[MWForum]Logo success story

Harvey Bornfield mwforum@lists.mathcats.com
Thu, 20 Nov 2003 00:09:11 -0700


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For those who want to bypass philosophy, you can parachute down to below 
the dotted line. Otherwise, enjoy entering our Minotaur's lair of 
labyrinthian thoughts,  our 'Man in the Maze', at your own 'risk...........'

In answering this call to arms to assemble magical moments in the MW 
theater, one does well to
bear in mind that it takes a Saguaro Cactus ten years to debut from the 
sandy desert soil before it extends even one small green prickly arm above 
the crypt of the soil in which it's catacombed, into the redeeming strum of 
the wind and warm face of the golden sun. What follows, lives in that 
emergence.

In all tales of organic unfoldment, of which human creativity is the most 
parallel, valuing and recounting the life of the 'root-ideas' and the 'stem 
and leaf-ideas' is integral to how the teacher mentors an improvisatory, 
unrehearsed, courageous ambience which untrammeled, casually and gracefully 
transports into every academic discipline, next to which the generation of 
a multimedia stack seems no more important than the ring of a cash-register 
upon exit from the marketplace.

Bearing this in mind, better, holding it in imagination, one thinks: In 
comparison to the glow of a firefly that same ten years of being a 
Saguaro-in-hiding certainly would be justifiably perceived as a prolonged 
silence, like Odysseus out to sea. Yet dreams gain shape and architecture, 
passing into brainstorming, and coagulate into thoughts. Those thoughts, 
ever descending, earthing, firm up into goals, their attendant strategies 
bearing at last visible fruits which glove the dreams that sired them, as 
though the Hand of God were invisible, and a glove of an overt deed, a 
tangible accomplishment alone were necessary to profile and present it, 
that is to say, to give it presence; and so a little reflection invites us 
to conclude that if we as constructionist sages are "doing our job", are 
indeed as well as by professing, are devoted to transfiguring education, 
moving it from a career back into a calling, from commodified warehouses of 
definable tasks back to realms of subtlety, patience is a Prime Directive. 
Not to move too fast from the seed kernal of an idea to the actuality, not 
to be too eager to rob the magic in order to create the object.

"Duly noted", says Spock:  Patience, which dissolves, like Aqua Regia, 
every academic and existential hysteria back into trust, patience which 
remains the still or yet-to-be-discovered antidote to the widely 
metastasizing mass ADD and ADHD which seems to have pathologically taken 
hold of culture and schools, patience, when it matures into majesty, 
expanding to epic scope and stature, turns "problems" into adventure and 
kindles a spirit of exploration, and so morphs all manner of 
witch-hunt-like-quest for 'correct answers' into the enduring art works, 
effecting an attitude shift. In this way issues of teaching becomes 
upstaged by invitations to learning, pedagogy is replaced by discovery, and 
tedius book-keeping by leap of inspiration, revealing humanity as a higher 
priority than the feverish pursuit of success, of notches in the gun, for 
places on the food-chain and manifestations of similarly pleasant materialism.

And therefore we agree, robustly agree, in what the emperor in Amadeus is 
reported to have said to Mozart" Our thoughts comprise "too many notes!". 
Still, one has to recall what the walking trees said to the hobbits in The 
Twin Towers, and marvel at the breath of detachment: "We never say what is 
not worth taking a long time to say." And so it is that a good response, 
one which links and thoroughly discusses creative project-authoring 
initiatives to one or more underlying philosophical paradigms, must all 
along harbor the intent of transforming focus from that of being "on tap", 
i.e., the teacher as a short-order-cook-reporter, to the teacher as a 
mentor, a sharer, a whisperer and gesturer of creative intent.

And so conclude:
It is easy, in the clandestine unacknowledged hysteria, in the deranged 
fervor of prevalent norms-based pathology which in its self-styled 
arrogance imagines it praiseworthy to superimpose exclusively left-brain 
focus upon educational infrastructures and curriculum, to fall prey, and to 
cultivate a victim mentality which places our enthusiasm, our powers to 
dream under house arrest. It is dangerously easy to come to believe and 
embrace that strange religion which lies camouflaged behind the sacred 
cliche "Time is Money", and in so doing, rush forth to sell short and 
auction off to the highest bidder or well-funded politician the value of 
sustaining enchantment as a muse which bathes multimedia initiatives with 
wonder most open-ended. And by so doing, beach up like driftwood, as 
sterile slaves of the literal, ending up governator-gladiators, (rather 
than philosopher-kings) recounting in loudly volumed accents of 
accomplishment copious arsenals, publishing abroad inventories of academic 
boast and plunder as recounted from the point of view of the Javelin.

