ICT in Education

The second day of Innovate 2010 started with a few interesting applications of smartboards and Nintendo Wiis. It is interesting that they are using Python to communicate between the two. I've recently discovered that smartboards are becoming rather popular at schools around Cape Town (we even had one installed in EGS at UCT) but I'm not sure how effective they can be. I'm very keen to see what type of content teachers are developing to use on these teaching toys.

Robert and I presented Project Umonya today to a number of IT teachers from around South Africa. Speaking to them afterwards we discovered that many teachers are frustrated with the SACO format and how it doesn't fit into teaching IT, that the North West would really like a course of their own and that there may in fact be computer labs big enough to host courses at certain IEB schools (namely in Johannesburg)

While speaking to educators and NGOs who facilitate educational programs I've discovered a few resources that people may wish to browse, namely Living Maths, Free High School Textbooks (FHSST) and Fullmarks (website pending). Its amazing what resources are available. Project Umonya is hoping to feed their upcoming resource packs into the FHSST system for a greater distribution.

Tomorrow is the final day of the conference and I am keen to network a bit more and discover a few more useful contacts to help us on our way.

Project Umonya: CS4HS Workshop

Project Umonya is an realisation of a lot of hard work by the UCT Algorithm Circle. Umonya means Python in Zulu, Python being the language of choice for teaching beginners. The UCT Algorithm Circle submitted a proposal to Google for its Computer Science 4 High School (CS4HS) funding grants. AC proposed to run 4 courses across the country for up to 250 school children between grades 7-9 in each location. This is the most ambitious undertaking of the AC yet. An article from the Monday Paper on the most recent course we ran shows the 75 high school students we coached through the basics of programming and algorithms, which at the time we considered rather large. The next course is set for August and we're scaling up to 100 high school students this time.

Google accepted the proposal last week and agreed to partially fund it and thus we are forging ahead with plans, logistics and redesigning our course content (theory, examples and exercises). The next step is to recruit more tutors into the project. We have a wonderful mix of postgraduate and undergraduate students (and a few very bright high school students) working as both tutors and lecturers, the entire project is run by students, a feat in itself.

We (the students) volunteer our time as we feel strongly about increasing the country's capacity for computer science and allowing early high school students the opportunity to experience CS to make an informed decision in choosing it as a subject. We hope to provide encourage and enthusiasm for the subject we all love. If some of them go on to win CS competitions, even better.

The format going forward is to train a core group of lecturers and tutors from UCT and then bring in the university students as additional tutors at each location. This provides them an opportunity to share their passion, talk about their experiences and hopefully build teaching capacity to expand the project even further in future years (long term goal).

If you know of anyone who you think would be interested in the project (high school student, uni student wanting to tutor, sponsors, printers etc please spread the word)

Oweek: The undergrads are back

Oweek on Campus is always crazy with everyone signing up for courses, tutorials and societies. I've been splitting my tine between teaching Python to the EGS Honours students for CSAG and helping out at the ballroom stand.

How to Think Like a Computer Scientist

I have been looking through the various online resources available for Python and found Green Tea Press which includes How to Think Like a Computer Scientist: Learning with Python and Python for Software Design. I find the book informative for people who can already program but need to understand the idiosyncrasies of a new language.

Python for Nonprogrammers

The EGS Honours class at UCT has requested a course on programming and the research they are attached to (CSAG) has decided Python is the best introductory language for them. I have never taught Python to people who have never programmed before and especially ones who have already done an entire degree. How quickly can you move through the basic programming concepts? Do you assign it as homework before your first lecture? Any suggestions?

I have read through a Byte of Python but I am not convinced it covers the topics in enough depth. I as a programmer can breeze through the whole book without a qualm but I do not remember a time when I didn't know what a variable is or what an IO stream is.

We will see how well things go next week. I might be designing the lecture material yet again. Sigh. If nothing else, it is a challenge to see how well I can still teach the basics.