Category: Digital Creativity

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Constructing Modern Music

A view from inside a cardboard model castle of the dragon that threatens it with Gary Stager looking on.
From inside a cardboard model castle – the cardboard dragon that threatens it, with Gary Stager looking on.

Music?

More of a noise really, but made by hand crafted instruments made using servo motors and BBC Micro:bits.

All part of the summer institute, making and programming, that was Constructing Modern Knowledge (CMK), held in Manchester, New Hampshire, USA from 9-12 July 2024.

I went to be amongst friends and like-minded educators such as Cynthia Solomon.

Richard Millwood and Cynthia Solomon enjoying the morning ‘sermonette’ by Gary Stager – a rabble-rousing, amusing and thoughtful reminder of the value of what we were all there doing.

CMK is the invention of Gary Stager and Sylvia Martinez, bringing together teachers who want to explore constructionism in the best possible way, by making.

Each morning, Gary would remind us of the origins of his pedagogical paradigm and re-inforce its precepts in an entertaining and informative way, reminding each of us of our evangelical duties!

A slide from Gary’s morning presentation quoting the late Edith Ackermann: “Learning is less about acquiring or transmitting information or existing ideas or values than it is about collectively designing a world that is worth living in.”

Another important aspect of the summer institute was the huge, ballroom-like space for us to work in, with one long wall filled with table after table of equipment, spare parts and tools for participants to exploit in making their projects.

The cavernous space used for CMK, with tables on the left extending the full length of the room filled with equipment and materials.

In the evenings we enjoyed a baseball game, a meal in an Argentinian restaurant, where the food was supplied on swords, and a pajama party!

Josh Burker and Richard Millwood enjoying the baseball game between the New Hampshire Fisher Cats and the Binghamton Rumble Ponies at the Delta Dental Stadium (you can just make out the emblematic molar on a pole over the entrance to the top left!)

We had impressive guest speakers in Stephen Wolfram, Tricia Tunstall and Melissa Walker as well as drop-ins from Eric Rosenbaum, Dan & Molly Watt and many other friends.

BUT we also had European football!

Richard Millwood (Eng-er-land!), Pauline Maas (The Netherlands) and husband watching the Euros semi-final soccer game between England and The Netherlands.

Like me, everyone I spoke to was committed to creating powerful learning experiences by handing to learners ownership & responsibility over their learning through project work. This means creating the conditions for “hard fun”, leading to meaningful & fulfilling outcomes. Gary and Sylvia’s insight was that we need to do that, not just talk about it in order to be better teachers employing the method.

In my case, I really wanted to understand how to use servos too, so on the first day, when we brainstormed project ideas, I proposed a mechanical orchestra, and luckily, two others (Timothy Patterson and Angela Buffington) wanted to join me.

We made individual instruments which each employed Micro:bit & Hummingbird driven servos to make sounds, and then attempted to coordinate them by using the broadcast radio communication between micro:bits.

We did it!

Here is the code for Tim’s instruments, using MakeCode:

Angela’s code ended up in MicroBlocks, as we scrambled to get everything working, it made the debug loop quicker with its direct coding model:

My code was for the four ‘tuned’ glasses, again in MicroBlocks:

And finally the ‘conductor’ code, in MicroBlocks:

We invited guests to obtain a ticket:

A design based on the baseball ticket:

And, ta-da!, the performance:

All in all, best summed up in Gary and Sylvia’s colourful words:
“CMK 2024 was a powerful refutation of the cruelty fuelling the latest explicit instruction craze.

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Curtains for Sashiko

I was pleased to remix the Turtlestitch project which I had previously used to fix my shirt and jersey to repair a torn curtain.

Sashiko is a Japanese embroidery technique to decoratively repair and strengthen old clothes. I had written a Turtlestitch program to stitch a spider’s web to hold fabric together.

A torn curtain with embroidery stabilising material and ruler.
I started by measuring some stabilising material to slip inside the curtain.

Torn curtain material with a few hand stitches to hold it together in preparation for repair.
The torn curtain material with stabilising material inserted and held in place with a few hand stitches.

Torn curtain material with a few hand stitches and sellotape to hold it together in preparation for repair.
Sellotape added to help the embroidery machine frame hold the curtain material as I tried to make the embroidery reach the edge.

Torn curtain material with hand stitches and sellotape now clamped into an embroidery frame.
Now clamped into an embroidery frame.

Material in an embroidery machine frame being stitched with three lines of thread.
Begin stitching the spider’s web.

Material in an embroidery machine frame being stitched with nine lines of thread.
Halfway through the radial threads.

Material in an embroidery machine frame being stitched with lines of thread radiating from a point and cross-connecting lines to look like a spider's web.
Almost completed the ‘rungs’.

Material finished being stitched with lines of thread radiating from a point and cross-connecting lines to look like a spider's web.
Finished!

Material finished being stitched with lines of thread radiating from a point and cross-connecting lines to look like a spider's web hanging in a window.
Hanging in the window.

From beginning to end around an hour’s work one morning – having had the code already written and just adapted it to make a 180 degree web rather than a full circle.

Now I can relax, knowing I am unlikely to make that tear worse!

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Speaking to my boiler

My boiler clock stopped working.

A somewhat stereotypical seasonal response to the dropping temperatures and clock changing back last night!

I do hope the central heating engineers out there are raking it in right now, but I am sorry to say, not from me.

Like my late father, I am perhaps too careful with my money despite being able to afford a call out. But for me, it is an opportunity and incentive to experiment with home automation.

I looked at the price of smart controls and blanched. Maybe instead I could replace the aged thermostat with a smart plug? I had to do some considered thinking about how that would work, and paused for a couple of days to do a little online research and devise a solution before deciding I could go for it.