All this having been said, and our philosophical revels having ended, which 
was made so roundabout in order to slow down witnessing the crime we all 
commit when we, as educators consent to sell short process in order to 
catalogue the products of striving, making fruit more important than acts 
of cultivation of ongoing ideas, and give up our station middle men, of 
go-between spirits, as intermediate rungs upon a ladder that ever 
traversing, ascends and descends again and again between dreams and deeds.

So now, onto the fruits:

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Episode one:
The idea: That American Indian parents, looking for ways to get involved in 
creative energies with their own children in the process of authoring, can 
create a level of dialogue and community which transcends parenting goals.

We used to open our computer labs every week for two or two and a half-hour 
multimedia authoring projects. With a digital camera, you can photograph, 
edit and then 'blowgun in' the faces of a father, mother, and siblings upon 
predesigned currency templates, creating and printing off a variety of 
accomplished counterfeit Navajo-Nation currency denominations. This gave an 
at times seemingly 'spectral satisfaction' to parents, as they filled their 
wallets. All in a solid night's work.

One third grade teacher, who by interest in wishing to become a computer 
teacher, was studying for a master's in educational computing, coordinated 
a unit on dinosaurs with me. We were utilizing Microworlds 1.03, and 
stashed into 25 or so 40 by 40 pixel shapes, digitized faces of each of the 
children. Meanwhile, each child was taught and/or assisted to scan in their 
favorite Mesozoic Villain, creating a page of what through a merge commend 
would turn into a collaborative publication. After creating a turtle 
clothed in the student's turtle-shape-face, we superimposed and then froze 
it on top of the scanned dinosaur.

Children recorded their own voices and connected them as instructions when 
their face was clicked.
This was most engaging. Buttons were connected to toggle, i.e both reveal 
and conceal text boxes upon demand. The program which accomplishes this is 
simple:


to ttxt :v                              ;text-toggle
set :v "visible? ifelse get :v "visible? ["false]["true]
end
(to make this elegant, make an turtle of an open book, and attached the 
ttxt "mytextname instruction to it. Have the advanced students creatively 
visualize what it would look like to make the book respond like a depressed 
button, using setsize. You'll end up with a first line like:

setsize size - 2 wait 3 setsize size + 2 wait 3
                             ;(the second wait 3 is if you get carried away 
and want to use a repeat)
Extra 1
Ask the sparky kids to enlarge the logic in the code so that if you call 
the program ttxt "  (empty variable), he will toggle the current textbox 
(textwho)

Extra 2
Ask the very choleric kids to enlarge the program so that if you pass in a 
list of text-box names, every one of them will be toggled to its opposite 
state. use ttxt bf :v

Lastly, if you're using both options 1 and two, you'll encounter 
interesting logic problems in the recursive use, when deciding when to exit 
the procedure.

An encore:
While we're at it, why not create a 'turtle-toggle' program which causes a 
turtle to appear and disappear with a single click of a "designated on-off 
turtle switch", whose name we call 'ghost'

to ttrt :v                      ;turtle-toggle
make "origin ask "ghost [pos]                   ;were moving this turtle to 
the place of the turtle we want
                                                               ;to conceal 
or reveal, first remembering the ghost pos
ask "ghost [setpos (ask :v [pos]) wait 5 ]    ; use wait just to witness 
how the procedure works
ifelse touching? "ghost :v [ask :v [ht] ][ask :v [st]]       ;touching? 
only works when both are visible
ask "ghost [setpos :origin]                                        ;restore 
ghost to original location
end

When I first set about to answer this question, I had no idea that there 
would be a reason to rethink the text-toggle program or to create 'one for 
the road', the parallel corresponding turtle on-off switch. It is the love 
of creative problem solving which defines the difference between the 
gradebook coercive mentality so prevalent in education "do this and no one 
will get hurt" and having a reason to celebrate existence.

Which "QED - ;-)))"
proves that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. QED

For all these 'reasons', Microworlds offers a way forward from the 
acquisitive to expressive-based educational focus.

