Martyn, [EMAIL PROTECTED] said: > As a practicing computing teacher also undertaking research into the > topic of children and programming I was hoping for some views on this > topic. It seems to me that programming has slowly been removed from > the school syllabus since the days of Mindstorms and logo excitement. > This may be due to the research never concluding that learning to > program helped children, or something to do with the difficulties of > teaching programming to children, or the changing of computing at > schools to teach how to use applications like Word rather than learn > about the computer/tool they are using and how it works.
I've written some research proposals in this area, but not yet done any serious work (I've done educational technology research, and also psychology of programming research, but not yet both at the same time). I do know a number of groups around the world who do actively work on the teaching of programming in schools, most of whom have presented their work at PPIG at one time or another. You probably know that there is an active group at the London Institute of Education who have worked on Logo for many years. I don't know many researchers who have investigated Mindstorms, although it did grow out of research efforts. Some of the active groups at present are: - Ken Kahn's work with the ToonTalk language (IOE and Sweden) - Alex Repenning's work with AgentSheets (Boulder) - The TeachScheme project Others that are doing small projects, proposals or ex-projects - A proposal at Boulder called BigWorld - Maggie Niess' work on spreadsheets in maths http://oregonstate.edu/~niessm/ - The StageCast Creator product http://www.stagecast.com/ -- Alan Blackwell Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/afb21/ Phone: +44 (0) 1223 334418 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- PPIG Discuss List ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Discuss admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/discuss Announce admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/announce PPIG Discuss archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/discuss%40ppig.org/
