Taking Part in the Greatest Experiment in History
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00:00
MereologyManufacturing execution systemMassModemInternet forumChi-squared distributionLocal GroupIRIS-TBootingExecution unitRoyal NavySoftware developerModulare ProgrammierungFunctional programmingError messageQuicksortLevel (video gaming)RandomizationWhiteboardNumberMereologyDifferent (Kate Ryan album)Message passingSystem programmingPasswordInformationMultiplication signBlock (periodic table)Formal languageStrategy gameStudent's t-testComputer programmingFigurate numberContext awarenessAlgebraic equationCodeVulnerability (computing)PlastikkarteElectronic signatureComputer scienceE-learningSocial classComputer animationXML
07:37
Power (physics)DigitizingScientific modellingFormal languageStudent's t-testCodeVideoconferencingInformationAddress spaceField (computer science)Functional programmingMultiplication signBlock (periodic table)GradientE-learningWebsiteContext awarenessDifferent (Kate Ryan album)Fibonacci numberUniformer RaumProgramming languageResultantYouTubeType theoryComplex (psychology)QuicksortGraph (mathematics)Graph (mathematics)Computer scienceComputer fileComputer programmingMereologySystem programmingPlotterRevision controlProgrammer (hardware)TouchscreenPasswordText editorInheritance (object-oriented programming)EmailWordMathematicsMoment (mathematics)Point (geometry)
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Chi-squared distributionTask (computing)BitSoftware testingPressureComputer scienceComputer virusMereologyStudent's t-testUniverse (mathematics)CodePresentation of a groupRegular graphCore dumpQuicksortGroup actionNP-hardGame theoryMultiplication signFormal languageMusical ensembleFamilyManifoldExpected valueProjective planeXML
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SoftwareModemComputer programError messageType theoryComputer programmingComa BerenicesSystem programmingPasswordMIDIPlastikkarteWeb pageSalem, IllinoisProcess (computing)Phase transitionMaß <Mathematik>Modul <Datentyp>ComputerFunction (mathematics)Bit rateRange (statistics)Graph (mathematics)Formal languageNumberDialectScientific modellingSimulationCodeMoment (mathematics)Musical ensembleNormed vector spaceWebsiteWeb 2.0Error messageSoftware developerComputer programmingRevision controlSimulationFunctional programmingAddress spaceEmailModulare ProgrammierungShared memoryScientific modellingGraph (mathematics)Endliche ModelltheorieOnline chatRandomizationQuicksortGraph (mathematics)PlastikkarteE-learningMereologyWebsiteInformationBitBlock (periodic table)YouTubeWhiteboardInternetworkingPasswordPower (physics)Computer fileNumberFibonacci numberRadical (chemistry)Programmer (hardware)XML
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Formal languageMusical ensemble
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Computer animation
Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:06
Okay, I guess we'll make a start and whoever joins can join, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Basically what I am, you know, I'm involved in teaching high school children
00:22
and I've been involved in teaching, well, computer science and I introduced computer programming to them a couple of years ago. But the thing is that there's no sort of precedence for teaching computer programming and, you know, so I made up my own little strategy
00:42
of how to actually introduce computer programming to them. And I decided that I'd introduce Python to them, you know, as opposed to say a block based language or something because I figure that they can learn Python. You know, after all, I've been teaching high school students
01:03
aged 11 to 18. If you look at what they're doing at age 11, you know, they read Shakespeare, they do algebraic equations, you know, in Britain, they wrote essays on advantages and disadvantages of Brexit. So I figured that like, you know, at the age of 11, they can actually process textual
01:24
information quite well, and they should be able to cope with Python. So, you know, I introduced it and it was going quite well. And in fact, I found the 11 year olds better than the 12, better than 13, better than the 14 year olds. So from that, my take home message is that
01:44
introduce these things early and properly. But then what happened was, obviously in March, there was a pandemic lockdown. And, you know, overnight, we switched to online teaching. And I understand that the UK was slightly late in its lockdown. And we joined, say,
02:05
we were, you know, joining at that time, 900 million children in over 100 countries, I read somewhere. So this obviously meant, this meant that you have to, you know, we have to re-evaluate how we're actually teaching this computer programming to the children,
02:24
and whether we could actually do it at all. As such, it's a whole sort of re-evaluation. And, you know, so the first sort of, you know, thing was that idea is can this online
02:41
medium of instruction complement or even supplement face to face in person practices, which have been established and perfected over many years. And then came, there's a book and a saying called The medium is the message. And it's a phrase coined by
03:02
one Professor Herbert McLuhan. And it essentially means in this particular context, that each medium of instruction will have its own signature. And it's accompanied by its own strengths and its weaknesses. So, you know, what we should do rather than dismiss
03:24
this online medium out of hand is to try and discover its strengths and advantages and to capitalise them. And in due course, we did find these, you know, the great strengths of the online medium. And we found it quite educational. Now, so what did we actually do?