The smart speakers I have are Echo Dot 5s, which can measure room temperature. I planned to write Alexa ‘routines’ to respond to changes (up or down) and do the timing too, so that it is not on overnight. A simple kind of programming, but interesting to think about as it means setting up a feedback-loop to operate at certain times only.

All I needed to do is understand how the thermostat was wired, and instead of the temperature alone switching the boiler heating on, I could perhaps replace it with essentially a home made programmable relay to do the work of thermostat and timer?

The inner workings of the thermostat are simple enough, but I had to think out loud all the connections and label them up before I went further (John Davitt would be proud).

Of course I had already turned off the boiler in the consumer unit and at it’s fused spur outlet for double safety.

The trick was to take the ‘switched’ wire, which needed to be live when the new ‘thermostat/timer’ called for heating, and wire it into an ordinary plug which then is inserted into the smart socket, which can switch it on and off.

Here is the final wiring. Note that the plug needs no neutral connection(!), hence the earth sleeving to indicate that the blue wire was used for earth (for safety) in the lamp flex I used:

And after screwing it all together and plugging it in where the thermostat used to be:

I was pleased to be able to recycle an old plug and especially an old switched socket from my store in the garage, so if anything goes wrong with the smart socket, I can take it out of the equation, plug in the plug and still control the heating manually with the switch on the old socket.

Finally I had to write two routines for Alexa to respond to temperature change and, for now, notify me it has done so, to check it is working. These are simple to make in the Alexa app on my iPhone. Ziggy is the name for my bedroom Echo Dot 5, which I decided to use to monitor my small flat’s temperature. In the living room, I have an Eco Flex, currently on sale at less than £5 on Amazon, which is an amazing bargain! Sadly it has no thermometer function, but it does play music on my hifi and let me control the lights and the rest of the house.

Here are the two routines:

  • first, ‘Turn on heating’ to turn on the smart socket when the temperature is below 17C, within a specified time period;
  • second ‘Turn off heating’ to turn off the smart socket when it is above 18C – at any time. By saying ‘Alexa disable turn on heating’ as I leave the house, I can ensure I am not wasting energy when away.

Total outlay, £7.50 for the smart socket.

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Sashiko

No, this not a term of endearment for my son Sasha, not another Russian diminutive of the name Alexander – here are those:

  • Alexander– used at work, in official circumstances, or by people he doesn’t know
  • Sasha – used by his friends and family. An alternative diminutive is Shura
  • Sashenka – used as a form of affection by members of his family
  • Sashulya – used very affectionately, probably by his girlfriend
  • Sashka – used very informally by family and friends, but is impolite if used by a stranger

No, this is Sashiko, a four hundred year old Japanese cultural concept, of a craft that revives old clothes or makes them stronger and warmer.

A man with a holey shirt repaired using a Sashiko technique of embroidery designed to look like a spider's web.

I have this old cotton shirt. The fabric is thin and worn and torn slightly near the breast pocket. I wanted to repair it based on the values and ideas of the Japanese craft of Sashiko.

I made a digital embroidery design, rather like a spider’s web, by writing a program using Turtlestitch, hoping it would strengthen the fabric and prevent the tear from spreading. So far so good – you can see the results in the photograph above – the hole was made bigger by the process, but I think more secure – we’ll see!

I also have a knitted cotton jersey, which I had torn lying down in a plane and catching it in the seat frame, doh!

The fabric is much stretchier, and with the experience of the first repair enlarging the hole, I thought I would try to stabilise the fabric on both sides with washable backing.

To further improve the stability, I chose to make some flour and water glue (with again the intent to wash it away afterwards) and stuck the jersey to the backing before mounting it in the embroidery frame:

The flour and water glue placed on the jersey
Now with the washable backing
Ready to go!

I had to wait overnight for the glue to fully dry and then the fun began:

Stitching the web
The end result before removal and washing
After washing away the backing and glue.

The result should stop the jersey from unravelling, but either way I am pleased with the process and the outcome!

I was unsettled by the amount of trigonometry and list processing I had to use in my first spider web solution, so spent some time while waiting for the glue to dry making a simpler program for the jersey spider’s web, that relied on Turtle Geometry only.

This confinement to Turtle Geometry – move and turn commands from the perspective of an imaginary turtle-like robot – means that when trying to fix or improve the program, one has recourse to bodily movement (imagined or real) to figure out what the program is doing. Seymour Papert, one of the inventors of Logo, on which Turtlestitch is based, called this ‘body-syntonic’.

This has been a focus for my inquiry over several years and I have blogged before about it:

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Morse Code MakeCode

Before Christmas, I was working with four schools in County Mayo, Ireland, and challenging the students to use MakeCode to make a Microbit lighthouse showing the actual sequence of flashing lights that the lighthouses round Mayo use.

Tomorrow all four schools are gathering in Atlantic Technological University in Castlebar, county town of Mayo, to show off their work with artist Bryan Duffy and their digital skills combined.

My rôle will be to extend those digital skills, and I intend to do that by introducing Morse code:

  • You are on a small boat out to sea
  • Your engines have failed and the waves are getting bigger all the time
  • You can see the lighthouses and you want to send a message using the only technology you have left – a powerful torch
  • How do you say ‘help’?

We are working in four groups of students in rotation, mixed from each school.

I will start by introducing Morse code and asking them to simulate the torch just by raising and lowering their hand – can they send messages? can they read them?

Then we will move to coding the Microbit in MakeCode, imagining it to be the torch and automate the sending of a distress signal.

Finally we will write our own message to be sent from the Microbit and challenge the other groups of students to decode afterwards.

Here are the two sheets that will support the workshop:

The sheet to explain Morse Code and propose an activity to make it real
The sheet to ‘copycode’ the program to automate an SOS signal from the MicroBit

I’ll update this blog after the workshop and tell you how it went!

Update:

Well it was a great day.

I left the house in Essex at 5am to fly to Knock West of Ireland from Stansted and collect a hybrid hire car from the redoubtable Pauline on my way to Castlebar.

