Rambling Teacher's Blog

The Math(s) Fix is Conrad Wolfram's case for teaching mathematics with the assumption that computers exist! To be clear from the beginning, Wolfram is not advocating that we solve the same problems but with a greater reliance on computers and calculators. He wants us to recognise that computers have revolutionised the discipline of mathematics and that we need to reflect this change in our curricula. In the following lines, I will present a summary of Wolfram's thesis, as I understand it. My aim is to give you enough of an idea so you can decide whether you want to read the book for yourself. This part will concentrate on the case that the book builds for a radical change of the maths curriculum. Part 2 will explain the alternative in more detail.

For what it's worth, I thought I would write a blog post about the technology I am using in my online classes and about some of the ways I use it. There is nothing ground breaking here, which is why I think it may be useful to some readers. (c) Can Stock Photo / Emevil

Teaching in Melbourne, I am about to start my second round of online classes. I am taking some time to remind myself of the lessons I learnt from my and other people's experience in lockdown 1.0. Some of the best student feedback that I received from the last period was due to a question that was suggested by my school's principal: How did I, as a teacher, help you learn during the lockdown? (c) Can Stock Photo / lightkeeper

Today, I had the privilege of co-presenting with three of my students at DigiCon 2018. The whole day was really engaging and the students benefited from hearing the keynote speech and from playing with robots. In the afternoon, we ran our own session, which a friend and colleague asked me to write about. Our session was about designing digital tech electives that appeal to girls. I wanted to share some ideas about what has been working for us at Avila College and to show that attracting girls to digital technologies need not mean a watering down of our offerings. The session was well attended, with about 30 teachers there. The students, previously nervous about presenting to teachers, seemed relaxed and confident once we got started. This slipper hides a message from Bob to Alice

Having grown up in Lebanon, I was taught French and Arabic throughout my schooling and then English from Grade 6. I will forever be grateful for this opportunity. When my family migrated to Australia, I was able to begin my university studies without the need to spend a year learning the language. When I decided to write a Master's thesis, I found that many experts in that subject were French-speaking researchers from Switzerland. In this blog post, I make one simple suggestion for languages education in Australia. I have no illusions about the reach of my blogposts or any expectation that anyone will take up this proposal. The most I am hoping for is a discussion with those interested in the topic and generous enough to offer a comment. My proposal Choose two languages and make sure every Australian child can study one or both of them from prep to year 12. Please keep reading to see my justification. I quite possibly anticipate your objections.

I have often found Abstraction a difficult concept to explain in high school computing classes. I now think that I found a few good examples to illustrate this concept and this post is about one of them. First, let's define the word: Abstraction ...  is the process of taking away or removing characteristics from something in order to reduce it to a set of essential characteristics. ( Abstraction on Whatis.com ) In other words, we hide some detail so we can concentrate on the essential features of the problem at hand. Below, I will attempt to illustrate with an example which is implemented in Snap! , a block-based language created at the University of California, Berkeley. The problem Say, for instance, we wanted to draw this brick wall: Brickwall activity from Beauty and Joy of Computing, UC Berkeley

This post is about a project that I set 3 students in my year 10 Digital Tech class, Big Ideas in Computer Technology. Before you proceed, can you see the love message hiding in this image? courtesy of Groklearning.com The idea The idea was not my own. The first time that I saw it written up properly as a project was at the University of Melbourne. I was there for a professional development day and a computer scientist, Bernie Pope, showed us a project he gave to his first years. Without describing the project in detail, here's the cut down version I used with the year 10s.

Visual programming environments, such as MIT's Scratch , are often regarded as a good way to learn programming for young children, to be discarded once the child reaches his/her teens. In this post, I intend to say a few words on why I believe that these environments are more than child's play! The goal of coding instruction In an article entitled " Learn to code, code to learn ", Mitchell Resnick, the creator of Scratch, contrasts two concepts:  Learning the mechanics of writing code Learning to create and solve problems with code The strength of block-based visual programming is that, by making the mechanics simpler, it enables the second type of learning. Rather than worrying about spelling commands correctly, observing indentation rules or remembering to type a semicolon at the end of a line, the learner concentrates on the goal of their project.    The Koch Snowflake implemented in Scribble

In two days, the first batch of VCE Algorithmics students will sit their final exam. While I am nervous about the content of the exam, I am already proud of what my students have learnt and achieved over the year. As the delivery of the course gives way to the nervous waiting we're all experiencing this weekend, I thought it important to reflect on the last 12 months. VCE Algorithmics (HESS) is a "Higher Education Scored Study", the only one in the Victorian Certificate of Education. It is a very ambitious introduction to computer science and carries significant university credits at Melbourne and Monash. The study design reads like a computer science course in "the Analysis and Design of Algorithms". Every university has its equivalent of such a course, usually in the second year of a CS degree!

Having introduced many students to algebra, I have always wanted to find a way to make it "make sense". One year, I met two researchers from the University of San Diego, Dr Ferdinand Rivera and Dr Joanne Rossi at a conference in Greece(*). Their presentations and later conversations I had with the two of them, especially an electronic correspondence with Dr Rivera, changed my practice completely. This is a recorded description of this approach that was presented to the staff of Avila College in December 2014. If you wish, you can download my article, Thinking Visually About Algebra , from the website of the Australian Association of Mathematics Teachers Inc. (*) Psychology of Mathematics Education 33.

Today, my task was to convince my students that there are problems which computers cannot solve in a practical time, say a year or a few years! It was meant to be an informal introduction to the concept of the limits of computation and we did it by exploring two specific problems: The towers of Hanoi and the Travelling Salesman.

