at this scales?
The product will consist of a written analysis of the project, illustrated diagrams of new architectural toolkit components, and plans for activities that could be implemented in workshops in the short term to further test these ideas. Recognizing that architectural experimentation can quickly become expensive, I will try to propose activities that can be done on a variety of budgets and with variable numbers of people collaborating perhaps both in person or remotely.
What a great idea! If I understand correctly, students would work together to design and build a classroom and then afterwards, they would (or at least could) actually utilize this classroom, much like any other classroom that they walk into, to learn a 'traditional' subject? I'm really loving this idea for a number of reasons. First, in building the classroom, I definitely feel that students can develop a variety of skills ranging from design to communication. Next, learning in such a personally meaningful environment seems like it would be more engaging. Finally, I'm a firm believer in well designed space. Classrooms these days are not structured to foster collaboration, group discussion, and creativity. Instead they are very efficient for lectures. A good example of well designed space is Computer Clubhouses (http://web.media.mit.edu/%7Emres/papers/Clubhouse/clubhouse-origins.pdf - described mostly under Principle 3).
The first thing that stood out to me was the suggestion that this would be an outdoor classroom. Mostly because I was thinking about the Boston weather. I'm guessing the reason for this is because the idea is to build the room itself and not items within the room. However, I don't think you need to restrict yourself to an outdoors kit. For instance I can see a school section off a large gym into different 'classrooms' where the students could build their own indoor classrooms and perhaps even rotate at times and use the classrooms created by their peers.
One thing I would love to see is a collection of what students create with the kit. I'm thinking not just pictures, but brainstorming notes, design explanations and sketches, things that were attempted but didn't succeed - a full documentation of their processes and their experiences with the kit. I think it would be valuable for students to have a central place to go to get new ideas, but I also feel that when students can document and verbalize their strategies and decisions they reach a new level of understanding. It also allows them to have a place to showcase their work.
Can't wait to see what you come up with.
DIGITAL INSTRUMENT
background:
Papert argues that educational researchers should focus on the development of new "objects-to-think-with" (such as the Logo turtle) where there is "an intersection of cultural presence, embedded knowledge, and the possibility for personal identification." Manipulation is the key word to understand this: Papert imagined a logical space inside the computer where children could learn; new technologies enable educators to turn these learning spaces into a physical world. Physical objects come natural to children for they are used to playing and exploring with them.
design:
I am going to design a digital instrument for kids. First of all, it can record sound, which could be the sound of the wind, the crying sound of a cat, the singing of the birds and so on. this instrument is very portable, so kids could bring it everywhere and always ready to record the sound they like. After getting the sample of the sounds, children could play with those sounds. For example, after recording a note of the crying sound from a cat, that sound will be automatically defined as "do". So, if you play this instrument, like " so do do do, so re xi do, so do mi so mi re do si do re...." , actually you are imitating a cat singing this song. It is the same with any soundd you record.
So actually this instrument is a tool for children to touch the nature. All the sounds around them are becoming tangible and can be played with. they can share and exchange the interesting sound they recorded, or the song they made. And this instrument can be connected to the computer, thus, children can play together and share them online. Furthermore, I do think that it could develop a audio version of "scratch", which is specially for dealing with those music generated from this instruments.
education goal:
1 build the fundamental knowledge of music
2 find a way to help kids to connect to the nature
3 how to make experiment through this digital instrument
4 how to share
Inspiration: I/O brush. I/O brush is based on vision. What I am doing is about being tangible to the sound of the world
I/O brush: http://web.media.mit.edu/~kimiko/iobrush/
Hi Huang,
Your project sounds fabulous. I like your idea yet I like more your approach to realize the concept of “object to think with”. Here are some technical help for your project.
Incorporating a Digital Sound Recorder into your Halloween Projects
http://www.scary-terry.com/dsr/dsr2.htm
also check here for Instrument Shops Scratch Project Gallery
http://scratch.mit.edu/galleries/view/59498
Helpful comments are
1. It would be great that if you start with any musical instrument you like when you design the digital instrument instead of creating a whole new type of instrument. For example, flute looks adequate to me because it has several buttons you can manipulate for recording, playing and others, it has some space to put small microphone and it may used in combination of real instrument and your digital instrument
2. I imagined that you could make a music making game with scratch and play your own melody with your digital instrument. You can take advantage of using Scratch’s instrument samplers. http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/AddZero/721904
3. One last point to think about that is what if your digital instrument is kind of portable and a group of children can play together as if they are members of orchestra. It would be great to play together with various animal sounds.
I can imagine there are so many possibilities in your idea.
Hi Huang,
Thank you for your creative imagination for kids! Your proposal reminded me 2 things; my experience in childhood, and the movie called "August Rush".
I think your digital instrument would provide kids many "WHY?" and curiosity through playing with it. For example,when I was 4-6 years old in the kindergarten, I used to enjoy recording my voice and singing with friends because the recorded voice sounded different from my actual voice. I enjoyed its funny gap, like "my voice sounds so weird! WHY? WHY? WHY?" Then gradually noticed that the voice which I thought it was actual my vice was not what people around me hear as my voice. As a child, I realized there were something transmit/tweak sound to different form in my ears and in the tape recorder through asking questions to my parents, my brother and my medical doctor.