03:50
Well, the very first thing was actually testing. Now, what's been happening is that, you know, teaching Python, I've been teaching them how to write programs and they've been
04:06
they, you know, if you're in a class of say, 15 children, every time they make a mistake, they put their hand up, and you rush towards them to, to correct their mistakes. But and it was thought that, you know, getting them to correct their own mistakes is actually boring.
04:26
And it will mar their enjoyment of the subject. So the very first thing was to teach them how to correct their own syntax errors. You know, if they're going to get any satisfaction at all, they have to have working programs. So a few very dedicated sessions to the syntax error.
04:50
And, you know, these, I had a class of 11 and 12 year olds. So, you know, wondering how they're going to take this thing. And, you know, they seem to be quite into this syntax error,
05:05
what to I think to adults even is a pain in the neck. But to them, they, you know, they seem to take it all quite on board. And so, you know, somebody said, wrote to me, the most interesting part was the mistakes when we made them. They could have been minor,
05:21
but they made such a difference. It was interesting to see how that counted, how and how intricate a system that really is. And another person, another sort of 12 year old sort of said, I really enjoyed and basically talk about the syntax error here. You know, and this is a program that he, this person, Harry, age 12, wrote of his own volition.
05:46
And, you know, he's written a, we also taught them about functions at this stage, a function which has got playing cards and randomly selects one. It's made a syntax error. And then, you know,
06:02
during the evening of his own volition, he corrected it. And in the morning, you know, he's sending his code over to say that it's corrected. So, you know, the take home message from that is that they're perfectly able at age even 11 and 12 to correct
06:21
their own syntax error. They don't find it boring. It only in a way needs to be taught. And it can actually be taught online. Then we move on to, okay, development. Now, obviously, if they're going to produce anything useful, they're going to have to learn about
06:44
functions and modules kind of thing. We previously thought that this is a tough topic and you have to obviously be in the classroom to teach this. But nevertheless, you know, want them to do something pretty useful. So, you know, we taught them about functions
07:04
with, first of all, a worked example of a function adding two numbers and passing in information and then getting them to create their own functions as such. And then we also showed them a function of generating sort of random passwords and asking them to
07:28
modify it for their own sort of purposes. Now, actually, they managed to grasp the concept of functions quite quickly. And when thinking about it, why shouldn't they really?
07:43
Because at the ages of five, six and seven, they they read paragraphs and they're quite used to processing blocks of information. So a function is a block of information. So there's in a way no reason in that sense why they shouldn't. And they were quite enjoying
08:02
it as well. One little boy, Alex, aged 11, wrote, I enjoyed learning about functions and how to define them so you could access them at any moment. Then, you know, what else can we do which is meaningful and useful? And
08:24
so we introduced them to this, the concept of modelling and simulation. And we could introduce this in the in the context of the Covid-19 forecast, which have arisen as a result of modelling and simulation. And we showed them the papers and there's even code on GitHub,
08:46
Python code about this as well, to show that the Python language has actually played an important very role in all of this. And graphs are integral to modelling and simulation. So we showed how you can create graphs. Now, when you create graphs, perhaps there's an
09:06
extra layer of complexity to this type of function in that we have an external file and, you know, so they have to now know how two files can work together to produce a graph as such. And, you know, we gave them sort of worked examples of temperatures in different
09:27
countries and then we asked them to create their own sort of graph code. This girl here, Siobhan, age 13, she put in Fibonacci numbers and managed to produce a plot.
09:45
So here now we've got a function, we've got extra complexities of an extra external file here and it's creating a graph. And again, you know, we managed to do this online. Now, as I was teaching online, you don't really know what tools are out there as such,
10:06
but we discovered, say, online editors, one called REPL, where you can write code, you can share code, you can take over somebody's screen and correct code, and then we make it heavy use of the chat functionality in the Microsoft Teams to
10:27
share, to pass code to and from each other. So when you wanted to do something, you know, you looked for the tools and the tools seem to be appearing.
10:41
Now, of course, having said that, I think we're very much in the infancy of online teaching and learning and we're very much, I think, in version one. But having said that, what we have, we can do a great deal with. You know, the children seem to enjoy this.
