algorithmic literacy – dave's blog of art and programming

Red King: Host/Parasite co-evolution citizen science

A new project begins, on the subject of ecology and evolution of infectious disease. This one is a little different from a lot of Foam Kernow’s citizen science projects in that the subject is theoretical research – and involves mathematical simulations of populations of co-evolving organisms, rather than the direct study of real ones in field sites etc.

The simulation, or model, we are working with is concerned with the co-evolution of parasites and their hosts. Just as in more commonly known simulations of predators and prey, there are complex relationships between hosts and parasites – for example if parasites become too successful and aggressive the hosts start to die out, in turn reducing the parasite populations. Hosts can evolve to resist infection, but this has an overhead that starts to become a disadvantage when most of a population is free of parasites again.

Example evolution processes with different host/parasite trade-offs.

Over time these relationships shift and change, and this happens in different patterns depending on the starting conditions. Little is known about the categorisation of these patterns, or even the range of relationships possible. The models used to simulate them are still a research topic in their own right, so in this project we are hoping to explore different ways people can both control a simulation (perhaps with an element of visual live programming), and also experience the results in a number of ways – via a sonifications, or game world. The eventual, ambitious aim – is to provide a way for people to feedback their discoveries into the research.

Training teachers in coding, and thinking about e-waste/recycled robots

We recently had the second inset training day in programming related activities at Truro school. Following on from the previous session I didn’t want to introduce too much new stuff, so we concentrated on going back over Sonic Pi and Minecraft/Python programming in the morning, then discussed a lot more about our future workshops in the afternoon. These will include children from most of the primary schools in the Truro area and take place during the next term. I also wanted to use the day to work on some specific ideas the teachers wanted to get going. One of these involved running a Kinect camera with the Pi, which we managed to get more or less working – reading depth data in Python for potentially plugging into Minecraft at a later date.

The big idea I wanted to get feedback about was the use of robotics and electronics in conjunction with code (the photo above is my desk while preparing the day before). I didn’t have any lesson plans for this, but based on some comments from the first workshop and from playing a bit with this during CodeClub teaching I felt it might be good with this age group, who already know quite a bit about screen based activities. To keep costs down (as well as building in issues like e-waste) we’re planning to make use of recycled junk to extract motors from toys and hack them to do different things. It seems this doesn’t cause too many issues from safety POV (everything will be low-voltage and we can check everything beforehand), even the use of soldering irons seems to be acceptable as they have supervision.

The advantage of using code to move real things (as shown by a long history) is that it directly connects programming with the world outside of the screen (where it most certainly now has great importance in our lives), and at the same time results in teamwork – as it’s not easy for a single person to make a robot while programming it. When we tried this at Troon Primary they self organised into a group with one person programming while another was building stuff in lego and a third provided excited communication between them and more or less managed the task. Other programming activities tend to be more individualistic – with the possible exception of networked Minecraft, which is important but a very different form of collaboration.

Picademy Exeter and Future Thinking for Social Living

Last week I had the chance to help out the Raspberry Pi foundation at their Picademy in Exeter. It was good to meet up with Sam Aaron again to talk livecoding on Pis, and also see how they run these events. They are designed for local teachers to get more confident with computers, programming and electronics to the point where they can start designing their own teaching materials on the second day of the two day course. This is a model I’m intending to use for the second inset teacher training day I’m doing next week at Truro school – it’s pretty exciting to see the ideas that they have for activities for their pupils, and a good challenge to help find ways to bring them into existence in a day.

We also had the ending of Future Thinking for Social Living at the Miners Court summer party last week. We exhibited the map made during the workshops, made lots of tea, and had some fun with the pattern matrix in musical mode out in the garden – I adapted Alex’s music system we used with Ellen in Munich to run on Raspberry Pi so it didn’t require a laptop, or a screen at all – simply a speaker. It was interesting how quickly people got the idea, in many ways music is easier to explain than weaving as listening while coding is multi-sensory.

Easter Python/Minecraft programming day at dbsCode

Thursday saw our second dbsCode Easter programming taster, and like last year we focused on minecraft programming with our procedural architecture api.

The main change this time was that for the 20 11-16 year old participants we doubled our teachers to 4 (Glen Pike, Francesca Sargent and Matthew Dodkins and me), plus a couple of interested parents helped us out too. This meant that the day was much more relaxed and we noticed they were engaged with the programming for a much higher proportion of the time. Another factor was that we went straight into coding, as none of them needed introduction to minecraft this year. I think one of the biggest strengths of this kind of learning is that they are able to easily switch between playful interaction (jumping into each other’s worlds, building stuff the normal way) and programming. This means there is low pressure which I think makes it more of a self driven activity, as well as making a long (4 hour) workshop possible.

