We know that arts integration can open all kinds of opportunities for learning and fostering creativity. We’re learning why computer science is an essential skill for every student to thrive in the digital world. And we’re understanding how allowing kids to get their hands on do-it-yourself projects shows them the value of designing, creating, and the process of making.

Until such time that schools provide these essential skills to all students, certain individuals and organizations are stepping in to fill the void. We met a few of these changemakers who are bringing these essential tools to students recently at the Big Ideas Fest in Half Moon Bay. Here are their stories. Perhaps their work and influence will make progress towards bringing these skills from outside the school system to where it belongs.

SMARTHISTORY: Making High Art Accessible

Steven Zucker and Beth Harris, the creators of Smarthistory, a huge collection of videos that take you inside the most important museums in the world, talk about how their explanations of significant art work make otherwise abstract or hard-to-understand concepts more accessible to students.

BLACK GIRLS CODE: Teaching a New Generation of Innovators

Moving from being consumers of media to creators is the goal of Black Girls Code, an organization devoted to teaching girls of color in-demand skills when they’re thinking about what they want to be when they grow up, says Kimberly Bryant

CAINE’S ARCADE: Showing the Value of Making By Hand

Nirvan Mullik, the creator of the wildly popular video Caine’s Arcade, about a young boy who built an arcade out of recycled cardboard boxes, talks about the importance of knowing how to make things by hand, and how the video has helped propel the Maker Movement in schools.

STARTUP WEEKEND EDU: Entrepreneurs Helping Educators

While these organizations provide tools and opportunities for students, another group is attempting to bring innovation from the fringes directly to teachers. Introducing educators to the world of technology and innovation is the goal of the grassroots movement called Startup Weekend EDU, and the organizer, Khalid Smith, talks about what teachers can learn from tech entrepreneurs, and what educators want from entrepreneurs that can help them be better teachers.

[Videos co-produced with Matthew Williams]

Flickr: CriCristina

It may come as no surprise that the ideas that are top-of-mind for educators, parents, and policymakers are the very topics conveyed in the most popular MindShift posts this year. Giving kids the tools to create, teachers the freedom to innovate, making students’ work relevant in the real world, giving them access to valuable technology. These are the aspirations that have resonated most with MindShift readers this year. Here are the top 10 posts from 2012.

1. 1. EASY WAYS TO INTRODUCE PROGRAMMING TO KIDS.
   

2. Being able to use the Internet and operate computers is one thing, but it may be just as valuable to teach students how to code. Giving students an introduction to programming helps peel back the layers of what happens inside computers and how computers communicate with one another online. Programming knowledge, even at a very basic level, makes technology seem less magical and more manageable. Programming also teaches other important skills, including math and logic.

3. 2. 10 THINGS IN SCHOOL THAT SHOULD BE OBSOLETE.

4. So much about how and where kids learn has changed over the years, but the physical structure of schools has not. Looking around most school facilities — even those that aren’t old and crumbling –  it’s obvious that so much of it is obsolete today, and yet still in wide use.

5. 3. WHY KIDS NEED SCHOOLS TO CHANGE.

6. The conversation in education has shifted towards outcomes and training kids for jobs of the future, and in many ways the traditional classroom has become obsolete. And yet many people fear change, preferring to hunker down and take the conservative route. Yet, it’s exactly during these uncertain times when people must be willing to try new things, to be more open, curious and experimental, said educator Madeline Levine.

7. 4. LEARNING SHOULD BE MESSY.

8. Can creativity be taught? Absolutely. The real question is: “How do we teach it?” In school, instead of crossing subjects and classes, we teach them in a very rigid manner. Very rarely do you witness math and science teachers or English and history teachers collaborating with each other. Sticking in your silo, shell, and expertise is comfortable. Well, it’s time to crack that shell. It’s time to abolish silos and subjects.

9. 5. MAKING CELL PHONES WORK IN THE CLASSROOM.