11:01
One little boy kept saying, will you tell my parents? Every time he had a working programme, a little girl sort of said, oh, you know, I've written a programme to generate a passcode, a random passcode of six digits. And, you know, there's a lot of discussion that can take place
11:21
in an online medium, which you can't in a face to face classroom as such. So, you know, somebody was asking what programming languages excel written in. And because this online medium, every time somebody showed their programme, I think everybody was looking up to see what,
11:47
you know, what was being done. So the conclusions are accessing the power and the motivating power of online teaching, I think when properly done are enormous. And it's a great privilege to partake in this. It's very exciting to take part in a field which
12:05
is in its infancy and rapidly developing. And, you know, we look forward to the day when everybody can enjoy these experiences. And I think we'll look back on this time and think of it as, you know, one of the greatest experience of mankind ever,
12:24
and also in the field of online learning. I have a YouTube channel called Lil Anonymous, which has got computer science videos and videos on programming as well, a website that I've created for my students. And this is my email address. Yeah. So I've got a talk also
12:49
tomorrow in Microsoft Room from 1.45 to 2.15, which, you know, explains a lot more. Yeah. So what would you like to say? Any comments or any questions or anything?
13:06
Yeah, well, first of all, thanks very much for presenting. I see that there's one other guy here now. I just wanted to ask, so have you developed this curriculum by yourself?
13:21
And also how does it work specifically in the UK? Do they have, I know in South Africa, we've got information technology, but it's only available from grades 10 to 12. Is your thing, I mean, you spoke at the very beginning about, you know, teaching them as young as possible.
13:42
Have you basically developed the system to teach them as young as possible? Yeah, maybe available. That's right. I mean, what we have in the UK is that we have a system. There is an intention, let's say, to teach computer science from the kindergarten age.
14:01
And, you know, there are various documents about this. Now, the documents are written in a very for want of a better word, loose fashion. So, you know, there's an intention that they should learn how to programme. And there's a lot of other things in the document as well
14:27
about what they should learn about technology and computer science as well. So everybody probably does things very differently. There's, you know, in other subjects, maybe say as
14:42
maths, Latin, English, they've been going for longer. So there's a uniformity about it in how people do this. So and there's, you know, because it's so new, probably people do things differently. And there's a lot of flexibility allowed in how you do this. So my
15:02
school of thought was I would like to learn, I would like them to learn how to programme. And a lot of people think that they should, you know, they're too young to learn at age 11 and they start them off at age 15 when they start doing their enrol for their courses.
15:26
But, you know, then I experimented and taught the 11 year olds. And indeed, we found, I found that they are a lot better when you introduce these things than you introduce it at age 15. We come to the conclusion or coming rapidly come into the conclusion it's like music or learning
15:45
language or learning sport or something. When you introduce these things younger, they seem to learn these things sort of better. So I have 11 to 18 year olds on my plate. So I've introduced at age 11. My guess is that you can introduce it at age eight as well. And with
16:05
a few family friends, I have, you know, on occasion, introduced a bit of Python to them when I get over age eight, and they are very good at it. So, yeah, trying to develop this so that it, you know, so that it can appeal to, we can introduce it a lot younger. And also,
16:27
what we've been finding is that the young children, they do not mind, say, arithmetic examples or hard examples as such. They don't need to be, they don't need to necessarily be
16:42
kept amused with games or something. They're very happy with textual arithmetic examples. So you can start them off, you know, my guess is that if you start them off quite early, very soon, they'll be quite proficient. And probably what's currently taught at older age
17:04
groups can be brought down a lot lower. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think that's pretty prevalent because the younger age groups, I guess I'd kind of look at it like they're eager to learn.
17:21
They don't know what they want to learn, but they're very eager to learn and just develop. And also, you know, the emergence of technology all around us and kids are playing games 23 hours a day these days. They want to know how these things are developed or even the grassroots of them. And then maybe at 15 years old, 16 years old, these kids, they maybe have a bit of an ego
17:46
about it. Just like you were saying that the younger kids don't necessarily mind a difficult task. Maybe the younger kids, they welcome it. And then the older kids, they might like take
18:02
a knock to their ego or they might give up on it quite quickly. Yeah, exactly. I mean, you find that the younger children don't easily give up. They've got that something within them that they want to do things. And also, I think older children, they're pressed, you know,
18:30
in some sense, I found that nobody is expecting anything from the 11 year olds. And because they're left alone, they produce an awful lot. In fact, more than the 15 year olds somehow,
18:45
you know, that lack of expectation, that lack of pressure works very much in their favour, where they do a lot more. I think that's a completely separate discussion.