Have you seen the movie "August Rush"? It's the story about a boy who has out-of-box music talent. He got his music talent through daily life, not from traditional education. He has an open mind for the meaning of music instruments. For example, he used glasses as instruments; making sound by going over the edge of glasses with wet fingers. Yes, anything can be a sound maker, like what you said in class :)
My question for your proposal is; what is the issue/problem behind your idea? Why are you going to create it, and what are you going to solve with your creation?
I think you have already had the answers for thoes questions. It would be grate to address them in your actual paper.
I would like to follow your project! Very looking forward to seeing the demo.
Thank you for reading!
I think this sounds like a great concept - your analogy to the I/O Brush helped me to imagine all of the creative musical interactions that this instrument would encourage! I agree with John's comment about portability being a nice feature of your instrument and how great it would be for kids to play their instruments as a group. I also think it's nice that you're aiming to encourage interaction with nature. There are so many technologies that draw kids indoors, so I always find it refreshing to see technologies which counterbalance that.
Are you planning to use pitch-shifting technology to map one sound (like a cat meowing) to the musical scale or are you expecting that kids will attempt to capture various pitches of the same sound on their own? Also, have you though about evaluating your instrument at all? I think it would be great to test it out before the end of the term (even informally) with some kids. It would be interesting to see how and where they use your instrument - for example, if it's actually motivating them to head outdoors for environmental noises or if they gravitate towards school/household sounds instead.
Huang,
Hailing from a family of musicians, I became an instant fan of this project, although mostly a curious and intrigued one, rather than rabid and devoted:)
First, this sounds like a great cool application for making sounds tangible and embedding children's play and learning experiences in their ambient environment. In fact, that's the core of Pr. Hiroshi Ishii's research initiatives here at the Media Lab, so you may want to check his group's website for methods you could apply to your own project - http://www.media.mit.edu/research/groups/tangible-media - The project MirrorFugue for example could have some interesting applications for your digital instrument.
I also love the idea of having some form of an audio version of Scratch. I had actually been discussing this idea in one of our class' group dicussions, when we were debating how to extend Scratch's capacities.
In reference to your proposed instrument, i have a couple of questions:
. How will you test it? What age group[s] will it be for [if they will be specific age limits].
. How will you, as a designer, measure the success of your tool?
. I understand that this instrument will let children capture and play with the natural and ambient sounds in our daily environment, such as those in nature [animals, etc]. Then I understood from what you wrote that this will lead children to learn music. However, here I am wondering how children will bridge the gap between listening to, recognizing, playing around with, and reproducing those natural sounds and those from real, actual musical notes - which are quite a different thing and require specific training in ear-based note recognition. This wasn't clear to me, as I am not sure that proficiency in playing around with just any sound automatically translates into proficiency in musical knowledge, including of the auditive kind.
This, by the way, would be a great functionality of your instrument to work on, and I am sure that musicians, music learners and teachers around the globe would love this instrument and would find great applications for it in their classrooms or private lessons settings.
In any case, good luck with your project!
Florence Gallez
REMIXING SCRATCH!!
(1) Summary
I am going to extend the Remixing capabilities of Scratch… in order to foster creativity, understood, here, as the process by which we find new ideas by combining and reframing old ones.
-Proposed Solution: combining two or more projects/ideas to create a new one.
(2) Background
The main objective of Scratch is to teach/train children how to be more creative (question I asked to Mitch last class). The programming environment of Scratch constitutes the methodology to achieve the goal but not the goal in itself. Even though users learn programming skills --which is a useful and powerful problem-solving tool-- the main goal behind Scratch is to teach how to be more creative and not how to program. Scratch teaches you how to use rules and how to organize a sequence of actions to produce unexpected outcomes --shapes, behaviors, stories or games-- that did not exist before. This is what creativity actually means. We imagine, construct, play, and reflect (Resnick) to create new ideas and new problems: in a process of reflection-in-action that enables us to “reframe” the initial idea in “a new and unexpected way” (Schon).
The objective of the background is to understand how new ideas come into being in order to find methods to promote the process of discovery. The main hypothesis is that new ideas emerge from ambiguous situations, in which one thing can be understood as something else: if we “remix” or combine two things together, the outcome would be neither of them and therefore would constitute something new.
(3) Idea
The aim is to combine the DNA of different projects to engender a new one. The initial idea (this is a draft I still don’t know exactly how to implement it) is to have an interface in which different projects can be opened at the same time. Particularly important is to be able to see the DNA, in this case the script, of each project in parallel and be able to copy from one to the other.
I made an experiment: I opened two Scratch projects at the same time and I realized it is not possible to copy code from one to the other. Until now, the only “remixing” feature is to download a file (only one) from the Scratch website and edit it on the Scratch software (only one project at a time and without been able to see different processes and ideas in parallel). My idea is to enable opening different files (from the website, or from previous individual projects… could incorporate get “surprise project”) and been able to “remix” them in parallel.