We set up in a lovely hall in Atlantic Technological University, with ample space to spread out for our four group workshop rotation day.

The Morse code MakeCode workshop went well, despite the difficulty of talking in a noisy space – ironic given the topic of using morse code to communicate!

Students were inventive and quick with sorting out how Morse code worked, planning messages and then sending them across the hall with arm movements for dots and dashes in the absence of torches.

Explaining Morse Code and how to signal with your hands

Having acquainted themselves clearly with the concept of Morse code, the students then went on to use laptops, programming in Makecode to automate the sending of an SOS distress signal.

It gave me a chance to introduce them to sub-programs in Makecode as a way of structuring the work. Some were too enthusiastic to read my notes and coded it in a linear way, with a long ‘tower’ of jigsaw pieces. They quickly saw how much tidier and easy to adapt it was by using functions, which they readily understood.

Explaining the functions used in the program to transmit morse code from a Microbit

As the day progressed, the tower of decorated cubes, one made by each student in the four schools, was assembled on stage, directed by artist Bryan Duffy.

Artist Bryan Duffy masterminds the construction of a lighhouse tower of cubes

We placed one microbit at the top of the lighthouse tower, broadcasting a secret message to everyone:

Microbit broadcasting morse code message

One teacher and three students managed to work out what it was broadcasting – can you?

The four schools stood for a group photo with the tower on stage.

All-in-all a very satisfying day as we re-assembled the tower in the Mayo Education Centre next door, where the staff happily decoded the message, with some coaching!

Many thanks to the four principals – Adrian Ormsby at the Clogher School, Dermot Walsh at Cornanool School, Farnan Harte at Ardagh School, Kevin Munnelly at the Quay School – for trusting me with their students. A pleasure working with Bryan Duffy – a powerhouse. Most of all, a privilege to be working with the almost 100 students who worked tirelessly, noisily, enthusiastically, politely and generously.

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Lighthouse coding

A lighthouse lit up at night time on an isolated rock in a rough sea.
Blackrock Island photo by Helen Geraghty Munnelly

This November, I have had the pleasure of working with colleagues Dermot Walsh, Farnan Harte, Kevin Munelly and Adrian Ormsby. They are the principals at Cornanool, Ardagh, Quay and Clogher primary schools respectively in Co. Mayo, Ireland. They formed a Digital Creative Cluster project to combine digital technology in an art work made collaboratively across the schools.

In truth the privilege was the chance to work with their energetic, imaginative and polite students.

Student at Ardagh school designing an art work of a light bulb incorporating an LED
Student at Ardagh school designing an art work of a light bulb incorporating an LED

My goal was to establish the competence to use Microbit and LED technology to include in a work of art to be developed.

Over two sessions, we:

Given a free rein, the art produced included many spaceships, cars, light bulbs and signet rings, as well as a couple of lighthouses.

Artwork of colourful lighthouse with LED from Ardagh School
Artwork of colourful lighthouse with LED from Ardagh School

This inspired discussion with the principals and raised the idea to focus on the flashing lighthouse, with its symbolism of identity and function of communication, as an exercise to make a dynamic Microbit project.

Could students code the Microbit to simulate a lighthouse?

We explored the LEDs on the Microbit and discussed the pause function in Makecode and decided we could, but after some introduction, it was left as an exercise for students to complete after I left.

So last night, I slept restlessly with troubling thoughts of unfinished business. I’ve learnt to get up and do something when this happens, rather than lose sleep in fitful discomfort!

So this is fruit of my feverish night mind – a simple Microbit program that I could have offered as a solution.

The challenge to you, is to run my program and study its output, before you inspect the code, while imagining you are:

  • Out to sea on a clear Christmas night off the western Irish Coast.
  • The battery is flat on the GPS.
  • All you can do is spot stars and lighthouses.
  • Where are you and which direction are you heading?
  • What has this to do with Christmas?

You can find out by downloading my program, unzip it and drag the hex file into a new project in Makecode, run it there with the emulator or download it to a Microbit and then imagine you are seeing the lights on the Microbit as objects in the landscape before you.

If you want, you can print my poster for this challenge on card, cut out the window to see the microbit display having fixed it to the back, and mount it on the wall in class for students to look at and attempt to work it out. Email me with their answer to the challenge and I’ll send the fully commented code.

Can you answer the questions, before you read the code?

Can you answer them after inspecting the code?

Merry Christmas to all the learners (including principals and me) in the four schools and all my colleagues, friends and family!

Hints to help:

UPDATE: Here is the fully commented code which explains everything I hope!

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Computers in Education Society of Ireland Webinar: Knowledge Creation

I joined this panel on knowledge creation, responding to the Irish Department of Education and Skills report ‘Digital Learning 2020: Reporting on practice in Early Learning and Care, Primary and Post-Primary Contexts’.

I was asked to respond the following eight questions, and here are my prepared answers:

1. Who or what triggered your interest in the educational use of technology?

My first contact with educational technology was the arrival of microcomputers in 1978/9 – the secondary school where I taught Mathematics and Computer Studies took receipt of a Research Machines 380Z computer, and I took it home every weekend to learn how to use it and how to exploit it. To upskill myself I wrote a computer program in BASIC to make a snooker ball bounce around the screen – when I showed it to children, I was surprised at their enthusiasm to engage with it , even running to the cupboard to find a protractor to hold against the screen to estimate the angle they should fire the ball! The rest is history.

2. What is your primary motivation behind your educational use of technology?

To make the abstract concrete!

3. Describe in your experience effective educational use of technology in formal education.

To enhance the expressive and evaluative power of learners.

4. Describe in your experience effective learning outcomes from the educational use of technology in formal education.

Deeper and broader insight into knowledge coupled with useful skills and the character to persist with learning using technology as an augmentation of learning capacity – competence.