10. At its core, the issues associated with mobile learning get to the very fundamentals of what happens in class everyday. At their best, cell phones and mobile devices seamlessly facilitate what students and teachers already do in thriving, inspiring classrooms. Students communicate and collaborate with each other and the teacher. They apply facts and information they’ve found to formulate or back up their ideas. They create projects to deepen their understanding, association with, and presentation of ideas.

11. 6. TURN YOUR CLASSROOM INTO AN IDEA FACTORY.

12. If we’re serious about preparing students to become innovators, educators have some hard work ahead. Getting students ready to tackle tomorrow’s challenges means helping them develop a new set of skills and fresh ways of thinking that they won’t acquire through textbook-driven instruction. Students need opportunities to practice these skills on right-sized projects, with supports in place to scaffold learning. They need to persist and learn from setbacks. That’s how they’ll develop the confidence to tackle difficult problems.

13. 7. OPEN EDUCATION RESOURCES FOR ALL.

14. As open educational resources and OpenCourseWare (OCW) increase in popularity and usage, there are a number of new resources out there that do offer opportunity for interaction and engagement with the material.

15. 8. FOR STUDENTS, WHY THE QUESTION IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN THE ANSWER.

16. In a traditional classroom, the teacher is the center of attention, the owner of knowledge and information. Teachers often ask questions of their students to gauge comprehension, but it’s a passive model that relies on students to absorb information they need to reproduce on tests. What would happen if the roles were flipped and students asked the questions?

17. 9. DEFINING DEEPER LEARNING.

18. In preparing students for the world outside school, what skills are important to learn? This goes to the heart of the research addressed in the Deeper Learning Report released by the National Research Council of the National Academies of Science in Washington. Simply defined, “deeper learning” is the “process of learning for transfer,” meaning it allows a student to take what’s learned in one situation and apply it to another, explained James Pellegrino, one of the authors of the report. “You can use knowledge in ways that make it useful in new situations,” he said.

19. 10. HOW CAN WE CONNECT SCHOOL LIFE TO REAL LIFE.

20. So what if we were to say that, starting this year, even with our children in K– 5, at least half of the time they spend on schoolwork must be on stuff that can’t end up in a folder we put away? That the reason they’re doing their schoolwork isn’t just for a grade or for it to be pinned up in the hallway? It should be because their work is something they create on their own, or with others, that has real value in the real world.

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By Sheena Vaidyanathan

Deep into the digital age, the need for everyone to understand and learn programming is becoming more and more apparent. Codecademy, Coursera and other education start-ups are stepping in to fill the much-needed gap to teach adults to code. For kids, non-profits like CodeNow are raising funds to run summer programming camps for minority high school students, while other organizations like Girls Who Code are working on getting middle and high school girls interested in computer science.

While these are all worthwhile endeavors, each is working to fix what’s broken – teaching an essential skill that’s not taught in most schools. Learning to program has been relegated to summer camps and through programs that exist because of fundraising. But there’s a case to be made about using school time, school computers, and school funding to teach programming to every student. And to start early: Programming is just writing in the language of computers, so why not teach kids to code like we teach them to write?

A 6th-grade student's rendering of what's inside the computer.

By Sheena Vaidyanathan

Have you ever looked inside a laptop? Have you ever held a CPU or studied the components on a computer motherboard? Though we use computers everyday, many of us know little about the fascinating world inside.

In the spirit of tech innovation that’s defined Silicon Valley, every sixth grader in the Los Altos School District will be able to describe what goes on inside a computer. Students spend several classes studying a computer motherboard, drawing it in their notebooks and creating a 3D model of the computer on the computer. This hardware lesson is part of a required weekly class in a program that teaches science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) with a focus on creativity, collaboration and computer science.

Along with computer hardware, students learn the art of drawing from observation; the ability to simplify what is complex. Students use their pencil drawings to create a 3D model on the computer using Google SketchUp, a free application. Using the tool is not exactly new to these students — they used it to create 3D models of houses in a digital design class in the fifth grade.

Students are encouraged to use their own interpretation and creativity in designing the 3D model. They don’t have to make it look exactly like the original, and can create their own work style. Some quickly make blocks and label them; others go back several times to the physical motherboard in the classroom to re-check the drawing and count out the exact number of components and relative sizes. The completed models are colored, labeled and then exported to a 2D image so they can be added to the student’s Google site as part of their e-Portfolio for the class. (Check out their samples here.)

Besides this computer hardware lesson, students learn vector graphics, binary numbers, computer programming, and how to post onto their Google sites. They work in teams to create video games using Scratch, a programming language from MIT.

But these students are not just learning about technology; they’re learning computational thinking skills, a problem-solving process that includes the ability to formulate problems so a computer can solve them. Some consider computational thinking one of the key skills in the digital age.

This class, along with the fifth-grade computer programming class, the implementation of the Khan Academy and collaborative online homework, is part of the school district’s aim to teach students to go beyond being consumers of technology, but to become creators using technology. Having learned how computers work on the inside, and how to program the computer, the goal is to get students to use the computer as a tool to express their creativity.

Sheena Vaidyanathan teaches 3D design and computer programming to students in the Los Altos School District in California.

Flickr: AngryJulieMonday

By Heather Chaplin

Since MIT’s Lifelong Kindergarten group released Scratch in 2007, kids ages 8 to 13 have built more than 2.2 million animations, games, music, videos and stories using the kid-friendly programming language.

Scratch allows kids to snap together graphical blocks of instructions, like Lego bricks, to control sprites—the movable objects that perform actions. Sprites can dance, sing, run and talk.

Now, with a grant from the National Science Foundation, Lifelong Kindergarten is collaborating with Tufts University’s DevTech Research Group to make Scratch Jr, a new version aimed at kids in preschool to second grade. The expected launch date is summer 2012.

The new project raises questions about childhood development and digital learning, and just how early kids should be introduced to computers.

Mitch Resnick, director of the Lifelong Kindergarten group, spearheaded the creation of Scratch. Having worked with a network of afterschool programs using digital media, Resnick was struck by the lack of software that enabled kids to go beyond playing with other people’s media. There was nothing that encouraged them to make their own interactive stories and games.

“What’s most important to me is that young children start to develop a relationship with the computer where they feel they’re in control,” Resnick said. “We don’t want kids to see the computer as something where they just browse and click. We want them to see digital technologies as something they can use to express themselves.”

There’s been a lot of buzz in the last few years about what it means to be literate in the 21st century. To Resnick, teaching kids to program was like teaching children of another generation how to write.

“At one point, there was a growing realization that people needed to learn how to write as well as read,” Resnick said. “They needed to be able to express themselves as well as understand how other people expressed themselves. Now it’s the same with new media. It’s not enough to be able to interact with new technologies; you have to be able to create with new technologies.”

The problem, though, is that programming languages like Java and C++ are difficult to learn. Resnick and his team imagined a language that would be more “tinkerable,“ as he calls it—more accessible. They also wanted the language to encourage kids to create work that was “personally meaningful,” as opposed to simply manipulating numbers. Lastly, they wanted the program to have a social component so kids could share their work and learn from one another.

While Resnick was building Scratch, Marina Bers, a graduate student at MIT’s Media Lab, was focusing on younger children, building, among other things, a programming language for robotics aimed at preschool-aged children. Bers would leave MIT for a position at Tufts University, but she and Resnick stayed in touch. In 2010, they decided to partner to develop the Scratch version for a younger audience. Scratch Jr officially kicked off this last summer.

According to Bers, the challenge is creating an interface that very young children can understand. Some of the problems are straightforward, like the fact that Scratch relies on text, and the youngest children cannot yet read.

“I’ve noticed materials online for games aimed at kids pre-K to third grade where there’s this assumption that children are fluent with reading when they’re not,” said Lisa Guernsey, director of the Early Education Initiative at the New America Foundation. “This then becomes an exercise in frustration.”