One important feature to be restudied in my proposal will be the “Sprite,” used in the current Scratch program as a unit of work (Bamberger). Most of the current Scratch projects show the repetition of units, moving around, reacting to each other, changing costume, rotating, and sometimes deforming a bit. Yet, they always correspond to the same unit or component, which in a “remixing” platform should be redefined. The goal, here, will be to enable the combination of units to create new ones: to transform them according to ambiguous and variable units of perception instead of determinate and invariable units of work.
(4) References (concepts)
Bamberger (units of work and units of perception)
Dewey (learning by experience)
Polanyi (tacit knowledge and discovery)
Resnick (creative thinking spiral)
Schon (reflection-in-action and reframing)
Stiny (emergence, ambiguity and embedding)
Sawyer (creativity by improvisation)
Hi Daniel,
This is a very interesting idea. What strikes me is that both the user and the functions are being "creative," by your definition of creative as the combining and reframing of old ideas to create new ones: the user is actually selecting the "units of work" and your proposed Scratch functions will be randomly selecting different projects for the user to work with as well as actually create the "re-mixed" units. It seems as though the products of the remixing will be somewhat surprising to the user, is this correct? One thing that I am unclear about is whether or not the user will choose specific aspects or the entire code of the different units? In other words, will you combine the total "DNA" of 2 different projects to create a new surprising creation? If so, it seems like a difficult task to be able to teach Scratch to combine these different elements. Perhaps there should be several random sequencing options that the program will select as far as the integration of the different DNAs. I'm just trying to imagine how to build in an "intelligence" in the program so that it will be able to integrate the different projects you are remixing.
It sounds like you will need some guidance as far as how to actually create this platform to see the parallel codes and the third "new" code. Unfortunately I am not a programmer, and cannot help you with this! :( I'm sure the you could get guidance from Karen and Mitch and some of our other classmates.
This sounds like a great project! Good luck with it, and I am looking forward to seeing how you are able to create this new function and platform within scratch. I know I would love to try it out! It would be really cool to combine really different projects! (I hope that I have understood your original intention. If not, please respond and let me know if I've misunderstood anything!)
April Lee
Daniel,
Your project is very close to my new one, though I'm going in a slightly different direction. I think there may be some room for collaboration or at least discussion.
danny
It's interesting to imagine how Scratch would be different if it had a multiple document interface like the one you proposed. I imagine it would increase the importance of comments and other means of defining the meaning and function of different sections of code.
This is an fascinating and ambitious project. I found myself thinking of evolutionary biology, selection pressure, and problems like "systems of irreducible complexity" as I was reading this. In a way, you are talking about "breeding" scratch programs together.
In creating this system, I think it will be important to give the user some constraints on the range of projects they should try to mix together. Perhaps the interface could recommend projects loved or favorited by the remixer first - or maybe even projects made by the user's friends. There is great diversity in the Scratch community, and many Scratchers may not know how to understand projects that are far from the realm in which they specialize. It would be helpful to invite them to integrate projects of a sort they can recognize and understand clearly first. A compelling and simple demo (brief video showing the mixing of two projects?) will be vital for communicating the concept.
I'm not sure I quite understand your last sentence - perhaps I need to read Bamberger first, and I'm not having much luck googling for it.
Data Visualization for Scratch Users
MOTIVATION
The Scratch website is a great place for people to share their creations with the rest of the world. It's also a great place to get started with Scratch by seeing the wide range of possibilities, to find sample projects to remix, and to get feedback from the community. This makes the website part of the learning experience. It even provides a way to collect all the works of a user so that he/she may see his/her progression over time. With all this information, we could be providing better feedback to a user about what is going on with his/her projects both currently in the community and over time. We can imagine that this type of feedback mechanism can help a user reflect about his accomplishments and motivate him with next steps.
APPROACH
I propose enhancing users' experiences by providing them with statistics and well designed visualization 'services' such that they can easily explore their progress. Services may include blocks used in all projects to help pinpoint new blocks that have not been explored previously, tag clouds to better see what type of projects a user is creating, word clouds (like tag clouds) that show what is being said about a user's projects, and much more. Perhaps even provide a way for users to define new visualizations that they would like to track.
I would like each user to have a statistics page, much like they have a 'My Stuff' page. This page would show all the visualizations a user has previously subscribed to and provide ways to subscribe to, and perhaps create, new ones. Additionally, a user can select which visualizations he/she would like to make public and have appear on his/her 'My Stuff' page. I believe this will encourage users to work towards having more 'positive' visualizations and thus work harder to achieve more with their Scratch projects. For example, if a user publicly posts his blocks visualization (mentioned above), perhaps he will work harder to try to use all the blocks in Scratch in his various projects.
EVALUATION
It would be difficult to launch such a project in the timeframe of this class. But if such a project were launch, we could evaluate its usages by monitoring the qualitative user comments we receive about the visualization services. We can also monitor how and in what ways a user's project creation behavior changes after subscribing to one or more of these services.
Making a Scratch user’s programming history more accessible is an interesting idea. When I program, I often go back to older projects I’ve done to copy bits of code into new projects, using the old material as a template for new ideas. So I think you’re on to something here, if I understand your intent. Also, being able to see the history and impact of my projects in the community would be a lot of fun. This would be a terrific added feature for Scratch, one that I think the community would embrace. I also like very much the idea of encouraging a user to do new things and broaden his/her programming experience based on use patterns. This could be another nice addition to the Scratch programming environment.
