Information Age Education is now publishing some books for the Kindle and Kindle-format readers that are available for computers, iPad, and other machines. See http://iae-pedia.org/IAE_Kindle_Books.

The most recent of these books is:

Moursund, David (2011). Introduction to Problem Solving in the Information Age.

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This IAE Blog entry is a continuation of my discussion of David Perkin’s book Making Education Whole. 

Perkins, David (2010). Making learning whole. How seven principles of teaching can transform education. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

The basic idea Perkins discusses is that much of what students learn in school can be described as  “learning elements of” and “learning about.” He uses the words elementitus and aboutitis while describing these illnesses in our educational system. He proposes that students be routinely engaged in playing the whole game of education and/or junior versions of such games.

When programming languages such as BASIC and Logo  first became available, it was pointed out that such programming languages were accessible to quite young students but were useful even to graduate students and researchers. They were called  low threshold and no ceiling programming languages. About 30 years ago I visited a computer summer camp for first graders. The microcomputers available to these students had three different versions of Logo. The students were required to change to different versions of Logo every once in a while. I was really impressed that such young students could learn three different versions of Logo at one time, and were learning to solve a wide variety of problems.

Students learning today’s “modern” programming languages such as Alice, Logo, Microsoft Small BASIC, Scratch, Squeak, Visual BASIC, and many more (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_educational_programming_languages) are working in a low threshold, high ceiling environment. There are a great many programming languages that are available free. (See http://www.freebyte.com/programming/languages/.)

Programming is useful in any academic discipline. There is considerable transfer of learning as one learns a second, third, and still more programming languages.

Posing problems and then solving them via computer programming gives on increased insight into Computational Thinking (http://iae-pedia.org/Computational_Thinking).

Computer Programming is a Challenge to Our Educational System

The details of the programming languages developed for children are relatively easy to learn. However, computer programming mainly consists of problem solving. Problem solving via programming involves figuring out how to solve problems, represent solution procedures in a programming language, and testing for correctness. It involves designing good user interfaces and writing code that can be understood by the programmer and by other programmers.

Most teachers lack the programming, problem solving, and software design knowledge and skills needed to work with the students. Suppose, for example, that a student learns to program and uses this programming skill to do a project or other assignment in a “traditional” course in our “traditional” curriculum. The chances are that the student’s teacher cannot help the student much, and cannot adequately provide formative and summative assessment.