[MWForum]research project help - a few more thoughts

[Wendy Petti]

Karen, I'd also like to mention how I used to use Logo (MicroWorlds) as a
teacher... I left my teaching job four years ago.

MicroWorlds formed the bulk of our computer education program.  I taught
grades 1 - 5.  I loved MicroWorlds so much (and still do) that even when we
had to do keyboarding, we did it through a keyboarding program I wrote on
MicroWorlds.  The students contributed "friendly insults" and compliments
that would appear after each two-minute speed test.  (We had three hidden
textboxes full of comments to cover fast, medium, and slow speeds, and
depending on the student's speed, the computer would choose the appropriate
textbox and then choose a remark at random from that textbox to display.)

We used MicroWorlds to integrate technology with every subject area.  For
instance, when fourth-graders were studying French cave paintings, we
downloaded some images from the Internet and then animated a herd of
galloping cave-painting buffalo.  Some students animated a caveman waving a
paintbrush over a cave painting.  They were in a bilingual program, and they
wrote French explanations of their animated scenes.

Sometimes each student or pair of students would work on a different page of
a project - with an explanatory textbox and an animation - and then we would
combine these into a whole-class project.

At the beginning of each school year I took digital photos of the students
and each student would then draw a cartoon body to go with their photo head.
Then they would animate their own cartoon self.  We would collect together
in one project all of the cartoon classmates, and they would write
multi-page animated stories using this pool of characters... a very fun
language arts / art / programming / math project.

I'm assuming the possibilities for integrating MicroWorlds with the math
curriculum are obvious - not just through turtle graphics but through the
concept of variables controlled by sliders: a great way to interact with
algebraic concepts.  We did lots of explorations with randomization and
controlling the limits of the random possibilities.  For instance, in a
history / math integration, when students were learning about ancient
Chinese "oracle bones," they designed projects that would simulate the
cracking of these bones to answer questions posed to the bones.  They had to
make sure that the bones would sometimes crack more to the right than the
left, and sometimes crack more in the other direction, and they had to make
sure that the cracks did not extend beyond the limits of the bones.  Most of
the students tried to have each crack consist of several smaller cracks at
somewhat different angles, so they needed to find a good range of angles as
well as lengths.  It took a lot of mathematical experimenting to find the
best range of random numbers for each portion of each simulated crack.

I also used MicroWorlds to design a variety of mathematical activities to
support the development of conceptual understanding... to go beyond the
drill games found on many interactive math sites.  Garry Clark of Australia
has developed a CD of 125 mathematical activities created with MicroWorlds,
including some logic/strategy games.
www.northnet.com.au/~mathsactivities/mathact.htm

And sometimes we focused on programming concepts themselves, such as
recursion.  I might introduce the concept and then ask the students to
develop a project of their own incorporating recursion.

So while I was there, MicroWorlds was a vital component of the technology
curriculum and a vital component of technology integration throughout the
curriculum.

BUT.... then I left.  And I was replaced within the school by several
teachers who had never had any training as technology teachers and who had
never spent one minute learning about computer programming.  They split my
job between these teachers, and MicroWorlds programming vaporized from the
curriculum, and even, as far as I can tell, MicroWorlds as a technology
integration tool largely vaporized from the school.  This happened even
though I had spent years working with a team of teachers to develop and
document a well-thought-out curriculum.  But I was apparently the only one
who believed in it enough to keep it alive.  And I think this has happened
at other schools, too.  This is why I'm concerned about the future of Logo
in the schools, even as another part of me is the eternal optimist.

Wendy Petti
OWL's MicroWorlds in Action
http://mia.openworldlearning.org