Wolfram Science

Brian Silverman: Simple Programming, Simple Programs

Brian Silverman showed us a project called Turtle Art that he is developing. It's a "simple programming" environment for kids. Silverman contrasted simple programming and simple programs. The user starts with a turtle in a blank gray field and has a collection of graphical programming building block that can be snapped together to control the turtle's path and the kinds of colored trails the turtle can leave. Each graphical "command" has sockets where are other commands can fit, usually one socket for the previous action and one socket for the next one. Control structures are also building blocks, so for instance, "repeat" has a socket for the previous action, a socket for the command to be repeated and a socket for the action to continue to after the repetition is done.

Silverman showed that unpredictable behavior is possible even with this limited set of primitives by changing some parameters for some intrinsically defined curves with unpredicatble overall behavior.

He ended his talk with a call for long-term "project-based" learning for children, saying that there is a trend to have shorter and shorter term assignments, and that he thinks that many of the long term projects that adults find interesting would also be interesting for children.

Michael Round, "The Computational Universe of Two-Dimensional Cellular Automata"

The presenter is interested in using the NKS concept in the process of teaching symmetry and feels that the usual way of exploring snowflake types of symmetry is a missed opportunity: these shapes are not just static images but rather the snowflakes found in nature grow.

Also the snowflake shape can be used as a tool for conveying to students the idea of exploring a computational universe.

Francisca Aladejana, "The Implications of ICT and NKS for Science Technology"

Francisca Aladejana has been exploring the possibilities for teaching NKS in the context of Nigerian educational institutions, which tend to have very traditional attitudes toward education.

Her situation is quite different from  that of most of the presenters at this conference in that not only is Mathematica not widely available, but under 10% of the students surf the Internet and under 6% of the teachers have computers.

Were computers available, there would still be a number of technological issues such as poor power and internet infrastructure (and most likely also connection speed.

She would like to engage her government  in supporting the introduction of computer and internet technoloogy into the schools, and she would like to integrate the teaching of NKS into this process.

Yehuda Ben-Shimol, "New Kind of Students? NKS in Information Theory Course"

The presenter discussed teaching NKS topics to engineering students. The presenter had the chance to teach Information Theory and use it as a venue for introducing engineering student to NKS concepts.

He was very pleased at how his course worked out.

Materials related to the course are available from the presenter.