Yesterday, I listened to this excerpt of an interview with Isaac Asimov on Radio National's Future Tense program page. It is characteristically prescient: Once we have computer outlets in every home, each of them hooked up to enormous libraries ... If there's something you're interested in knowing, from an early age, however silly it might seem to someone else ... you ask and you can find out and you can follow it up and you can do it at your own speed, at your own home, in your own time, then everyone will be interested in learning.

They all want school-aged students to learn to write computer programs, sometimes referred to as “coding”. This has become a feature of many modern curricula worldwide, from Estonia to the UK and now Australia. The questions I would ask myself as a teacher and a parent are: Why and how? This is my attempt at answering these questions together with a few others. What is computer programming? Computer programming is the act of giving instructions to the computer in order to fulfil a particular purpose. For instance, we can write a computer program that checks if a certain number is prime. We can also write computer programs that draw shapes or play music. "Powerpuff girl", generative art by D.J. and L. P. Year 10 Big Ideas in Computer Technology

Yesterday, 3 students and I left Avila College early in the morning to attend and speak at the annual conference of Digital Learning and Teaching Victoria, DigiCon15. We were there speak about our experience in the first year of VCE Algorithmics . Our session was straight after morning tea. We spoke to a group of teachers considering offering the subject at their respective schools. I presented my experience as a teacher and the students told of their own joys and struggles with the content of this very ambitious course. The common themes in what all four of us said were: Great content and lack of resources. The teachers in attendance left with a better idea of the work involved in teaching the subject: I told them it would take over their lives in the first year. I was not exaggerating! The most important part of our presentation came at the end, when the audience had 15 minutes to ask us questions. Most of these were directed to the students and they answered them brill...

All holidays, I was anticipating the start of the Algorithmics class. In my last post, I mentioned that we were 7 in the class but now we're 8. What happened was that two students went to the NCSS Summer School and fell in love with computer science. One of them was already enrolled and the other decided to join. Now, the number of year elevens has increased to 5, joining 2 year twelves and me. Each week, the students complete a series of exercises. They are at different stages in their transition to "algorithmic thinking" but they're all making progress. We have solved puzzles and learnt about queues and stacks. More on these later. So, what has it been like teaching this course? The briefest statement I can make is: "It's a lot of hard work but totally worth it!"

Today, I had my first class of VCE Algorithmics. This is a computer science course that will be part of the Victorian Certificate of Education for the first time in 2015. Like many other schools, we have a week's "headstart" at the end of this academic year. My class is made up of six girls and me. Four of the girls are in year 11 and the remaining two are in year 12. As for me, I am out of school and in my forties! We will learn much and solve many problems together and I have been waiting impatiently for the course to get under way. Given that the textbook is yet to be published, I took the opportunity of this week to lay some ground in "algorithmic thinking". The students looked at a few algorithms today and decided what each of them accomplished. Here is one. Do you know what it does? If you want to work it out for yourself, stop reading!

Today, two colleagues of mine and I accompanied 46 year 9 and 10 girls to the Go Girl conference at Deakin University. After a warm welcome by program director, Fi Slaven, the presentations started with the day's conference patron, Karen Stocks, Managing Director of Twitter Australia ( @ KazStocks ). Karen gave the students 3 pieces of advice: It is okay not to have a life plan. Follow passions, dreams. Do something that makes your heart beat faster. Trust that you'll end up somewhere good. Education, education, education. Don't just get a degree, do well. Good grades will show that you can apply yourself. You will earn credibility through sustained performance. Be humble, patient and respect your elders, even when you feel that you're the smartest person at the table. Next up was Tammy Butow ( @ tammybutow ) , senior digital strategist at NAB. It was inspiring to see someone achieve so much at such a young age. She encouraged the girls to build pr...

Last year, I began teaching an elective class in year 10 called "Big Ideas in Computer Technology". The first class had 12 girls in it and, this year, the number grew to 17. I was blown away with the number since, in year 10, the girls can take only three electives across the year and the offerings at our school are mind-boggling. How the learning was structured This year, I really wanted to work with a principle I learnt from a video by James Paul Gee which I reviewed earlier . Using computer games as a metaphor, I saw my role as designing the learning in such a way that the students could have enough guidance at the beginning - the first two levels of the game - and then learn through experimentation, discussion and some help from me.

Before becoming a teacher, I used to assume that kids couldn't know things unless they were taught them. I really thought that a comprehensive curriculum and rigorous tests were the way to ensure a quality education. Every time I encountered kids who seemed to struggle with basic numeracy, I would mumble something about the school system lacking rigour. In this post, I want to list some of the beliefs that I no longer hold. Here are four beliefs I used to hold but no longer do: Students learn what we teach them It is a well-established fact that students construct their own learning and that this construction is influenced by many factors, including what teachers say or demonstrate. I know many teachers, myself included, who finish correcting their students' papers and exclaim: "I told them ...." or "was I even in the room when we discussed this?" At times, I still express my frustration this way but I am no longer surprised when students do not interna...

This video by James Paul Gee is an absolute gem. One idea I want to discuss here is his vision of people learning in what he calls "passion communities". Passion communities form around video games, popular books and hobbies. Fans of Harry Potter go on sites where they write their own fiction stories in that genre. World of Warcraft gamers develop the skill of solving problems in groups. So, what are the features of a "passion community" (ideas taken from the video): They solve problems collaboratively: The group is smarter than the individual. Learning happens on demand: In a game, progressive levels introduce you to the skills and language you need to succeed. You don't acquire knowledge in a vacuum and expect to apply it later. They are not age-graded. People of different ages can contribute and learn. The same teacher can mentor one time and be mentored at another time. The community sets high standards and provides honest feedback to help its...