The Culture of Tools – Richard Millwood

22 July 2024

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.

29 October 202329 October 2023

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.

23 October 202324 October 2023

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

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:

28 October 201728 October 2017

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:

Jigsaw programming

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?

20 October 201712 March 2023

Turtlestitching – programming 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:

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

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!

3 June 20113 June 2011

Old lobster almost boiled

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

26 November 20091 January 2021

Can we reverse the decline in schools’ computing, especially with girls?

You are invited you to participate in the fifth in a series of annual lectures to address the issues surrounding manufacturing, technology and education.

Can computing be viewed as a form of manufacturing in the knowledge economy?
Why is it in such decline in schools, especially amongst girls?

In 2005 there were 7242 students sitting A Level computing exams, 815 of these were female. By 2014 that is predicted to drop to around 1500 and all of them will be male, based on figures released by the Joint Council for Qualifications (JCQ).

Dr Stan Owers’ thesis claimed that the human species evolved in symbiosis with technology since the stone age.
What part has computing in such evolution?

The evening will begin with a focused presentation by our guest speaker, Kate Sim, followed by a brief response from Professor Stephen Heppell, leaving ample time for discussion.

For further background information, please visit:

The Culture of Tools – 2009 event and

The Culture of Tools

If you are unable to attend, please feel free to nominate colleagues.

16 February 2009

Guilt upon accusation

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!

20 November 2008

Engineering Diplomas get boost

Jamie Tuplin, Stan Owers, Mick Waters and Pete Williamson – presenters at the Owers Lecture 2008

The Guardian reports “Oxbridge to accept engineering diploma” – welcome news to learners and their teachers pioneering the Engineering Diploma in Barking & Dagenham schools. This timely announcement comes a week after another stimulating and informative Owers Lecture presented by Jamie Tuplin and Pete Williamson, and an excellent commentary in response from Mick Waters, Director of Curriculum at the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority. This fourth Owers lecture, organised by Core Education UK, was once again held at Oracle UK‘s offices in Moorgate, London on November 12th, thanks to Oracle’s ever-supportive Chris Binns who is champion for Oracle’s altruistic ventures Think.Com and ThinkQuest in the UK.

Jamie Tuplin, who leads the diploma developments Barking & Dagenham Local Authority and Pete Williamson, Head of Design Technology at the Warren School (and Learning Line Lead for Engineering for the authority), reported their experiences & issues of Engineering Diploma implementation in the first three months.

The question put to the audience was ‘Can Diplomas Cure the ‘English Disease’?’ and Mick Waters’ response, designed to provoke further debate, was to outline several diseases, all of which needed attention! In the end we had to stop, but discussion was strong and all participants were hungry for more.

7 July 20087 July 2008

New Learning ’08 – Connecting the Future to the Past

New Learning '08

This conference is taking place on Wednesday with about 50 folk – I know many others would have liked to come, but this is only a start and there’ll be more. For those unable to be there, there will be plenty of reporting to come, and you can download the conference pack and archive leaflet right here.

More importantly, if you have a story to contribute about your experiences with educational computing over the last four decades, contribute it in the stories section of the National Archive of Educational Computing website and if you want to do more, fill in the form in the support section.

10 November 200717 November 2007

The Owers Lecture 2007

When Stan Owers became Dr Stan Owers, this lecture was initiated.

It was to be held annually to address the issues surrounding manufacturing industry and education. This third in the series was a really challenging event with Jeff Roche, a 2nd year undergraduate giving us a frank review of his learning trajectory so far. Raj Rajagopal, IET trustee and long experienced in the world of manufacturing added his global perspective, pointing out that where the design and manufacture goes, the research and development follow.

A vibrant discussion ensued and a real sense of action required to improve the awareness amongst school students of how industry works.

The Importance of Computing as a Specialist Subject in Schools

Shared a platform with Gillian Lovegrove on this topic at the Naace All-Members Conference at Cisco in Feltham. I enjoyed the relatively easy task of listing some of the arguments for computing’s contribution to the wealth of human knowledge:

computing > arithmetic – it is also the engine room of the social network / Web 2.0
ubiquity of knowledge management – all disciplines’ approach to knowledge is infected with computing
creativity and problem solving – it provides extraordinary potential for creative and problem solving activity by making the abstract concrete
concept of the human mind – ideas of the mind have interchanged with concepts of the computer throughout history
historical contribution – the interrelationship with war, economy, culture and democracy
tool culture drives evolution (genetic and social) – tools have been symbiotic with humanity’s evolution since the stone age and the computer is the most sophisticated and diverse tool invented

After Gillian’s points about the problems facing the subject of computing, it was most challenging to hear one member of the audience ask the question: “Could it be our fault?”. It will be interesting to see how this discussion develops in the future.

17 June 200717 November 2007

Royal College of Art Show

Platform 8:

“The Chinese Government has recently commissioned the building of more than 1600 new design colleges, with a view to ending the division between the design of an object and its production.”

This was a very small part of an astonishing show in a large tent in Hyde Park, over the road from the Royal College of Art. The students on the MA Product Design had been organised into six ‘platforms’, focii led by their tutors. The words quoted above, from the Platform 8 poster they were giving away, are fascinating in the context of Stan Ower’s work around the culture of tools and gives me food for thought as I prepare for the next Owers Lecture.