Harvey Bornfield
www.mythologics.org

At 07:12 PM 11/19/2003, you wrote:
>Hi Folks,
>
>My request for you to share Logo success stories has been met with prolonged
>silence!  So I'll start us off by sharing a little anecdote, and I hope lots
>of you will contribute your own stories.  Susan of LCSI is collecting the
>stories, and I think we'd all appreciate hearing them - even just a few
>sentences to tell us what is worth celebrating as a teacher or learner of
>MicroWorlds / Logo.
>
>Here's a moment I've always enjoyed replaying:
>
>One year I was coordinating a MicroWorlds project with two third-grade
>classes who had been learning about Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night" through a
>story version of the play.  The teacher wanted the students to create their
>own version of Twelfth Night with MicroWorlds, including animated scenes and
>voice recordings.  Each pair of students developed one of the animated
>scenes: drawing the characters and backgrounds and writing the code to
>animate the characters.  For instance, Sangeeta and her partner had animated
>a small scene of Malvolio opening a door to a mansion, walking down a path
>(becoming larger as he moved), picking up an envelope, opening it, and
>reading the letter inside.  The full text of the letter was displayed on
>another page of the project; in the story, it had been written as a prank to
>make the haughty Malvolio begin to act foolishly around the woman he loved.
>
>In the midst of this project, the school had a ski day at a small ski
>resort.  Late in the day, I happened to ski past Sangeeta and some of her
>friends.  She called out in surprise, "Mrs. Petti, I didn't know you could
>ski!"  A moment later she said in delight, "Why, we could make Malvolio ski
>down the path to pick up the letter!"
>
>It was just a quick moment on a ski slope, but I was tickled.  Sangeeta was
>sufficiently invested in the project and empowered by MicroWorlds to be
>brainstorming a fun variation in the middle of a ski slope!  I could hardly
>imagine that she would have shouted out story ideas to her English teacher
>or math story problems to her math teacher.  My students had been delighted
>to see their cartoon-like characters come to life with a few lines of Logo
>code.  They had not seemed to mind tweaking the code endlessly to get their
>characters to behave exactly as they intended.  They were creating their own
>microworlds, and they loved being in control of these little worlds.
>
>This is why MicroWorlds is my favorite software and my favorite Logo.  Some
>people prefer "pure" versions of Logo without the multimedia features that
>can distract kids from the programming language.  I say it depends on our
>ultimate purpose.  Is our main purpose to teach the programming language, or
>is the programming language a means to an end?  I think the experience will
>be more meaningful and enduring if the programming component is a means to
>an end and if the student is highly invested in the outcome.  If the extra
>features help the student develop a new world more fully and easily, that's
>great!
>
>I think  the student's mindset is more important than the particular bits of
>code that might or might not be mastered.  I knew on the ski slope that
>Sangeeta "got it" and that she was beginning to think like me:  the world is
>full of possibilities, just waiting to be turned into fun new MicroWorlds
>projects!
>
>Wendy Petti
>
>Director of Curriculum, OpenWorld Learning
>and OWL's MicroWorlds in Action
>http://mia.openworldlearning.org
>Math Cats
>http://www.mathcats.com
>
>
>
>_______________________________________________
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>http://lists.mathcats.com/mailman/listinfo/mwforum
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"Music is the one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge 
which comprehends mankind, but mankind cannot comprehend."
Ludwig van Beethoven