5. What is your philosophy of education?

To recognise the ‘engine’ of learning that every child has, but which is sometimes diminished by a lack of opportunity to exercise free choice and effective action! In other words, I am learner centred.

6. In your experience how is knowledge transferred?

Through expression (a kind of performance of competence) and evaluation (a check on the validity of that performance). Expression of competence may be in many modalities and media, but primarily internal thinking, natural language and formal (computer executable) code. Evaluation (of expressions) (internal check, natural social interaction and formal computer outcomes)

7. What pedagogy best supports the educational use of technology and why?

One that recognises the particular support that technology offers in such a learning model.

8. Formal education in the 21st century should look like….. because….

Something which has designed democratic responses to all the needs a learner has. Because I think that learners must increasingly take charge of their learning.

[ Updated for spelling and minor enhancements, 19/12/2020 ]

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Keynote voting wearables at CESI conference

Richard Millwood and Elizabeth Oldham presenting at CESI conference 2018 with voting wearables
Richard Millwood and Elizabeth Oldham presenting at CESI conference 2018 with voting wearables [Photo: Stephen Howell]

I had a mad idea.

Having learnt all about the amazing  Microbit at CESI•CS meetings and in particular their capacity to inter-communicate using Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) after being shown by the indefatigable Keith Quille, I wondered “how many Microbits could be broadcasting at once?” and “could I put together a voting system where the audience have Microbits and the speaker has a wearable with Microbit that listens for their votes and displays the outcome?”

I had been asked by the Computers in Education Society of Ireland (CESI) to present a keynote speech with my good friend and colleague Elizabeth Oldham at the CESI conference on 10th March 2018 at Dublin City University. I told Elizabeth about my idea and suggested we dramatise disagreement from time to time in the speech and then ask the audience to settle our dispute. She agreed!

Keith Quille also thought I wasn’t mad, but I’m not confident he is the best judge 🙂

So, Keith started me off with a first go at a program for each Microbit. Then I tried at our CESI•CS meetings to get participants to try and solve the problem – they all came up trumps within only an hour or so, some with no experience at all – amazing!

In Cork, a group with primary and secondary teachers quickly made a solution:

Richard Millwood, Sean Manning, Dawn O'Sullivan, Dominick Donnelly, Kathleen Touhy & Liam OCallanain in Cork
Richard Millwood, Sean Manning, Dawn O’Sullivan, Dominick Donnelly, Kathleen Touhy & Liam OCallanain in Cork

In Donegal, Sharon, Pauric and Claire collaborated to make their solution:

Richard Millwood, Sharon Lee & Pauric O'Donnell in Donegal
Richard Millwood, Sharon Lee & Pauric O’Donnell in Donegal

In Athlone, Elizabeth and Maeve made a plan, using a Design Thinking process by treating me as their client and empathising, before writing down their ideas and then programming:

The Barbie design think process - Elizabeth Mullan & Maeve Cormican
The Barbie design think process – Elizabeth Mullan & Maeve Cormican

In each case, we discussed design processes, collaboration and the project work proposals in the Leaving Certificate for Computer Science. There were good discussions about foundations, progression and continuity, since all the CESI•CS meetings included primary and post-primary teachers.

So, having established feasibility, I set about making something Elizabeth would be prepared to wear, so cut up an old shirt and got stitching and glueing according to this fabric flower design.

Making Elizabeth's wearable
Making Elizabeth’s wearable

And the result (from a distance it looked OK!):

Elizabeth's wearable
Elizabeth’s wearable

Behind her flower (and with no adornment on my wearable) was a Kitronix Zip Halo fixed to a Microbit, and with a safety pin provided by Adrienne Webb (thanks!) Elizabeth pinned it to her cardigan, and I mine to my shirt.

The final task was to complete the programming. With Keith’s inspiration and the many design conversations and prototypes made by CESI•CS participants, I finally completed the code with two hours to spare – I only had time to test with three audience voting Microbits, so there was no certainty it would work. Once in the room and with minutes to spare, we set about downloading the audience program to a pile of Microbits generously lent to me by Stephen Howell of Microsoft. It couldn’t be done without the generous help of Stephen Howell, Keith Quille, Tony Riley and John Hegarty. We think we had over fifty voting in the room!

Three voters and a speaker in testing
Three voters and a speaker in testing

There were three programs – a program for the audience ‘microbit-audience’, a program for my wearable to control the voting process & display votes for ‘A’ positions ‘microbit-A-speaker’, and a program for Elizabeth’s wearable to display votes for ‘B’ positions ‘microbit-B-speaker’:

Program for 'microbit-audience'
Program for ‘microbit-audience’

Program for 'microbit-A-speaker'
Program for ‘microbit-A-speaker’

Program for 'microbit-B-speaker'
Program for ‘microbit-B-speaker’

I leave it to the reader to puzzle out how it all worked and will welcome suggestions for improvement!

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Knock knock! – an interpretation of ‘body syntonic’

I recently worked with colleagues to offer similar workshops at two conferences – SCoTENS 2017 in Dundalk (with Pamela Cowan from Queens University Belfast and Elizabeth Oldham from Trinity College Dublin), Ireland and ATEE 2017 in Dubrovnik, Croatia (with Nina Bresnihan, Glenn Strong and Elizabeth Oldham, all from Trinity College Dublin).

The workshops introduced our ideas about using a version of paired programming to give confidence to novices in programming. We had developed these ideas, together with colleagues Mags Amond and Lisa Hegarty, also from Trinity College Dublin, through the CTwins project funded by Google’s CS4HS – Computer Science for High School.

The workshop slides for ATEE 2017 also included ‘Art’ in the title, since it was my notion that developing an art project would be personally fulfilling.