Beyond that, I’m not sure I understand the approach well enough yet—for example, what you mean by “Visualization services”. Can you describe a bit more what you mean by this? Are word clouds sort of graphic diagrams of linked words, or frequently used word tags? Does either size of word or links between words extract some meaningful relationships. I guess I’m not understanding how the visualization imparts more and better information to me as a user. This kind of data access and curation might be very useful to frequent or advanced users, but how would these visualizations benefit the occasional user? Is this kind of data and visualization useful or interesting to this age group? As I’m not a gamer, I may be missing a critical cultural point here. The data visualization concept could easily add complexity to the environment, rather than simplifying it, so it would be important to avoid additional complexity in your design.
Your ideas are great, and I want to provide helpful feedback to you. If you have a moment, could you provide a bit more description of your motivation and strategy to help me understand the concepts better?
Hi Lass! Thanks for the tips! Sorry I wasn't clearer with my original post. I would say you definitely understood (and verbalized even better) my motivation behind such a project. Let me try to clarify some of the other points.
Right now all the data we have about Scratch users and their projects are stored in database tables. We can see a lot of interesting details by querying these tables. However, as great as the data is, I believe it is important to be able to easily look at and understand data, and for the data to be presented in a visually appealing way - that's where visualizations come in. It's about taking the data (usually in text format) and transforming it into something more interactive. Here is an example of an interactive visualization using the toolkit (Flare) that I am currently exploring for the Scratch visualizations: http://flare.prefuse.org/apps/job_voyager.
As for tag clouds, they're best explained by example I think. Here's one: http://flowingdata.com/wp-content/uploads/yapb_cache/wordle.egr5ul3s7yg4.... The size of the words represent how often they appear in a certain body. When I mentioned showing users their tag cloud, I thought we could create a similar visualization but the words that appear would be the tags given to a user's projects. On the right side of the Scratch homepage (http://scratch.mit.edu/), there's a Popular Tags section that is very similar to what I'm envisioning, except instead of for the entire community, it would be for a single user. I see this visualization more as something fun to show the user what kind of projects they've been creating. For example, perhaps a user creates mostly animations about space, then we would see the words 'animation' and 'space' very large. It would be a (very fast and not entirely accurate) way to get to know a user and his/her interests.
I'm imagining a collection of these visualization. The reason I called them 'services' is to convey the fact that they are an option to the user. Users are given the option of seeing only the visualizations that they have selected. They would have the option to 'subscribe' to these. I like to think of these as subscriptions because these visualizations would be displaying data that changes over time. Therefore, once you subscribe to a visualization, we can start calculating the relevant data for the visualizations and updating these calculations as new projects, comments, tags, etc are added.
I hope that helped to clarify. Thanks in advance for any more feedback!
Hi Rita,
Your "Data Visualization for Scratch Users" seems to be a very useful tool to combine the creative activities with learning environments to encourage users to review and improve upon their existing progress. Here are my suggestions that might help you in the process:
Choosing the features:
It seems as if finding out features most useful for the scratch users would be important for the initial stage of planning the project. Have you considered doing a survey to existing scatch users to understand how they would like to track their own progress and which features might be most useful for them to see (e.g. tag clouds to better see what type of projects a user is creating, word clouds (like tag clouds) that show what is being said about a user's projects, etc.)
Designing the statistics page:
Maybe do a focus group to find out what interface would work would be helpful. If you have ample time, maybe you could also run a test group to see if the users are finding what they need and that the experiences is intuitive and helpful.
Good luck!
Marie
My Interactive America (working title)
At Harvard, I am working on the conceptualization of an interactive web-based timeline of U.S. History that includes key historical events in politics and society but also allows for user generated content. For this class, I hope to examine the website's pedagogical design towards fostering the greatest interactivity with users, easy access to information, and clarity of functions. I will not be creating the actual site.
Reason:
This project was initially born out of my own need for a comprehensive, engaging, well-designed and functional national timeline as I have difficulty in remembering people, places, dates and the sequence of history. I correlate my imperfect comprehension of U.S. history to my lack of political participation. I have not found any strong examples of such timelines--the ones I found were limited by their design and did not encourage user participation. I plan to use a Google Earth type of interface as well as multiple search options and layered tagging systems in order to contain a much broader spectrum of events and histories. I hope to address issues of youth civic identity by creating an interactive timeline in which students can add their own history the national one. Ideally this website will teach students new media skills at the same time as providing personally meaningful entry points into actively learning about U.S. history and their place within it.
Goals for the site:
• Provide multiple perspectives of U.S. history within a large timeline
• Create a multiply authored comprehensive timeline and an easily navigable site
• Enable users of all ages and backgrounds to create their own timelines embedded in and connected with historical national events
• Create a fun and powerful research tool for a diversity of users
Structure of Design Brief:
• I will continue to research existing timelines, data visualization strategies, and web interfaces and propose a design strategy that effectively
addresses my goals for the site.