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<body>
For those who want to bypass philosophy, you can parachute down to below
the dotted line. Otherwise, enjoy entering our Minotaur's lair of
labyrinthian thoughts,&nbsp; our 'Man in the Maze', at your own
'risk...........'<br><br>
In answering this call to arms to assemble magical moments in the MW
theater, one does well to<br>
bear in mind that it takes a Saguaro Cactus ten years to debut from the
sandy desert soil before it extends even one small green prickly arm
above the crypt of the soil in which it's catacombed, into the redeeming
strum of the wind and warm face of the golden sun. What follows, lives in
that emergence.<br><br>
In all tales of organic unfoldment, of which human creativity is the most
parallel, valuing and recounting the life of the 'root-ideas' and the
'stem and leaf-ideas' is integral to how the teacher mentors an
improvisatory, unrehearsed, courageous ambience which untrammeled,
casually and gracefully transports into every academic discipline, next
to which the generation of a multimedia stack seems no more important
than the ring of a cash-register upon exit from the marketplace.
<br><br>
Bearing this in mind, better, holding it in imagination, one thinks: In
comparison to the glow of a firefly that same ten years of being a
Saguaro-in-hiding certainly would be justifiably perceived as a prolonged
silence, like Odysseus out to sea. Yet dreams gain shape and
architecture, passing into brainstorming, and coagulate into thoughts.
Those thoughts, ever descending, earthing, firm up into goals, their
attendant strategies bearing at last visible fruits which glove the
dreams that sired them, as though the Hand of God were invisible, and a
glove of an overt deed, a tangible accomplishment alone were necessary to
profile and present it, that is to say, to give it presence; and so a
little reflection invites us to conclude that if we as constructionist
sages are &quot;doing our job&quot;, are indeed as well as by professing,
are devoted to transfiguring education, moving it from a career back into
a calling, from commodified warehouses of definable tasks back to realms
of subtlety, patience is a Prime Directive. Not to move too fast from the
seed kernal of an idea to the actuality, not to be too eager to rob the
magic in order to create the object. <br><br>
&quot;Duly noted&quot;, says Spock:&nbsp; Patience, which dissolves, like
Aqua Regia, every academic and existential hysteria back into trust,
patience which remains the still or yet-to-be-discovered antidote to the
widely metastasizing mass ADD and ADHD which seems to have pathologically
taken hold of culture and schools, patience, when it matures into
majesty, expanding to epic scope and stature, turns &quot;problems&quot;
into adventure and kindles a spirit of exploration, and so morphs all
manner of witch-hunt-like-quest for 'correct answers' into the enduring
art works, effecting an attitude shift. In this way issues of teaching
becomes upstaged by invitations to learning, pedagogy is replaced by
discovery, and tedius book-keeping by leap of inspiration, revealing
humanity as a higher priority than the feverish pursuit of success, of
notches in the gun, for places on the food-chain and manifestations of
similarly pleasant materialism.<br><br>
And therefore we agree, robustly agree, in what the emperor in Amadeus is
reported to have said to Mozart&quot; Our thoughts comprise &quot;too
many notes!&quot;. Still, one has to recall what the walking trees said
to the hobbits in The Twin Towers, and marvel at the breath of
detachment: &quot;We never say what is not worth taking a long time to
say.&quot; And so it is that a good response, one which links and
thoroughly discusses creative project-authoring initiatives to one or
more underlying philosophical paradigms, must all along harbor the intent
of transforming focus from that of being &quot;on tap&quot;, i.e., the
teacher as a short-order-cook-reporter, to the teacher as a mentor, a
sharer, a whisperer and gesturer of creative intent. <br><br>
And so conclude: <br>
It is easy, in the clandestine unacknowledged hysteria, in the deranged
fervor of prevalent norms-based pathology which in its self-styled
arrogance imagines it praiseworthy to superimpose exclusively left-brain
focus upon educational infrastructures and curriculum, to fall prey, and
to cultivate a victim mentality which places our enthusiasm, our powers
to dream under house arrest. It is dangerously easy to come to believe
and embrace that strange religion which lies camouflaged behind the
sacred cliche &quot;Time is Money&quot;, and in so doing, rush forth to
sell short and auction off to the highest bidder or well-funded
politician the value of sustaining enchantment as a muse which bathes
multimedia initiatives with wonder most open-ended. And by so doing,
beach up like driftwood, as sterile slaves of the literal, ending up
governator-gladiators, (rather than philosopher-kings) recounting in
loudly volumed accents of accomplishment copious arsenals, publishing
abroad inventories of academic boast and plunder as recounted from the
point of view of the Javelin. <br><br>