You can see how I have been a little pre-occupied with the relationship between art, craft and programming through my recent blogs:

In a happy co-incidence, I today found myself in a useful conversation about the design of the programming tool, Scratch, that we used in the project and the workshop. In the conversation, we rightly focussed on the design of Scratch, which has become so wildly popular that a heavy weight of responsibility lies on the development team to get it right. I tried to explain why Scratch is important in this blog post:

Nevertheless, I feel that as well as considering the tool design, we must also shift attention to the activity and mental models that I believe learners symbiotically develop alongside their use of the Scratch tool. The Logo programming language developed in 1967 and its turtle geometry microworld is one of the most potent developments to recognise such activity and mental modelling – although I believe not the earliest (I believe sentence generation using lists preceded it?).

A microworld is a slippery concept, but Richard Noss and Celia Hoyles neatly sum up its importance in their book ‘Windows on Mathematical Meanings: Learning Cultures and Computers‘:

“In a microworld, the central technical actors are computational objects. The choice of such objects and the ways in which relationships between them are represented within the medium, are critical. Each object is a conceptual building block instantiated on the screen, which students may construct and reconstruct […]. To be effective, they must evoke something worthwhile in the learner, some rationale for wanting to explore with them, play with them, learn with them. they should evoke intuitions, current understandings and personal images – even preferences and pleasures. The primary difficulty facing learners in engaging directly with static formal systems concerns the gap between interaction within such systems and their existing experience: it is simply too great. That is why computational objects are an important intermediary in microworlds, precisely because the interaction with them stands a chance of connecting with existing knowledge and simultaneously points beyond it.”

In the turtle geometry microworld, the computational object is a robot turtle on a stage, equipped with a pen to trace out lines as it moves according to program steps.

Scratch starts with a different microworld sporting a cat rather than a turtle and is a particular kind of computer game with interacting sprites. It leaves in the jigsaw blocks for a turtle geometry microworld but they are somewhat spoiled by the sideways view of a stage rather than the top down view of the space that the turtle inhabits.

In the conference workshops we asked completely novice learners (adults using Scratch and ScratchJr) to program knock-knock jokes, with two sprites and message passing to synchronise the joke-telling activity.

Firstly, together with colleagues, we performed this joke (thanks to Pamela Cowan for such an excellent idea, performance and preparation):

Ghost: Knock knock!
Cat: Who’s there?
Ghost: Boo!
Cat: Boo who?
Ghost: No need to cry!

Secondly, we asked the adults to humanly perform their own jokes working in pairs, so that one adult would be the first actor in the joke and the other the second. I was building on the concept of ‘body syntonic’ which is so powerful in the turtle geometry microworld, but in this case, it is the act of interactive joke telling that forms the mental model of the problem, to be then expressed formally in programming and debugged.

In the Scratch  turtle geometry microworld, the pen jigsaw blocks are the foundations of formally expressing the acts of an imagined turtle with its pen. Children (and adults) can ‘be’ the turtle and act out the actions either bodily or in their heads, exercising their mental model of the turtle, which may then help them debug their formal expressions in code (jigsaw blocks).

In the case of our knock-knock microworld, we presented on the projector screen a subset of jigsaw blocks to start with:

In one instance of the workshop, to my delight, one learner added other blocks, using repetition to tell a more complex joke.

So perhaps the set of immediately available jigsaw blocks should reflect the microworld the learner’s imagination and mental models are anticipated to inhabit? I would go further and propose microworld-appropriate stages (and stage views, as we have in Turtlestitch and Beetleblocks), sprites and costumes. In Turtlestitch I would propose a spider sprite/costume and indeed rename it Spiderart or some-such. Perhaps there should be a choice of microworld, “I’m doing turtle geometry today” which leads one to the set of jigsaw blocks most appropriate to that microworld? I emphatically do not mean that this means restricting access to the wider set of jigsaw blocks, simply that it provides the best recommendations from the menu for the kind of restaurant you want / are ready to eat in.

To extend an already overworked metaphor, after the learner has been eating at diverse restaurants, each founded in the same underlying elements of heat, ingredients and combination, perhaps they would begin to strengthen their knowledge of the invariates which inform the mental models that underly their understanding of notional machine and programming language?

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Turtlestitching – programming embroidery

Automated Landscape as an embroidery
Automated Landscape as an embroidery

My first introduction to programming an embroidery machine came at the Scratch 2015 conference in Amsterdam, when Andrea Mayr-Stalder from Vienna presented the Turtlestitch programming environment based on Snap. I didn’t take that much notice, however lovely the designs and the possibilities were.

Then I went to Seymour Papert’s commemoration in Boston in January 2016 and met Susan Ettenheim from New York. Susan had joined forces with Andrea to explore Turtlestitch and was on a learning journey with Susan’s student Jennifer Lin. Jennifer was struggling with a problem – how to fill in space with an embroidery machine using Turtlestitch. The task she was attempting was to fill in a petal shape. Artemis Papert had made a good solution, which tackled the problem using variables and trigonometry. In this program, the petals have become leafs:

Artemis Papert's petal
Artemis Papert’s petal

Susan told me that Jennifer struggled at first to understand such sophisticated mathematics. Never one to ignore a challenge, I designed an alternate solution which stuck to ‘body syntonic’ principles – essentially, exploiting a learner’s prior knowledge of moving their own body to make and debug a computer program. My solution involved three ‘sprites’ – one to run around one side of the petal, one to run round the other and finally another to run between them, filling in the space. One can imagine children actually acting this out for real, collaboratively, as a precursor to programming a solution in code, in the same way that turtle geometry allows them to solve geometric problems by imagining they themselves are moving and turning. [UPDATE March 2023 – here is a video we made in 2019 to illustrate!] It is salutary to note that my solution involves synchronising concurrent processes – a topic I would have considered above my pay grade, let alone appropriate for learners as young as 5! (Later I found out that ScratchJr, designed for younger learners, also included this kind of notional machine!).

