On Fri, Jan 25, 2013 at 11:04 PM, Walter Bender <walter.ben...@gmail.com> wrote: > == Sugar Digest == > > There are certainly cases where applying objective measures badly is > worse than not applying them at all, and education may well be one of > those. --Nate Silver > > 1. Not to be deterred by Nate Silver's words of warning, Claudia Urrea > and I continue to work on mechanisms for visualizing learning Sugar. > Along with the Pacita Pena and other members of the Learning Team, we > have been designing rubrics that capture the level of fluency with the > technology as well as the creative use of the individual Sugar tools > by children. The rubrics are captured automatically in some Sugar > activities, e.g., Turtle Art and a modified version of Write. We are > aiming for evaluations that look more broadly than those data that are > captured by standardized tests. We just submitted a paper, > "Visualizing Learning with Turtle Art", in which we present some > measurements calculated from 45 Turtle Art projects [1] created by > children working with QuirĂ³s Tanzi Foundation [2]. > > We claim that the rubric serves as a partial evaluation tool for > open-ended projects. Partial, because it is only a measure of how the > children used Turtle Art to express themselves, but not what they made > or why they made it [3]. But the rubric does have the potential to > give some assistance to the teacher who is working within the context > of accountability, without adding an additional burden of analysis > above and beyond looking at the work itself. > > We want children not just to learn about the computer, but also to > learn with the computer. Providing activities such as Turtle Art that > engage them in computational thinking in the context of personal > expression is necessary, but not sufficient. Giving them tools for > reflection enhance the learning experience. Giving their teachers > simple-to-use mechanisms for assessment increase the odds that > activities like Turtle Art will find more mainstream acceptance. > Making it easier to assess open-ended projects lowers one of the > barriers that are preventing more use of the arts in school. > > 2. Google Code-In ended last week. We had 52 contestants working on > almost 200 tasks supported by 22 mentors. On February 4, Google will > announce the two winners from Sugar Labs. But in the meantime, I want > to thank everyone who participated and thank Google for this > opportunity for outreach. Chris Leonard, the co-administrator from > Sugar Labs, has made a page in the wiki [4] summarizing the > accomplishments of our students. Worth checking out. > > 3. Sean Daly, our PR guru, is back with a vengeance. We are planning > to make some noise around Google Code In, the up-coming Sugar 1.0 > release, and many other accomplishments in order to broaden our > community of contributors and users. Please contact Sean if you have > themes we should consider promoting.
SoaS v8 _______________________________________________ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep