- One Laptop Per Child is going to change the world.
- The US schooling system is in crisis.
- The Internet is very free, but schools are very rigid.
- Schools aren't succeeding.
- She mentioned The Education Program for Gifted Youth (EPGY) at Stanford University
- Social interaction has a positive impact on eLearning.
- "Teaching to the test" is destroying education.
- nickjr.com is amazingly educational.
- Constructivist teaching is great, but it's hard.
- Programming is one of the most beneficial eLearning activities.
- Not enough time is given in schools to eLearning; it doesn't matter because they're too constrictive anyway.
- Let kids learn at their own pace.
- Inquiry-based, project-based, group-based learning is good.
- Lecture-oriented classrooms are bad.
- The best learning is the type kids do when they aren't in school.
In his keynote at PyCon, Eben Upton, the Executive Director of the Rasberry Pi Foundation, mentioned that not only has Minecraft been ported to the Rasberry Pi, but you can even control it with Python . Since four of my kids are avid Minecraft fans, I figured this might be a good time to teach them to program using Python. So I started yesterday with the goal of programming something cool for Minecraft and then showing it off at the San Francisco Python Meetup in the evening. The first problem that I faced was that I didn't have a Rasberry Pi. You can't hack Minecraft by just installing the Minecraft client. Speaking of which, I didn't have the Minecraft client installed either ;) My kids always play it on their Nexus 7s. I found an open source Minecraft server called Bukkit that "provides the means to extend the popular Minecraft multiplayer server." Then I found a plugin called RaspberryJuice that implements a subset of the Minecraft Pi modding API for B
Comments
Or maybe people were so put off by her seemingly negative initial thesis (which of course was meant to be a trope, a turning) that they just didn't listen to the rest.
Anyway, thanks for providing some evidence that I may not be losing my mind. You heard the same speech I did.