All this having been said, and our philosophical revels having ended,
which was made so roundabout in order to slow down witnessing the crime
we all commit when we, as educators consent to sell short process in
order to catalogue the products of striving, making fruit more important
than acts of cultivation of ongoing ideas, and give up our station middle
men, of go-between spirits, as intermediate rungs upon a ladder that ever
traversing, ascends and descends again and again between dreams and
deeds.<br><br>
So now, onto the fruits:<br><br>
----------------------------------------------------------------------------=
-------------------------------------------------------------<br>
Episode one:<br>
The idea: That American Indian parents, looking for ways to get involved
in creative energies with their own children in the process of authoring,
can create a level of dialogue and community which transcends parenting
goals.<br><br>
We used to open our computer labs every week for two or two and a
half-hour multimedia authoring projects. With a digital camera, you can
photograph, edit and then 'blowgun in' the faces of a father, mother, and
siblings upon predesigned currency templates, creating and printing off a
variety of accomplished counterfeit Navajo-Nation currency denominations.
This gave an at times seemingly 'spectral satisfaction' to parents, as
they filled their wallets. All in a solid night's work.&nbsp; <br><br>
One third grade teacher, who by interest in wishing to become a computer
teacher, was studying for a master's in educational computing,
coordinated a unit on dinosaurs with me. We were utilizing Microworlds
1.03, and stashed into 25 or so 40 by 40 pixel shapes, digitized faces of
each of the children. Meanwhile, each child was taught and/or assisted to
scan in their favorite Mesozoic Villain, creating a page of what through
a merge commend would turn into a collaborative publication. After
creating a turtle clothed in the student's turtle-shape-face, we
superimposed and then froze it on top of the scanned dinosaur. <br><br>
Children recorded their own voices and connected them as instructions
when their face was clicked.<br>
This was most engaging. Buttons were connected to toggle, i.e both reveal
and conceal text boxes upon demand. The program which accomplishes this
is simple:<br><br>
<br>
to ttxt
:v&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&n=
bsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;=
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
;text-toggle<br>
set :v &quot;visible? ifelse get :v &quot;visible?
[&quot;false][&quot;true]<br>
end<br>
(to make this elegant, make an turtle of an open book, and attached the
ttxt &quot;mytextname instruction to it. Have the advanced students
creatively visualize what it would look like to make the book respond
like a depressed button, using setsize. You'll end up with a first line
like:<br><br>
setsize size - 2 wait 3 setsize size + 2 wait 3&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <br>
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbs=
p;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&n=
bsp;&nbsp;
;(the second wait 3 is if you get carried away and want to use a
repeat)<br>
Extra 1<br>
Ask the sparky kids to enlarge the logic in the code so that if you call
the program ttxt &quot;&nbsp; (empty variable), he will toggle the
current textbox (textwho)<br><br>
Extra 2<br>
Ask the very choleric kids to enlarge the program so that if you pass in
a list of text-box names, every one of them will be toggled to its
opposite state. use ttxt bf :v <br><br>
Lastly, if you're using both options 1 and two, you'll encounter
interesting logic problems in the recursive use, when deciding when to
exit the procedure.<br><br>
An encore:<br>
While we're at it, why not create a 'turtle-toggle' program which causes
a turtle to appear and disappear with a single click of a
&quot;designated on-off turtle switch&quot;, whose name we call 'ghost'
<br><br>
to ttrt
:v&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&n=
bsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
;turtle-toggle<br>
make &quot;origin ask &quot;ghost
[pos]&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp=
;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
;were moving this turtle to the place of the turtle we want<br>
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbs=
p;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&n=
bsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;=
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbs=
p;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
;to conceal or reveal, first remembering the ghost pos<br>
ask &quot;ghost [setpos (ask :v [pos]) wait 5 ]&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; ; use
wait just to witness how the procedure works<br>
ifelse touching? &quot;ghost :v [ask :v [ht] ][ask :v
[st]]&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; ;touching? only works when both
are visible<br>
ask &quot;ghost [setpos
:origin]&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&n=
bsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;=
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbs=
p;&nbsp;&nbsp;
;restore ghost to original location<br>