• I will describe ways of implementing the multiple perspectives of history though partnerships with existing historical timelines such as PBS and other
social organizations. Individuals, organizations, social movements, etc. will be able to add their history to the larger timeline.
• I will provide an example of how a student might use this website. Briefly, I imagine they will be able to search the site using the main timeline (by
zooming into different time periods) as well as through the search fields (they can type in dates, events, ideas, people, inventions, places, cultures,
songs, art movements, etc. When they like an event they can add that to their own timeline, which will then begin to shape their personalized
timeline), and finally they create their own timeline.
• I will connect the design functions of the website to readings from class. Some important points will be: 1. Looking at how youth use new media informally, and how to design with this in mind (Ito, M., et al & Coleman, R., et al) 2. Describing the importance of teaching new media literacy by looking at certain youth participatory cultures, and addressing the issues of the "participation gap", the "transparency problem", and the "ethics challenge" through design (Jenkins, H., et al & Resnick, M.)
Bibliography
Bachen, C., Raphael, C., Lynn, K., McKee, K., Philippi, J. "Civic engagement, pedagogy, and information technology on web sites for youth." Political Communication, 2008; 25
Coleman, R., Lieber, P, Mendelson, A., Kurpius, D., "Public life and the internet: if you build a better website, will citizens become engaged?" In New Media Society 2008; 10; 179.
Ito, M. et al. (2008). Living and learning with new media: Summary of findings from the digital youth project. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Reports on Digital Media and Learning.
Jenkins, H. et al. (2006) Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Reports on Digital Media and Learning.
Resnick, M. (2002). "Rethinking Learning in the Digital Age," in The global information technology report 2001-2002: Readiness for the networked world. World Economic Forum.
April Lee
Hi April, I posted this under the draft proposals page, but figured I'd repost it in case you missed it.
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April, you should check out the exhibit framework from MIT: http://www.simile-widgets.org/exhibit/
Here's an example about noble prize winners: http://www.simile-widgets.org/exhibit/examples/nobelists/nobelists.html
the majority of the work is just entering the data... I can provide you with more info if needed.
First of all - this is a very interesting and ambitious project! Here are some thoughts:
How is the "key historical" event information indicated vs. the user generated content? It's an interesting problem - how, if at all, to privilege some "vetted" content over other content.
Wikipedia has had great success crowdsourcing this problem. For starters though, you will have to provide some general timelines. How, if at all, will these "facts" be indicated? It's not too tricky when it comes to certain things- World War II, Bush presidency, etc. But you will have to have a way for users to create and resolve disputes about some timelines, especially those whose boundaries / concepts are more abstract (i.e. The rise of Revolutionary sentiment, the beginning of the information age), or are currently going on.
"Individuals, organizations, social movements, etc. will be able to add their history to the larger timeline."
Very cool! I really like the idea of providing the user a way to integrate their own localized history with the greater one that is happening around them. The challenge of implementing this is how to change scale and focus in a way that makes sense intuitively. How to navigate from the greater political happenings of the Summer of 2009 to Obama specifically, to Ralph Nader, to the Mayor of Boston? How to jump between topics - from technological changes to personal events?
With regards to kid created content -- It may be important to make user generated timelines embeddable in other spaces (for example - a myspace page) in a way that is graphically compelling, and encourages friends to click on it for greater detail.
It might be helpful to have some kid-generated history to look at as you develop your project. Here's a forum thread about the history of Scratch by a prolific Scratch historian:
http://scratch.mit.edu/forums/viewtopic.php?id=25084
How might this be translated / presented through your new medium? How might the Scratchers who have commented on it be able to interact with the author's original content in a useful way?
All and all I'm very excited to see how this turns out -- great topic!
April,
What a cool topic! You're trying to tackle a lot of complicated issues that we face when dealing with historical narratives. I'd be curious to see some clarity in what student contributions would look like. Are you hoping to archive stories, make a sort of online "oral history" project that isn't actually oral since (I'm assuming) it'll be text-based? Are you allowing users to edit other people's work, including the descriptions of the "main events" that appear on the first version of the site? Where do you imagine people will use this? Are they browsing it informally at home (perhaps as the starting point for a research paper?) or are they completing it in a structured, classroom setting?
I'm excited to see you poster when all is said and done!
Vicky
Homepages for Scratch sub-communities
The Scratch homepage serves a variety of important functions for the Scratch community. It is a place to find interesting projects, compete and establish notoriety, and to make connections with other Scratchers. It serves as a metaphorical "peak" of achievement for many community members. Getting a project on the front page is a way for participants to establish themselves as successful and contributing members of the community.
While the Scratch community has grown dramatically since the site went live in 2007, the number of project slots on the front page has not. Today there are more community members competing for what is essentially a limited and highly coveted resource. Because different sub-communities have different definitions of value when it comes to Scratch projects, we have seen many conflicts about the front page. The mountain of users has grown, but the mountaintop remains the same size.
As the Scratch online community becomes more diverse and pluralistic, there is a growing need for spaces in which sub-communities can gather based on shared definitions of value. Such spaces should allow participants to find interesting projects and forge new connections. At the same time, it should expose community members to adjacent sub-communities with similar, but not identical interests.
