[Edu-sig] a non-rhetorical question

[Atul Varma]

Has anyone ever explored the idea of using a collaborative virtual
community for teaching programming?  I'm thinking about something
along the lines of Amy Bruckman's MOOSE Crossing:

  http://www.cc.gatech.edu/elc/moose-crossing/
  http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~asb/thesis/

As Laura was saying, having the students create something that's
meaningful to them and their peers can be enormously motivating.  One
of the advantages of any virtual community that supports third-party
coding, from World of Warcraft to Second Life to text-based MOOs, is
that they provide an excellent social context for computer
programming.

What if, for instance, rather than creating an isolated program that
repeatedly asks questions about who the most attractive teacher is--a
program that no one would ostensibly use--the goal was to create a
simple robot in a text-based virtual world that anyone else could
interact with?  Or a virtual dog that would eat people's virtual
homework, or a hot potato that exploded after 5 minutes and covered
its holder in goo?

Creating such things could potentially involve just as many CS
concepts as standalone programs, but they'd have a social context that
would make them more meaningful and interesting for everyone involved;
rather than being throwaway exercises, even the simplest of projects
could be something that is lasting, has a strong creative component,
and could even be constructed collaboratively.  And while I'm not sure
how useful it would be in a CS course, another advantage of such an
environment is that it's multidisciplinary--even if someone doesn't
"get" computer programming or simply isn't interested in it at all,
they can still contribute through writing, art,
management/coordination, and at least learn something useful about
teamwork and collaboration.

If Second Life's interface weren't so mind-bogglingly complex [1], I'd
actually like to see it used for introductory programming classes.
But barring that, I'm curious as to whether any work has been done in
teaching Python like this.

- Atul

[1] http://www.humanized.com/weblog/2007/05/01/mixed_thoughts_on_the_metaverse

On 7/8/07, Laura Creighton <lac at openend.se> wrote:
> In a message of Sun, 08 Jul 2007 00:04:14 EDT, "Andy Judkis" writes:
> >I've been out painting my house, so I have some catching up to do as well
> >.
> >I thank Andre for coming to my defense, but I think Michael's on the righ
> >t
> >track. The problem is that I haven't found something sufficiently motivat
> >ing
> >to get these kids to climb the hill.  It's not that I haven't tried, but
> >it
> >hasn't worked out very well. I too try to get to graphics stuff as quickl
> >y
> >as possible, but I think it isn't very meaningful without some control
> >structure around it.  I use the livewires API because it's the simplest I
> >'ve
> >found, requiring the least foundation, but it still takes a while to get
> >to
> >where you can do much.
>
> <snip>
>
> It is easier if you let the kids find what they want to do, rather than
> having to read their minds, and find something that you think they
> ought to want to do.  The kids I was teaching were a fair bit
> younger, but when I asked them 'what do you use the intenet for now'
> the answers clustered around 'finding out when some favourite web
> page changed' 'getting tickets for the Spice Girls concert' and
> 'playing computer games'.  So we ended up doing a lot of screen
> scraping, and collaboratively writing a small text based game.  Of
> course the kids that I were teaching were all volunteers.  If your
> class is mandatory, you may get kids who don't use computers and
> don't want to use them for anything.  They will be a much harder
> problem then I had.
>
> Laura
>
>
>
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