Bers hopes to solve this problem by replacing the text of Scratch with voice-over instructions.

In focus groups with teachers and children, the Scratch Jr research team has also noticed that younger children struggle with the number of blocks needed to create a program. “The relationship between cause and effect needs to be clearer for this age group,” Bers said. The idea is to reorganize the program so kids can focus on only one thing at a time.

Younger children also have trouble distinguishing between the colors in Scratch, (Scratch Jr will be redone in bright, primary colors), and they struggle with how Scratch moves from top to bottom (Scratch Jr will move from side to side.)

The group has also been studying tutorials in videogames, which teach kids how to play without realizing they’re being taught. “We want to add something like that to Scratch Jr,” Bers said.

For children ages 3 to 8, social interaction is perhaps the most important part of the learning process. That interaction can be with a teacher, a parent, an older sibling or a neighbor, said Guernsey of The New America Foundation, but young children must be able to study the facial expressions and other reactions of this “social partner.”

“The child needs to feel that what they’re learning is important to this other person,” Guernsey said. “Then it will go into the part of the child’s brain stamped ‘important.’”

When learning moves online, this becomes an issue.

“It can be the most wonderful content in the world,” Guernsey said. “But if it’s just slid into their lives without a social partner, then a lot of learning will be lost.”

The challenge isn’t lost on Bers. “We want to promote social interaction,” she said. “The question is, how do we imbed teacher interaction into Scratch Jr?”

Bers thinks of a playground. A good playground will have swing sets and slides for the kids, as well as benches and tables and chairs for the parents. The designers of Scratch Jr are figuring out how to embed the digital equivalent of those tables and chairs.

There are many who blanch at the idea of putting such young children in front of a computer screen. Concern over “screen time” is nothing knew—it began with television. But, according to Ellen Wartella, a professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University, these issues are far more nuanced than most people allow. First of all, she said, there simply isn’t good long-term research to show that being in front of a screen affects children negatively now, or in the future.

“There is no evidence of harm, although there are a lot of complaints,” she said.

Wartella isn’t saying screen time is good for children at a young age. Rather, she’s saying there isn’t good evidence yet to say it’s bad. There are no high-quality long-term studies that show that too much screen time as a 3-year-old will have direct consequences when he or she is 4 or 14. And in past research on TV screen time, it’s hard to untangle the effects of other influences, like parents and income.

One mistake people make, Wartella said, is focusing on the fact of the screen itself rather than the content of what the screen is showing. “Is it bad for kids to Skype with Grandma? I don’t think anyone would say that.”

Both Wartell and Guernsey refer to “the three Cs,” when considering these issues: content, context and the child. The question isn’t whether it is inherently good or bad when a preschooler is given a videogame. Rather, the questions should be contextual: Is the child playing with a social partner or on her own? What is the educational value of the game? And what are the needs of the particular child?

“When people worry about screen time, it’s the substitution effect they’re really worried about,” Guernsey said. “What happens when a kid is so enraptured by screen activity that they won’t go outside to play in other ways? But screen time being harmful by itself, there’s no evidence of that.”

For Bers and Resnick, it comes back to preparing children to be literate—in all the ways literacy is perceived today. For real empowerment in a world flooded with digital media, people need to understand not only how to interact with it, but how to make media themselves. Teaching children as young as 5 how to program not only teaches important executive functioning skills, which is crucial for that age group, but also helps demystify the computer, Bers said.

“Computers for most people are black boxes,” she said. “I believe kids should understand objects are ‘smart’ not because they’re just smart, but because someone programmed them to be smart.

“Also,” she said, echoing Resnick, “it’s about expression. In our times, we need kids to be able to express ideas in different ways, and learning to work in Scratch, in a computational medium, will give them another way of expressing themselves.”

The post originally appeared on Spotlight for Digital Media & Learning.