Interactivity

I’ve reached that part of the planning for a makeover at www.interactivestuff.org where I need to work out why some scripts no longer behave the way they used to. Particularly some fun database-backed stuff I wrote over six years ago.

One part of me says, “Don’t bother – no-one visits those pages anyway.” However, it would be nice to re-work the whole of what used to be on the site – rather than just the popular pages.

Old computing devices give us a fascinating insight into the development of ICT over the years. Manchester has a reconstruction of Baby at MOSI (in fact there’s a whole website about the 60th anniversary of the world’s first stored program computer). The Science Museum has Babbage’s Difference Engine. Now, according to the BBC, EDSAC will be rebuilt at Bletchley Park.

It’s arrived!

My teacher’s pack from the Google Science Fair arrived by FedEx this morning. Inside are pre-printed letters, posters and some sticker-like things that intrigue me. More details will be available from Google’s website on Jan 11. My guess is that it will be similar to ThinkQuest or Doors To Diplomacy – but will encourage students to participate in original research/experimentation and document their results. Depending on the categories for entry whether there’s an emphasis on practical experimentation, I may have some students who would be keen to participate.

Some fun with coding in Scratch.

Daughter #1 received a simple sliding block puzzle as a cracker novelty this Christmas. So, I thought it would be fun to create a simulation of this sort of thing in Scratch. Sliding block puzzle programs are nothing new. I remember a friend writing one in high school, and making the classic error of just randomly assigning the initial positions of the pieces – which meant that half the time you ended up with an unsolvable (should that be insoluble?) puzzle. I’m sure there was also one in David Ahl’s BASIC Computer Games compilations from Creative Computing.

I decided that I’d use a list as a data structure in Scratch to store the information about which block is where. There are two reasons for this. First of all, this keeps the values of each block independent of what is displayed as the sprite’s costume. So, I can substitute individual costumes to be elements of a larger picture, words/letters/symbols or more interesting number patterns (will probably post more about that one on my math games blog after I’ve made a few examples to show what I mean). Secondly, using a list makes it extremely easy to check that the puzzle is complete.

However – Scratch has its shortcomings when compared to Flash. It’s not so easy to encapsulate (woo hoo – fancy programming term) instances of code and recycle them as general-purpose procedures. Instead, I’ve ended up with nine sprites with chunks of code that has been copy-pasted and then edited by hand to hard-wire each one to make it work for that specific sprite. I’m sure I could crate just one general-purpose movie-clip in Flash that I could then get the script to replicate, and have all the functionality of the sprites in my Scratch version.

The big question is, do I have the cheek to submit it to Mozilla Labs’ Game On competition, just for fun? (deadline for submitting open standards games is on Jan 11)…

According to the TES, with only a few days before BETT, Microsoft published a survey with some interesting results – and some very different conclusions to the one I would make. Unfortunately, I can’t find a press release on the Microsoft website yet – so there’s no way for me to analyse the data beyond the treatment given in the TES article.

According to the quotes there, the majority of UK high school students feel that they know more about ICT than their ICT teachers, and that they learn more about ICT at home than they do at school.

The slant given by MS’s senior director for education is that there’s a serious disconnect between school ICT and the needs of the business community. This implies that schools should do as they are told, and produce obedient little office drones.

I’d agree that there’s a serious disconnect, but I would say the problem is exacerbated by the polarisation of seeing ICT merely as either office productivity tools, or a cornucopia of fun stuff. Both approaches are essentially utilitarian – reducing the role of the computer to that of a box which adds value to something much more “important”. Neither view has room, or curriculum time for empowering students to unleash their creative energies through creating original software. This could be to demonstrate what they have learned across the curriculum, or to solve a practical problem – but would it be any less valid, if it was simply to show off their talents or to explore something that piqued their interest?

My simple, ill-thought-out contribution to the ongoing debate is that until we address this, we risk training ICT specialists who are ill-equipped to bridge this false dichotomy of perceived “needs”. But I’ll wait until I see more information about the survey before pontificating further.