After this, I was hooked, and at Scratch 2017 in Bordeaux I met Andrea, Susan and Jennifer together with Michael Aschaeur, who had programmed Turtlestitch, and had the opportunity to talk about my ideas and learn how they planned to go forward. As a result, I resolved to buy an embroidery machine!

I purchased a Brother Innov-is F440E embroidery machine in September 2017 from SOSBrother in Bray, I resolved to create an opportunity to play with colleagues and friends using Turtlestich to explore programming and embroidery, and thus was born the Turtlestitching workshop held today, Thursday 19th October as part of EU Code Week.

The introduction that Susan from SOSBrother gave me in to the machine’s operation was invaluable and I tried to pass on all I could remember to my collaborators.

Mags created designs seeded by our date of birth:

https://twitter.com/twitter/statuses/921091656694235137

Mary Jo followed the brilliant Turtlestitch cards to create some lovely interlocking circles:

Mary Jo's simple but effective design
Mary Jo’s simple but effective design

Jake was like a duck to water, his work here modelled by Mags:

Jake's pattern
Jake’s pattern modelled by Mags

John’s design started black and white, but became really beautiful when using the multi-coloured thread:

John's design
John’s design

Glenn inspected, analysed and modified an existing pattern to fit the Brother’s 18 by 13 cm space:

Glenn's pattern
Glenn’s pattern

And after they all went away, I made my own Automated Landscape (the illustration at the start of this blog) into an embroidery, using the wonderful multi-coloured thread.

The workshop taught us several things:

  • “move 10 steps” produced a 2mm stitch, which was a ‘good’ size stitch;
  • going over patterns twice or even three times could make stronger designs;
  • multicoloured thread could make spectacular embroideries;
  • more time was spent discussing computational issues than embroidery issues;
  • it was hard fun!

I am absolutely delighted to announce that Trinity College Dublin’s Visual Arts and Performance scheme have agreed to fund a course and exhibition based on this, following a successful Wearable Electronics Workshop last year – look out for the advert in the New Year!

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Computational Thinking and Art

Automated Landscape - Richard Millwood (1971)
Automated Landscape – Richard Millwood (1971)

I recently made a presentation with Mags Amond at the Art Teachers Association of Ireland‘s 2017 Annual Conference in the National Gallery of Ireland. I spoke a little about technology and learning, technology and art and then gave some examples of our own experiences and thoughts. You can read our presentation ‘LED by the heart’ here.

Included was the picture above, which I painted in school in 1971 following an algorithm given to me by my art teacher. I remember being satisfied with the process and the outcome, and the pleasure never went away. This was what the teacher asked me to do:

  1. Draw a steep zig-zag line to make a mountain range
  2. Draw a less steep zig-zag line to make a range of foothills
  3. Draw a smoother zig-zag line to make rolling countryside
  4. Extend the lines thinly to divide the space into geometric sections
  5. Paint the sections using sky, mountain, hill and field colours

I have since written a computer program in Snap to do this automatically.

Mags demonstrated to the teachers how simple electrical circuits work, and later we encouraged them to ‘pimp their badge’ with LEDs, coin batteries and decorations.

pimping their badges
pimping their badges

Other examples I showed included the use of Snap by young children to program lights on the front of a four floor building at the Scratch Conference in Bordeaux this year, the use of light emitting diodes with micro-controllers to make wearable electronics and programming an embroidery machine to make patterns:

butterfly class embroidery
butterfly class embroidery

Our proposition to the art teachers, was that computational thinking and computing might be something they have the aptitude for, confirmed by Keith Gregg’s MSc dissertation.

We also proposed that STEAM (Science Technology Engineering Art and Mathematics) might better be written ASTEM, putting the art first, and themselves taking a lead in developing computing in their schools.

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Wearable Electronics Workshop

 

Richard explaining Doireann Wallace's musical glove at the Wearable Electronics Workshop exhibition April 26 2017
Richard explaining Doireann Wallace’s musical glove at the Wearable Electronics Workshop exhibition April 26 2017

This is the story of the Wearable Electronics Workshop, given by MAKESHOP by Science Gallery Dublin in March and April 2017, in collaboration with the School of Computer Science and Statistics, Trinity College Dublin.

In 2015, I was introduced to the idea of ‘pimping your badge’ at a conference by friend Mags Amond.

Mags Amond in Rang na bhFéileacán
Mags Amond in Rang na bhFéileacán

It involved adding a watch battery and an LED (light emitting diode) to my conference badge to make it light up – my first wearable electronics!

Conference badge with LED and watch battery

Mags was later to get involved in the workshop to introduce some basic ideas about circuits.

That Christmas, at my annual birthday party, I gave similar treatment to a bow tie, and it was well received.

Bow tie with LED lights
Bow tie with LED lights

The following summer (2016) I found myself in St Vincent’s hospital in Dublin, having my heart checked out when experiencing a rare irregular heartbeat (arrhythmia). The time in the hospital was short, since I proved to be in robust health, but enough to stimulate an idea for another wearable electronic – something driven by my own pulse:

 

The experience stimulated the following design, ‘LED by the heart’, which pleased me, so I resolved to try and make something wearable with it.

'LED by the heart' - a design based on the symbol for an LED (Light Emitting Diode)
‘LED by the heart’ – a design based on the symbol for an LED (Light Emitting Diode)

Feeling a little worried that it might be hard work, I sought friends and advice. My good friend at Trinity College Dublin, Doireann Wallace, offered support and interest, and later helped me to invite all my party guests in Christmas 2016 to complete and wear a glowy wearable. Doireann kindly prepared for this by cutting felt into Christmas shapes and stitching battery pockets for the partygoers to assemble.

Felt fir trees for glowy Christmas badges
Felt fir trees for glowy Christmas badges

Friends wearing their glowies at the party

On a hunt for new components and advice, I visited the MAKESHOP by Science Gallery here in Dublin. There, I got into a conversation with Jessica Stanley, who runs electronics workshops for them, and as luck would have it, had a background in wearable electronics. She had wanted to offer a course on this for some time, so I promised to help by finding some other participants.

