I've been slightly struggling with time management issues this autumn, having so many things to do and so little time. Today was an end of one experiment I wanted to do, and it turned out great even if different than what I had in mind when I got started.
I wanted to try out teaching 1st graders about creating with computers and programming in a format that is different from free-time voluntarily -based approached of code schools and clubs in Finland. I wanted to start building a way of being helpful as part of classroom training, instead of adding more hobbies on the side. There's still a big challenge ahead in getting all the teachers up to speed with what they could be teaching with regards to programming when it starts in all elementary schools for all grades in less than a year.
I contacted my girl's teacher and asked if we could do something together. With a little discussion, we came to the conclusion that we could do a few classes with the focus of story telling with the kids. So we started making pictures and voice over to become a video of an alphabet story.
It was wonderful to see what kinds of story ideas kids came up with from the letters. I was originally hoping to put these together into a CYOA-story (Choose Your Own Adventure), but the timeframe of 2*45 and a class size of 28 students minutes soon put me to a different idea. Just the collaboration would have required more time to make that happen.
The first session had two parts:
- Hello Ruby book handout. Every kid in both 1st grade classes got a free copy to take home, as well as the teacher. That was 48 copies. Linda Liukas and her publisher were very nice and enabled a cheaper unit price for the batch, and my non-profit work was able to finance the books as gifts. The kids were very curious about the books and with guidance from me and the teachers, named their own copies so that they would not get lost or mixed up.
- Create a story with picture, and record it. I had each kid choose a letter of alphabet and draw a picture of a story they came up with. I asked them to come to the computer for recording, and showed them around on how to tell their story as a recording. I collected the hand-drawn pictures.
In between the sessions, I did a bit of work on the outputs of the first session. I paired with my girl at home on some of the work, and taught her video editing basics to cut out all of me to leave just the kids. We scanned the hand-written pictures and included them side by side with the stories. My girl recorded a beginning and an end with a proper microphone and got excited about the idea of singing into the microphone. With the huge number of stories, the editing was quite much work, taking me 3-4 hours. I cut out the silences, and even transformed one word answers to something that resembles a story.
With that preparation, our second session had three parts:
- Creating credits image to end the video. The teacher set up a touching game to add a little randomness to the order of kids coming over to the computer to add their own name into signatures. When touched, it was their turn - and this created a positive sense of waiting for one's turn. With the projector, there was a lot of fun with this simple act: writing on the computer, getting your own name into the work and others reading what is on the screen as it emerged. Every kid wrote their own name with small (non-capital) letters, and watching that happen for a few kids, I realized there was a great intro into the programming we'd do later. I showed how with a computer I can select all 28 names and turn them into words that start with capital letters just with one function.
- Watching the video together. We then watched our end result. Everyone in their turn was looking like they were feeling a mixture of embarrassment and happiness, and the whole group was very focused on seeing their own stories. We talked briefly about the fact that the video is theirs and that I will not put it in the internet nor should they - that things like that should be agreed on in advance and everyone should agree. The class teacher pointed out clarify of speech and how much easier it was to understand what great messages you have to say if you articulate, and I was just thinking I missed a bit of editing when I did not raise the quiet voices to a higher volume.
- Talking and trying out programming. With the video created, we started talking about programming. We talked about someone having programmed the tool we could use to create videos, and programming as something that would allow us to create things we could imagine. We did two exercises from Hello Ruby book.
We talked about small programs that consist of commands learning Ruby's dance moves. Then we talked about us being the computers running the dancing program and tried it with three repetitions. We ended the exercise talking about doing the moves 1000 times and how computers don't get tired of repeating things you program them to do. And we talked about the idea that we could tell also to stop when we say to stop.
The second exercise was the debugging exercise that comes closer to my usual work. We looked at two three examples where the little instructions that computers could understand but that missed something. Like the idea that you would put your table cloth on top of your birthday cake, or that you would eat when you're full and say thank you when you are hungry.
With a lot of laughter, sense of having created something that wasn't there without you, I ended the session. Next up would be hour of code, in just a few weeks. I like those exercises, but I find them one-sided: to become smart creatives, we need to want to create, not just solve given puzzles. I call for freedom and support in implementing one's own ideas, the thing that I remember loving but missing out in school system including the computer science studies in the university.
Creating with computers is the point for me. Programming is just a tool. Sometimes what we want to create require programming. Sometimes advanced use of existing programs. But the thing we should not have is fear. Believing computers do what you want, demystifying them is a core of what I do professionally, whether I feel like being a tester, a programmer or a product analyst - today. Most days I love being a tester too much to ever want to be anything else.