I want to design a page / space that could serve as sub-mountaintops for Scratch sub-communities. This page should:
1. Allow different sub-communities to define the kinds of projects that are valuable and interesting to them.
2. Serve as a node through which members of a given sub-community can meet, establish themselves as community members, and forge new connections.
3. Link to adjacent sub-communities in such a way that invites connections and collaborations.
4. Be suitable for hanging out, encourage messing around, and to some extent reward geeking out.
This is essentially a sub-front page for Scratch sub-communities, with some important differences: It does not have to show new visitors what Scratch is, link to the various Scratch related resources, or be representative of the entire Scratch community.
There will be six such sub-homepages, one for each of the 6 system tags choosable in the Scratch "share" dialog interface: animation, art, game, music, simulation, and story.
Like the greater Scratch website, the goal is to design a space in which creative expression - regardless of the particular content - is encouraged. But in this case the criteria for achievement is defined by the sub-community, allowing for a more focused dialectic between creator and audience.
Amos--
I think you're really onto something here, and letting people form groups is definitely a great way to build communities and keep people involved over the long run!
I think you're basically on the money about all of your suggestions. The idea of letting communities decide what is valuable reminds me of this charity event my friends held to raise money for an NGO in college. We had a cake contest, but instead of having 1 winner or 3, they let everyone who brought a cake make their own category to win (my cake won "most pessimistic about the future"--it was an apocalyptic scene using teddy grahams). It's a goofy idea, but it might be a fun way to get people to use their meta-cognitive skills. maybe there can be a space on the homepage to feature wildcard projects?
Great idea.
VC
Hey Amos,
This was one of the big things that came up in our group's discussion during "redesign scratch in 20-minutes" day. It seems like the logical next step in fostering a diverse community!
I'm wondering if it would be possible to have a less centralized model for sub-communities than what you propose here- why only six homepages? Why not let the categories be defined by the scratchers themselves? Are each of the communities' homepages going to look the same? Why not let the community design their own homepage, encouraging them to become a little more web-literate along the way? Or maybe there's some sort of rotating design process, like what happens with the MIT homepage spotlight image where whole groups get a chance to be featured.
I'm intrigued by your point #4 - suitable for hanging out, encourage messing around, and reward geeking out. I don't think this is something that happens with the current homepage model. I hope you can accomplish it - what's the plan?
I'm wondering if it would be possible to have a less centralized model for sub-communities than what you propose here- why only six homepages? Why not let the categories be defined by the scratchers themselves? Are each of the communities' homepages going to look the same? Why not let the community design their own homepage, encouraging them to become a little more web-literate along the way?
Thanks for the great feedback!
The tricky part of this transition to sub-communities is that I think it takes a lot of faith. A lot of good can be done, but one can also easily imagine a lot of harm. For example, if we allowed user defined sub-communities by tag, it wouldn't be long before we had one called "I hate so and so user..."
So I see constraining these subcommunities to the system tags as a way to dip our collective toe in the water. After we learn more about sub-communities, perhaps we can remove the constraints, or come up with a process for Scratchers to propose / create new sub communities.
Regarding community controlled look and feel - that was in my original vision but I forgot to put it in this proposal. But yes - there needs to be a way for the community to make the space their own. Not sure exactly how that might work yet...
Reading with Robots
Goal
To improve children’s literacy skills through robots.
Background
Reading with Rover is a program where volunteers take dogs into libraries and schools to have children read to them. http://www.readingwithrover.org/default.asp
In the "Reading with Rover" program, children are paired with dogs and read to them out loud. Although shy about reading to teachers and peers, children feel less stressed when reading to these unjudgmental creatures.
Unfortunately, there are some problems in using dogs (1) Sanitation (2) Safety (3) Allergies (4) Fear of dogs (5) Annual training certificates. Also, the level of interaction between the child and dog is minimal during the reading. The dog only sits quietly next to the child as he/she is reading the stories.
Robots can become a better alternative to using dogs. They are capable of having more interactions with the children, which could lead to more meaningful experiences.
Approach
Implement autonomous interactive abilities on Nexi the robot http://robotic.media.mit.edu/projects/robots/mds/overview/overview.html
(1) Gaze at the child and the book
(2) Wave hello and goodbye
(3) Nod randomly
Even with these limited capabilities, I believe that the robot will be interactive enough to engage the child while he/she is reading.
Scenario
The participants for the study will be children in elementary. I will have the child come into our lab to read a short story to our robot Nexi.
Evaluation
Before the study, I will ask the participant to fill out a short survey, which will evaluate their comfort and interest in reading. After the study, they will take another survey, which assesses their interaction with the robot and re-evaluates their interest in reading. I hope to discover that children find robots to be fun companions to read to just like the dogs!
Looking for Help
I would LOVE to have help in this project for anyone that is interested. You do not have to be techy! Harvard students are especially welcomed. Your knowledge in the realm of children and education will be a great help in this study.
Hi Jin Joo,
The program looks so great and I love to join the program regardless of the literacy skills. Of course I love your idea too.