Then I came across the Trinity College Dublin Visual Arts and Performance Fund. I made an application, and the committee were kind enough to sponsor our course. So in March 2017, we recruited participants to join us: some had craft experience, others programming and design knowledge – all were keen to know more.

Working together, with Jessica’s supportive and knowledgeable leadership, we each made artefacts to be proud of. Over six weeks of Wednesday evenings in the MAKESHOP we learnt to sew conductive thread, programme micro-controllers and solder circuits, as well as make sense of the exciting electronic components we could combine with interesting fabrics in our designs

Finally we demonstrated our work in an exhibition in the Science Gallery on April 26th 2017:

Doireann’s glove instrument

Susan Reardon's jacket
Susan Reardon’s jacket

John Hegarty's bowler hat
John Hegarty’s bowler hat

Una O'Malley's scarf with loudspeakers
Una O’Malley’s scarf with loudspeakers

Katrina Enros' badge
Katrina Enros’ badge

Caroline Kelly wearing her necklace made with handmade felt, slices of stalactite and LEDs next to Richard Millwood wearing his LED lit bowtie, braces and beating 'LED by the heart' decoration
Caroline Kelly wearing her necklace made with handmade felt, slices of stalactite and LEDs next to Richard Millwood wearing his LED lit bowtie, braces and beating ‘LED by the heart’ decoration

I am now wondering how far this can go.

The initial premise was for me to find a course to fulfil my own creative aspiration. I now think that it may be a route to learning about programming and technology, starting with our desire to be crafty and creative, building from where we are already comfortable in making things, to add a desirable electronic aesthetic dimension. Having broken the ice with this encounter, perhaps participants will find a better relationship with  programming and technology, or at least a greater clarity about how such things work.

So now I feel it may be the basis for an adult education model, and so intend to pursue this as an idea for Art teachers, working with the Art Teachers Association of Ireland and the National College of Art and Design and of course MAKESHOP!

I also think it may be interesting to explore the idea with a more general public, by seeking support from Enterprise Ireland to establish feasibility.

Personally I am now the proud owner of two Adafruit Flora Arduinos – small computers usually called micro-controllers, two BBC Microbit computers and lots of lovely LED swag – I can’t wait to make the next mad idea come to fruition!

Thanks to Doireann Wallace & Jessica Stanley for working with me, to all the participants for working so hard and to Nadine McDonogh Cunningham & Rozenn Dahyot for the photographs.

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Jigsaw programming

Blockly program to compute a factorial
A program to compute the factorial of a number using Blockly

I’m sure many of my readers will know what I mean, but just in case, I am talking about the visual programming languages for programming computers which use blocks that plug together like a jigsaw to express algorithms. Examples include StarLogo, App Inventor, Scratch and Blockly.

These are widely used to introduce programming for the following reasons:

  1. such languages tap in to a pre-literate capacity to help learners make sense of things without depending on technical reading and writing literacies;
  2. learners appreciate the tactile and kinaesthetic sensibilities involved in producing a visually pleasing artefact, the program, regardless of what it does;
  3. such languages clarify the logic of the program through the display of visual, diagrammatic shapes that make it easy to determine the relationship and scope of program elements;
  4. it is impossible to make syntax errors such as incorrect spelling, conjunction or punctuation;
  5. they provide a visual menu of programming elements so that opportunities for expression are clear and the learner’s memory is not overtaxed.

All this I can understand and I am very much a fan, but I am unclear why there is considered to be a desirable progression from these languages to the traditional text-based languages?

In some cases features are missing from the visual programming languages. For example Scratch doesn’t do functions and local variables.

It may be thought that a complex program would be visually unwieldy, but I find that true of any reasonably sized textual program.

Then there is the historical/cultural/custom-and-practice concerns of experienced programmers – I can hear them saying “surely there is something important, expressive and pure about traditional programming languages?”.

I maintain an open mind about this and can even imagine jigsaw programming becoming the method of choice for serious programming in the workplace. If I am right, there are some interesting challenges:

  1. What are the criteria for judging the effectiveness / efficiency / legibility of a program made using jigsaw programming?
  2. What are the examples of programming problems that cannot be solved using jigsaw programming?
  3. How do we benefit from the version control and sharing that matter for collaborative development?
  4. How do they effectively encapsulate and hide libraries of service functions and procedures?
  5. Can we add styling control so that we can tailor the visual appearance to suit the person and the task, or simply provide an alternative view?
  6. How can they reveal and make editable the variables and data they manipulate? (Scratch does this well with lists).
  7. How can they animate the program’s diagram to illustrate its execution, single step, interrupt and thus help us debug?

Some of these challenges may already be tackled – I’d be pleased to hear about where to find developments!

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Reflection on Reflection™

No this is not a treatise on reflective practice, it is reflective practice.

Today I took friend @benjeddi ‘s advice and decided to RiskIT (for only seven minutes rather than two weeks). A key RiskIT element is to be ‘Not afraid of failure, but learn from it’ – an attitude I have nearly always benefited from, despite some pain.

I was presenting at TeachMeet Essex, in front of an unusually strong gathering including many head teachers. The meeting exceeded my expectations of this novel form of CPD with excellent food (thanks KEGS’ chef and kitchen), excellent organisation (thanks @aknill and @ICTMagic) and clear evidence of the power of a good head’s sanction, thanks @headguruteacher!

My risks were:

  • to demonstrate from an iPhone via Reflection on my laptop;
  • to present my ideas using VideoScribe;
  • to test a proposal for developing modern apps based on lost ideas.

