Ivan Kalas

Connectivity and Virtual Networks for Learning

We present papers that indicate the potential and challenge of connectivity within or between mathematics classroms.

Young students and future teachers as passengers on the Logo engine

In 1994 we released a new version of the Logo language. We now concentrate on research into new educational possibilities offered by this environment. We want to provide Logo users with a strong and flexible developers’ tool for exploring, creating and playing. Together with our university students - future teachers of mathematics and informatics - we run a seminar on implementing informatics in primary and lower secondary education. The goal of the seminar for the 1995/96 school year was to develop a modern one-year course on informatics for lower secondary students, supported by a series of open microworlds which should provide creative laboratories to explore major ideas embedded in turtle geometry, mathematics, multimedia, logic and algorithmics.

Building interfaces for on-line collaborative learning

AbstractFor several years we have been engaged in the development and research of software environments for collaborative learning, for example in the recently completed CoLabs project (which we presented at the IFIP TC3 WG3.5 working conference in Budapest in 2004, see also http://matchsz.inf.elte.hu/Colabs/), also within lately defended long-range doctoral research, in which the co-author of this paper together with his undergraduate students had developed and evaluated cooperative computer activities for children aged 10 to 18. They observed children when using those environments and studied the influence of different approaches and solutions on the degree of their involvement and will to cooperate. We have also been involved in the London Knowledge Lab pilot project for developing a collaborative layered learning space travel games construction kit. Our department’s prior engagement in the development of collaborative activities also includes publishing a popular on-line journal (developed by A. Hrusecka and D. Lehotska, this on-line journal (in Slovak) can proudly boast up to 250,000 visits per month) for children, which intensively exploits on-line collaboration. This topic attracts us not only as a support for the learning process, but is a challenge for us as developers of educational programming tools as well. In our SuperLogo and Imagine environments we have always tried to provide users (ranging from children to developers) with new and powerful options to foster learning by exploring and developing. Thus we have equipped Imagine with the means for building objects and their behaviours in incremental loops, with parallel independent processes, event-driven programming and complex yet intuitive support for developing on-line environments for collaborative learning. In this paper we place our collaborative applications in the context of other related interfaces reported in literature. We use eight criteria to classify them and conclude that collaborative applications being developed by us and our students—future teachers—are distinguishable from others along two or three of those criteria: they combine in themselves typical features of Logo microworlds and inspiring support for on-line cooperation. We then analyze in detail our collaborative Imagine microworlds along four dimensions of their development. We specify means for establishing and maintaining on-line connection among any number of participants. We study tools for sending and receiving items (data, active characters with their behaviours, instructions etc.). We reflect on what can be shared by two or more participants in a collaborative activity. We examine all possible operations with common and private characters of a participant from the collaboration point of view. Our goals in this research and development are to: 1.Better understand potential the interfaces for on-line collaboration offer to support the learning process,2.Place our Imagine Logo microworlds into context of other related applications,3.Build a detailed map of all aspects important for their development (i.e., build a framework for the development),4.Present the observations from our long-range experimental development and evaluation of the collaborative environments,5.Point out how simple and natural it is (in the academic surroundings) to develop small and yet powerful collaborative microworlds—built for instance for immediate need in a classroom—with exceptional potential for interaction and openness. Most of all, however, we want to motivate the endeavour to overcome all obstacles connected with the integration of on-line cooperation into children’s learning.

Exploring visible mathematics with IMAGINE

In our paper we explore how programmable pictures together with events, parallel independent processes and direct manipulation tools can be used for building powerful interactive visual elements and provide rich environments for exploring basic mathematical concepts. To visualize the concepts we use IMAGINE turtles, the shapes of which are specified by the Logo language. Thus we achieve high interactivity in the resulting microworlds. Children can easily create such objects, control them, combine, move, group, match, etc. We hope that new features of IMAGINE will inspire math teachers and developers to create new visible math educational materials.

Experimental curriculum of informatics for 11 year old children

In the Slovak Republic recently a new type of school has been established in lower secondary education. To make the curriculum attractive regular informatics topics are included, although no one knows what the contents should be. This is a very challenging situation for educational research. In our paper we present a new conception of the subject based on an experiment with 11 year old children. We advocate an open learning project approach: our students should understand that computer use may coming in many different and surprising guises. We present six general curriculum topics and several projects, some of them based on paper and pencil work, others implemented in Comenius Logo for Windows. We plan to use Informatics as a kind of a Trojan horse to change the school—to involve teachers of subjects which have no tradition in using the computer as a tool for learning.

Defining Procedures in Early Computing Education

From the early years of educational programming researchers considered procedural abstraction a key instrument of computational thinking and tried to understand the cognitive difficulties encountered through this concept. Defining procedures is promoted in renewed computing curricula in several countries. And yet, it is rarely acknowledged by more recent educational research. In this paper, we consider the fact that the delayed implementation of a mechanism for building procedures (known as definitions) within Scratch, a widely used programming environment for children, may have negatively impacted the focus within curricular content on this powerful idea. In our research, which is a part of a broader ScratchMaths (SM) research project, we set out to explore which factors play a role in upper primary pupils understanding and utilizing the concept of defining procedures as a common and inherent instrument of their programming. We present our observations from the project design schools and demonstrate how they guided the development of our SM pedagogic strategy for definitions.

Exploring Control in Early Computing Education

In the paper we reflect on how our design research approach in the current development allows us to study the increasing cognitive complexity of different levels of control which pupils conduct when they program Emil, a virtual character on the screen. In our earlier work we outlined conceptual framework for primary programming, which recognised three different levels of control: (a) direct manipulation, (b) direct control and (c) computational control (i.e. programming) an actor. In the present research we managed to get deeper into the complexity of control by identifying four instead of three of its levels. Based on our close collaboration with three design schools we have also found that it is more productive to project and analyse learning progression of pupils connected with control within two-dimensional grid, where the first dimension is control itself and the second explores the way how the control is represented. Along this dimension we have identified five distinct levels of representation: (a) none, (b) as internal record, (c) as external record, (d) as internal plan for future behaviour, and finally (e) as external plan for future behaviour. In our paper we explain the grid of control by presenting selected tasks from different environments of Emil, our new approach to educational programming for Year 3 pupils.

A atitude de dez estudantes de programação em informática moderna

A Informatica esta sendo implementada na edu- cacao de diversas formas, muitas vezes como uma disci- plina separada, o que cria espaco nao so para o desen- volvimento do letramento digital como tambem de outras areas importantes como programacao, resolucao de pro- blemas e tratamento de dados. Estamos envolvidos com o desenvolvimento de novos conceitos de estrategias de ensino / aprendizagem de informatica como um componen- te eficiente, legitimo e atraente da educacao moderna para muito tempo. Recentemente, nos avancamos nesta aborda- gem (em conjunto com outros paises europeus) com uma nova estrategia, o concurso de informatica Bebras1, que, em um ano, atraiu mais de 96.000 alunos em 9 paises. Neste artigo, nos apresentamos a forma como trabalhamos o conceito de informatica moderna – com enfase na pro- gramacao – atraves de tarefas minuciosamente preparadas para a competicao. Em particular, exploramos o compor- tamento de estudantes do ensino secundario inferior com componentes-chave na formacao em informatica. Observa- mos que na idade desses alunos nao ha diferencas signi- ficativas entre meninos e meninas em seus interesses e desempenhos.