19:03
The impact that exams make and tests and assignments has a huge impact on it. Because when they're just doing it for fun, for their interest, they're doing it because they want to, as opposed to having to do it to get into university or to pass the year or whatnot.
19:21
I mean, yeah, I mean, there are children aged 12 and 13, you know, off their own back. They are doing projects as well. You know, we're talking about Python here. But I had one student who's two students in fact, you know, they do a lot of coding of their own back and say,
19:45
C sharp to produce animations and things. And yeah, they have the time maybe or the freedom or whatever to actually do that on the interests. Can the others hear me too? I can see someone
20:05
called Francesco Ingo Peter. Is there anything you guys want to say too? Okay, you're all on
20:28
mute. Yeah. Hello. Hello. Yes. I unmuted myself now. Yes, it's very interesting to listen to. It's sort of not my regular domain, but I'm a little bit interested in what young people are doing and
20:46
have some thoughts about it. So it's very interesting to hear about your experiences and what really appeals to young people nowadays and the approaches you take. So thank you for this presentation. I don't have so much to add. I have some thoughts on my own,
21:06
but it's very interesting to learn more about it. So, Oh, thank you. Yeah. Oh, any, any, anyone else? Any questions or anything?
21:21
Hi, I'm Francesca. Sorry, I've just come. So I lost the most part of the, of your presentation. Could you please resume briefly? The core of the project, please.
21:40
Yeah, basically I'm involved in teaching high school children, computer science and in the UK and I introduced Python to them a couple of years ago, and I'm teaching 11 to 18. And I found that well, the 11 year olds are the best than the 12, 13, 14. And this was going okay
22:04
until the lockdown, which happened in March. And so we had to resume, had to rethink, can we actually continue even with this teaching of their Python? Do we have to be there in person or show, you know, what, what should we do really?
22:21
So we decided to actually continue and see actually what emerges. The first thing, you know, if you're teaching online, the first thing it was decided before, if they have mistakes or anything, you as a teacher in an in person classroom, go over to their terminal
22:41
and correct it. So in order to, for them to enjoy the subject or anything, they have to, they have to know how to correct their mistakes. So therefore, the first thing we taught them was how to correct syntax errors. Now, this was done apologetically thinking that it would
23:03
be rather boring or anything, but a few dedicated sessions, they seem to be taking this in. And this is what they wrote, you know, somebody said to me, the most interesting parts was the mistakes. Another boy here, he wrote this programme of his own back, you know, to choose
23:23
a random card here. And, you know, there's a syntax mistake, syntax error, as he writes, and he corrected it and he sent it in. So they seem to embrace it, this concept, what, you know, maybe people think of as boring and awful. They seem to be okay with it.
23:43
Then sort of development, you know, if we're going to do anything useful, they really need to know about functions and modules. Could you do this over the internet? Is it, you know, previously I thought it's quite hard and you have to be there on purpose. But we explained it,
24:00
they seem to take it on board and produce things as well. And, you know, here are, here's a function by a 12 year old to generate a random password. If you think, well, if I thought about it, really, at the ages of five, six and seven, they read and they
24:21
read paragraphs. So they're used to processing information in blocks. So there is no real reason why they can't understand functions and understand them quite easily. And thirdly, you know, and so, yeah, some modelling and a bit of simulation and can they grasp the concept of
24:52
an external file to produce graphs? Is it going to be too hard to explain for them? But they managed and, you know, here somebody's produced a Fibonacci sequence and they've done
25:03
this here. So the conclusions we made was that accessing the power of motivating power of online teaching when it's properly done is enormous and it's a great privilege to partake in it. And I think it's very much in its infancy. We discovered a number of tools like
25:24
REPL where you can screen share and you can screen share and, you know, take over people's code. We made heavy use of the chat functionality and Microsoft Teams and things. But I think it is
25:42
version one and it has a long way to go. I have a YouTube channel, if anyone's interested, anonymous website and an email address. Yeah. So that's the synopsis. OK, thank you very much. Really interesting. But so if I understood Python as being
26:02
told in a certain sense, some basic comments and so on to 11 in youngsters. Is it right? That's right. Yes. Yes. And did you find that so more young people, young younger people learned it better than older?
26:32
Yes, you found that young people, younger people learn better than older people. They seem to have an intuitive grasp of these concepts, maybe like learning languages and music.
26:47
Great.