end<br><br>
When I first set about to answer this question, I had no idea that there
would be a reason to rethink the text-toggle program or to create 'one
for the road', the parallel corresponding turtle on-off switch. It is the
love of creative problem solving which defines the difference between the
gradebook coercive mentality so prevalent in education &quot;do this and
no one will get hurt&quot; and having a reason to celebrate existence.
<br><br>
Which &quot;QED - ;-)))&quot;<br>
proves that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. QED<br><br>
For all these 'reasons', Microworlds offers a way forward from the
acquisitive to expressive-based educational focus.<br><br>
Harvey Bornfield<br>
<a href=3D"http://www.mythologics.org/"=
 eudora=3D"autourl">www.mythologics.org</a><br><br>
At 07:12 PM 11/19/2003, you wrote:<br>
<blockquote type=3Dcite class=3Dcite cite>Hi Folks,<br><br>
My request for you to share Logo success stories has been met with
prolonged<br>
silence!&nbsp; So I'll start us off by sharing a little anecdote, and I
hope lots<br>
of you will contribute your own stories.&nbsp; Susan of LCSI is
collecting the<br>
stories, and I think we'd all appreciate hearing them - even just a
few<br>
sentences to tell us what is worth celebrating as a teacher or learner
of<br>
MicroWorlds / Logo.<br><br>
Here's a moment I've always enjoyed replaying:<br><br>
One year I was coordinating a MicroWorlds project with two
third-grade<br>
classes who had been learning about Shakespeare's &quot;Twelfth
Night&quot; through a<br>
story version of the play.&nbsp; The teacher wanted the students to
create their<br>
own version of Twelfth Night with MicroWorlds, including animated scenes
and<br>
voice recordings.&nbsp; Each pair of students developed one of the
animated<br>
scenes: drawing the characters and backgrounds and writing the code
to<br>
animate the characters.&nbsp; For instance, Sangeeta and her partner had
animated<br>
a small scene of Malvolio opening a door to a mansion, walking down a
path<br>
(becoming larger as he moved), picking up an envelope, opening it,
and<br>
reading the letter inside.&nbsp; The full text of the letter was
displayed on<br>
another page of the project; in the story, it had been written as a prank
to<br>
make the haughty Malvolio begin to act foolishly around the woman he
loved.<br><br>
In the midst of this project, the school had a ski day at a small
ski<br>
resort.&nbsp; Late in the day, I happened to ski past Sangeeta and some
of her<br>
friends.&nbsp; She called out in surprise, &quot;Mrs. Petti, I didn't
know you could<br>
ski!&quot;&nbsp; A moment later she said in delight, &quot;Why, we could
make Malvolio ski<br>
down the path to pick up the letter!&quot;<br><br>
It was just a quick moment on a ski slope, but I was tickled.&nbsp;
Sangeeta was<br>
sufficiently invested in the project and empowered by MicroWorlds to
be<br>
brainstorming a fun variation in the middle of a ski slope!&nbsp; I could
hardly<br>
imagine that she would have shouted out story ideas to her English
teacher<br>
or math story problems to her math teacher.&nbsp; My students had been
delighted<br>
to see their cartoon-like characters come to life with a few lines of
Logo<br>
code.&nbsp; They had not seemed to mind tweaking the code endlessly to
get their<br>
characters to behave exactly as they intended.&nbsp; They were creating
their own<br>
microworlds, and they loved being in control of these little
worlds.<br><br>
This is why MicroWorlds is my favorite software and my favorite
Logo.&nbsp; Some<br>
people prefer &quot;pure&quot; versions of Logo without the multimedia
features that<br>
can distract kids from the programming language.&nbsp; I say it depends
on our<br>
ultimate purpose.&nbsp; Is our main purpose to teach the programming
language, or<br>
is the programming language a means to an end?&nbsp; I think the
experience will<br>
be more meaningful and enduring if the programming component is a means
to<br>
an end and if the student is highly invested in the outcome.&nbsp; If the
extra<br>
features help the student develop a new world more fully and easily,
that's<br>
great!<br><br>
I think&nbsp; the student's mindset is more important than the particular
bits of<br>
code that might or might not be mastered.&nbsp; I knew on the ski slope
that<br>
Sangeeta &quot;got it&quot; and that she was beginning to think like
me:&nbsp; the world is<br>
full of possibilities, just waiting to be turned into fun new
MicroWorlds<br>
projects!<br><br>
Wendy Petti<br><br>
Director of Curriculum, OpenWorld Learning<br>
and OWL's MicroWorlds in Action<br>
<a href=3D"http://mia.openworldlearning.org/"=
 eudora=3D"autourl">http://mia.openworldlearning.org</a><br>
Math Cats<br>
<a href=3D"http://www.mathcats.com/"=
 eudora=3D"autourl">http://www.mathcats.com</a><br><br>
<br><br>
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</blockquote>
<x-sigsep><p></x-sigsep>
<font face=3D"Bell MT">&quot;Music is the one incorporeal entrance into the=
 higher world of knowledge which comprehends mankind, but mankind cannot=
 comprehend.&quot; <br>
Ludwig van Beethoven <br><br>
<br>
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