Today’s lecture from an artificial intelligence class reminds me of your project. The point is that people become smarter when they talk by themselves. Professor explained that talking might enforce a concentration and an engagement with topics he have. It would be greater if children can talk with pets. The class is 6.034 Introduction to Artificial Intelligence. You may want to check the class website (reading lists) as a research background to explain your project’s potential with scientific facts.
http://ai6034.mit.edu/fall09/index.php?title=Main_Page
Here is a toy you may want to check. Pling Plong is a toy that read books for children.
http://www.talk2myshirt.com/blog/archives/1006
This is another toy project you may be interested. (You may already knew these projects)
Bowl: token based media for children
http://makingfurnitureinteractive.wordpress.com/2007/11/06/bowl-token-ba...
I definitely see so many potential from your project. Just my minor concern is that I would recommend something pluffy and cozy robots than Nexi.(this is just my personal preference)
Hey,
What a great idea! What kind of help are you looking for and what's the time frame?
I'm going to have to agree with Juhong on the design though. I think Nexi is in that awkward in-between of being human-like but not human enough. To be honest, Nexi as she is now would probably scare kids. Think about Wall-E--definitely anthromorphic machines, but not really human-like. Star Wars is another example: I don't think kids particularly find C3PO cuddly or endearing--they like R2D2 better.
I'm interested in hearing more!
Vicky
Jin Joo,
Your project sounds very intriguing. I look forward to hearing about the child's response to reading with Nexi. Although Nexi may not be as classically cute as a puppy, the bot's behaviors may just override the physical.
Jenn
i think your project makes a very important point in our social problems and try to use some high techniques to approach that.
couple of things come into my mind.
one point is that, why people like to talk to their dogs? i think one of the most important part is that, dog is their friends in their daily life. I mean dogs are not only the companion when kids are reading. They are always the companion when kids are playing around. That is why people feel really comfortable.
so i think in this project, the interaction should not limited only in the situation of reading, since i think this robot should be a friend of kids' life. So, i would say, make the robot be a friend of that boy first.
In addition, i am a little bit worry about the way of the evaluation. I do believe that robot could be a really good solution to the problem you mentioned. But if you invite some kids to the lab ask them to read, they might feel nervous about this lab environment -- it is not home, where makes them very comfortable. And also , the robot to them is also very new. They are not friends at all so far. and i just worried about if they can do the readings very well in front of the robot. You know , if for the people who have no reading problems, it is always true that they will feel more comfortable to reading to the friends than reading to the strangers.
about the interaction, i think gazing at the child and the book is a very key interaction. I really like that. i am thinking it might be helpful if the robot can do a little bit more interaction based on that.
For instance, it is possible that the robot can pick some words read by the kids, and search them on google image and show some of them. So the kids would feel curious about what the image will the robot show and it is a kind of way to encourage kids to read. and that could be a continuous interaction between kids and robots.
anyway, i do think your project is a strong one.
Author: Danny
Note: I changed my project, originally I was going work on building blocks to help with language and vocabulary.
Project: Future Scratch, Rearchitecting Scratch on the Flash Platform for Collaboration
Purpose:
Scratch is an excellent way for people to program standalone projects; however, it lacks the features to allow users to easily remix projects and collaborate with others. My goal is to re-envision the scratch collaboration experience.
Tasks/Outline:
1. Analyze the current process of collaboration
2. Identify areas of improvement
3. ReArchitect the system to improve the collaboration experience
4. Discuss new language features and complexity trade-offs required for the remixing/collaboration.
5. Prototype new Architecture
6. Tell the collaboration story; Through the use of 3 fictional characters, we will explore the how the new system allows them to collaborate.
Some Ideas:
1. Focus on the sprite as the remixable unit
2. Introduce Self style prototype inheritance
3. Make the application native with the web; use URI to denote sprites, projects, versions (RESTful Interface).
4. The ability to import sprites from other projects.
Future Work:
Once the scratch platform has better support for collaboration then the website can be expanded to improve this process.
Hi Danny,
This sounds like a very interesting and useful project! You seem to have outlined your goals very well and I think they are realistic for the amount of space we have. I am really curious to learn more about what you mean by "new Architecture"--does this mean the programming architecture of the Scratch website itself?
I really like your idea of importing sprites from other projects, and the sprite as a remixable unit--it reminds me of Daniel's project somewhat, and it looks like you guys have already connected.
In your second section "Identify areas of improvement" I wonder if you might be interested in including a "surprise" collaboration, where a user is given a random choice of a collaborative partner and they can choose whether or not to contact them for collaboration. I think this could be educational for both parties--exposing them to new styles and possibilities.
I wish I could speak more to your idea of the "Self style prototype inheritance" but I do not know what this means! I hope to learn more through your final presentation, which I am really looking forward to!
Good luck!
April
Danny,
You definitely have your proposal focused, scoped, and planned. I imagine this will be quite useful to the Scratch group. I look forward to checking out the prototype.
Jenn
Danny,
You are right, our projects are very similar... therefore I dont have to much to say. Yet I think your proposal should be more clear in its objectives. What do you want to achieve with your application? I think it is not enough to simply "rearchitect" or "remix" without clarifying why do you want to do it.