It all went wrong, as it often does when you use technology in a presentation for the first time, but since I am going to do it all again at #tmbolton on Friday, I fruitfully learnt from the experience.  For all those let down by a slightly duff speech, here is the video from Videoscribe I would have like to shown:

Incidentally, I created the video by using Reflection to record the video as it was played by VideoScribe on the phone. A subsequent re-compress using Quicktime Player 7 to half size and H264 yielded a video only 3.3Mb in size.

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Old lobster almost boiled

Learning on the Beach 2011

The second annual Learning on the Beach unconference #lob11 has just scattered – I am blown away, boiled, invigorated and inundated – and that was just the weather. We were a self-select group of ‘old lobsters’ like me @richardmillwood and some fresh faces like @squiggle7 – the value of this mix in challenging the norms of indoor education was enormous.

Activities included:

  • a scene setter on flat-lining and free-learning from John Davitt
  • collaborative presentations by teams of participants on themes (and genre) as diverse as Irish History (sing-song), The Salt Marsh (tragedy) and Tides (rap)
  • a tour of the beach with Seán and Matthew to understand the nurturing approach to the ‘machair’ or sand dunes found on the west coast of Ireland and particularly in Mulranny, where we were staying
  • the Explainer Olympics – a chance to hone with a sharp stick in the sand our skills in capturing a concept
  • a Ceilidh to let it rip -thanks to Jim and Ann, @angedav @JamiePortman @mlovatt1 @magsamond @johndavitt
  • Postcards from the Edge, scribed on the beach – to let us shout about our findings
  • thoughts to challenge suppliers – what do we need to support learning outdoors in the design of equipment and infrastructure? Peter at @westnet_ie made it possible for us to connect from the beaches around Mulranny so that we could benefit from our vast array of gadgetry to support our inquiry including TouchaTag an RFID technology, but there were many issues addressed regarding weatherproofing, robustness, daylight viewing and power supply that would enhance outdoor activity anywhere
  • hot tub, sauna, steam room, cold plunge and swimming pool – four facilities that were welcome 😉
  • the sharing of Guinness, Google, kindness, camera-derie, Twitter, time, humour and happiness ( to say nothing of black and white pudding, fresh air and fine rain)

There are not enough wild sea-horses to hold me back from attending #lob12  – I already miss the lobsters: @squiggle7 @magsamond @JamiePortman @mlovatt1 @andyjb @dughall @VickiMcC @johnmayo @johndavitt @angedav @katherinedavitt @timrylands @sarahneild @susanbanister

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Dimensions in creative work

In talking about the issues of user-generated content with friends Stephen and Joy recently, Stephen reminded me of this presentation slide I used to show in 2004 in the context of a growing movement to engage children in the filming and composition of digital video.
The push by specialists such as the British Film Institute was to teach film technique, to be methodical, to learn ‘film language’ and essentially to be equipped to make compelling feature films. My feeling was that encouraging creativity and the arts demanded a rather more diverse approach.
With regard to audience, it seemed to me that an artist may well be concerned to articulate their ideas to an audience, on the other hand they may not care what the audience thinks, but simply please themselves in a deliberate (or naïve) break from tradition and justify it as art for art’s sake and true to their calling. I am not an art historian, but this is somewhat the realm of the modernist.
From Wikipaedia:
“The most controversial aspect of the modern movement was, and remains, its rejection of tradition. Modernism’s stress on freedom of expression, experimentation, radicalism, and primitivism  disregards conventional expectations. In many art forms this often meant startling and alienating audiences with bizarre and unpredictable effects, as in the strange and disturbing combinations of motifs in surrealism  or the use of extreme dissonance and atonality  in modernist music. In literature this often involved the rejection of intelligible plots or characterization in novels, or the creation of poetry that defied clear interpretation.”
Narrative on the other hand relates to the structural-temporal purpose of an art form – whether to tell a story which maps roughly on to our life experience of sequenced events or to simply effect a reaction, inspire an idea or evoke a feeling. Clearly a film intended for the latter purposes need not conform to traditional ‘film language’, although it might benefit it.
Control is about viewing an art form in a sequence determined by the author or on the other hand through choices made by the audience. The former could be a film in the cinema, the latter an interactive game or a web-site. Digital video which forms part of a ‘navigated’ experience may owe nothing to traditional film techniques, and make new and less well-known demands of the author.
The bottom line is that it pays to be open minded about the purpose of creative work and at least discuss these choices when introducing new technologies to young people. If they choose to be on the left hand end of each of these dimensions, then it will pay them to develop some film language skills – perhaps at the excellent Filmsense website created by Media Education Wales.
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TeachMeet North East London

2simple-cake

This TeachMeet was brave enough to throw the rules up in the air and try a new plan – and mostly it worked! I enjoyed the way the break-outs gave more intimate discussion and flexibility, but I missed the quickfire and serendipitous action of the random speaker. Most of all there was a mature relationship with commercial sponsors who were very much present, but respectfully supportive – thanks to all of them.

There were great talks from Drew, Tom and Ollie and others I didn’t hear, but I also loved the Max’s ‘next thing coming’ talk with augmented reality, Blue Peter style. As ever with Teachmeet there was a mix of old-timers (I mean you Penny) and newcomers (Edith) and enthusiasm in buckets.

Having done CEME, can we do the top of Canary Wharf next time? Can’t think of anything else they’ll want it for…

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Guilt upon accusation

New Zealand's new Copyright Law presumes 'Guilt Upon Accusation' and will Cut Off Internet Connections without a trial. Join the black out protest against it!
There are some major proposed changes in NZ law that will have an impact on education.
The proposed Section 92 of the NZ Copyright Amendment Act assumes Guilt Upon Accusation and forces the termination of internet connections and websites without evidence, without a fair trial, and without punishment for any false accusations of copyright infringement. An organisation called the Creative Freedom Foundation has been set up to specifically represent artists voices on these issues.
Check out their website: http://www.creativefreedom.org.nz , sign up and help NZ MPs make an informed decision about S92!