Yet... maybe in my case is the opposite. I have been working more in the theoretical background in order to find the appropriate methods to foster creativity, without thinking too much in possible applications (yet). So I was thinking we should talk and see if we can collaborate... I think we can remix our remixing ideas into something more powerful.
I missed class today though, since i had a very bad injury playing soccer and I cannot walk. Do you think we can meet in my office sometime this week? (9-266) or maybe in lobby 7? Lets at least start talking and see if we can collaborate or do something together,
best
Daniel
d_rosen@mit.edu
617-8215150
Building Blocks - in 3d
Motivation:
I am interested in using a version of Scratch to drive geometric objects in a 3d environment as a way to teach programming to architectural designers.
Context:
Data flow languages have been used as plug-ins for 3d modelers for a few years now. These languages are based on box and line diagrams and "hide" what's going inside the boxes. Every time a data line terminates in a box or any other graphical representation that is used to show that data will be manipulated, the user is left in the dark as to what exactly is happening within the box.
Existing concepts to build on:
Scratch, being a control flow language, conveys what the logic instructions actually are and I think it would be a great way to teach algorithmic thinking for 3d structures. Evelyn Eastmond of the Lifelong Kindergarten Group has developed a version of “Scratch” that is called “Building Blocks” that is intended for an audience who is interested in algorithmic graphic design in 2d. The underlying basic structure relies on turtle graphics which allows a user to generate an image or animated graphics.
Next steps:
I have meet with Evelyn and Eric Rosenbaum, who is a PhD student in the lifelong kindergarten group, to find out which libraries are available to drive 3dimensional geometry with Building Blocks. PaperVision seems to be easy to drive with flash and there seems to be sufficient documentation on the web as to which commands and data structures are available.
We want to find out what the limitations are before getting too excited about parametric designs and complex geometries we might then not be able to provide.
So, if I'm reading this right there are distinct ideas: 3D animation/graphics & extending/visualizing the black boxes of a control flow language. I think that the 3D animation/graphics is a great idea in scratch because as the user tries to build more and more complex creations the math they need to use will get increasingly sophisticated. I think that you might be interested in using Augmented Reality to visualize the their creations (this is relatively easy to use).
The second part; building you're own control blocks in scratch is a great idea. I don't really know what tools you use, but you might be interested in looking at other control flow languages such as SCIRUN.
Your proposal seems like a lot of fun. For me, there seems to be 2 objectives in your proposal (which I am unclear if you intend to focus on both equally, or more on one): 1. Actually designing/making this 3D version of Scratch and 2. Showing how this software can be used as a teaching tool. Given that I have little background in the former, I will defer to Danny's wonderful suggestions. As for the latter objective, I think it would be really great and help bring your vision to life, if you could provide a detailed example(s) of how one might teach architectural designers the skills you intend for them to learn through this version of scratch (perhaps devise an activity to help teachers/potential users actually see how the software can be used in practice as a teaching tool).
http://web.media.mit.edu/~rwistort/tempFiles/ryanWistortProposalTCL.pdf
Ryan,
I enjoyed reading your proposal. The storytelling with robots via painting definitely takes narrative design beyond the classic "playing with dolls" or figurines. It reminds me a little of puppets as well; yet the control interface is natural in terms of drawing. The robots provide an interesting, and enhanced media by which to create story lines. I imagine that 6-9 yr kids would love this (and age groups outside of this). I look forward to seeing the outcome of this project!
Jenn
Hi Ryan,
I am very intrigued by your StoryDraw idea. I think it is a great idea to explore the visual language and connect this to the experience of storytelling. Although I haven't completely understood detailed technical aspect of your project, here are some of my suggestions for you:
More concrete idea of how the visual aspects will be connected to storytelling:
I would like to see how each aspect of visual art (color, weight, shape, etc.) will be connected to aspects of storytelling (motion, action, sound, etc.). It would be meaningful if there is some connection of the art and story which reflects the emotional expression and intellectual exploration the person is trying to deliver. This sounds very abstract, I have to admit, by perhaps even a simple connection between the density of the color (i.e. pure red as opposed to pastel) is expressed by the energy level (i.e. speed of movement) of the robot.
I hope these suggestions are be useful to you, or at least helped you think deeper into the educational and artistic potential of your project.
All the best!
Marie
What a creative idea! I think it's awesome that you're creating a way to bring stories to life (literally). I agree with a lot of what Marie suggested above. Additionally, I was wondering if you were interested in experimenting with how the robots might respond to human interaction, in order to make the stories more interactive. Perhaps a step before this idea is thinking about how two robots will interact when their paths cross. Or even how to induce such an interaction. I can imagine drawing two paths for two robots and I'd like them to meet somewhere in the middle. However, I wouldn't want to go through a trial and error process to make sure they arrive at a specific location simultaneously.
I think it also might be interesting later down the line to allow users to create their own robots. This way they can express their creativity in the aesthetic design of the bots, but also in the expressiveness. For example, it would be interesting to allow users to reprogram the bots so that they can customize how the robots express a certain behavior. This would allow the users to give life to not only their story plots, but to their characters.
Can't wait to see what you come up with!