Here are some screenshots of their creations – this was a melon palace created in a world that had somehow become sliced apart:

Inside the melon palace, the waterfall pulsed with a while loop and sleeps that altered the water source blocks.

As last year there was a lot of mixing of activities, using code to create big shapes and then editing them manually for the finer details:

Here, a huge block of water inexplicably cuts through the scenery:

And two houses, that became merged together and then filled with bookshelves and other homely items:

Training teachers in coding at Truro School

I’m part of a UK Department of Education funded project to join up 10 primary schools in Cornwall and get them programming. The teachers are very important people in this equation, so our first activity was a training day for them. The idea of this was to get them familiar with using the Raspberry Pi and try out some programming, while at the same time allowing me to gather some research on feasible projects that can result in long term benefits for the schools involved.

We gave Sonic Pi and our Minecraft Python architecture coding a go, and I also briefly demoed the weavecoding project via flotsam – as one of our eventual aims is to produce teaching materials for this too. I’ll start with some of the broader things we discussed, see below for more specific observations for these programming systems.

Unaddressed needs of teachers

Despite a big push in coding in schools, there are still plenty of areas where support is lacking or even misguided. The focus on hardware platforms (Raspberry Pi, BBC’s Micro Bit) is not so relevant as schools have plenty of existing hardware, also the mass of community open source activity needs a lot of work to translate for classroom use. A further problem is that a lot of existing initiatives tend to be high visibility but too short term in their scope. Codeclub is a notable exception in this area. Technology also tends to get considered as a distinct subject – whereas it needs to be linked with other topics (i.e. teaching local history by making computer games about it) in order to make sense.

Long term thinking

Events for teaching a small proportion of children programming has short term benefit unless it is to enable the children to teach each other. This turns out to be successful in after school code clubs, so is it possible to design events and workshops with this aim specifically in mind?

Teachers need access to people who work with technology when they need it, but how can this be done – a local support network perhaps, we also discussed hacklabs for teachers where they can drop in and get advice. Hacklabs could provide teachers with feedback on their ideas, perhaps some small one on one training to help realise them – as well as perhaps building hardware or software specifically according to their needs. The funding for this is an open question at the moment.

One of the issues reported by the teachers is that it takes a lot of effort to get students to a certain tipping point with technical ability, after which they shoot ahead and quickly overtake the teacher. I’m not sure if this is seen as a problem in itself, but it does seem like there needs to be a situation designed where this can easily feed back into the collective knowledge of the group.

Classroom materials are worth their weight in gold, like the ones supplied with Sonic Pi or those provided by Code Club – and they take a long time to check and get right. The problem is that it’s actually hard to get funding to make these, relative to teaching hours. Releasing all teaching materials as creative commons to pool resources nationally (and beyond) is key. One thing that came out clearly with the worksheets we used for both Sonic Pi and the ones we wrote for Minecraft coding was that they are not really very well suited for primary school use. We seem to tend to write documentation that focuses on example recipes to follow rather than encouraging exploration – this was a surprise to me. The teachers were more keen on simple lists of commands (and liked the dropdown menus in Sonic Pi for example) which were then left for the children to discover how they fit together, and less wordy explanations.

Hardware problems

Many schools have already moved away from desktop PCs, whether using laptops or (shudder) tablets exclusively. The Raspberry Pi has considerable extra hardware needs – we discussed whether recycling hardware being thrown out from local businesses was one option to help with this.

We came to the conclusion that one promising area to look at is robotics, making use of the Pi’s easily accessible hardware interface. The problem then is where to get the required motors and other hardware from – one potential resource are the forgotten boxes of lego, electronics and bits and pieces gathering dust in school storage. Again the challenge is how to make effective use of this rather than spending money on new kit.

Systems we tested

We tried following some worksheets for two coding projects on the Raspberry Pi, the aims were twofold – to get some initial experience with them as well as getting feedback for how we can improve them from the teachers point of view.

Sonic Pi

This was the first time I’ve used the new version of Sonic Pi in a class room. We used the version that comes pre-installed on the ‘2015-02-16-raspbian-wheezy’ release. I’m not very familiar with Ruby, the language it uses but I’d had a bit of a play with it in the days prior and had a bit of feedback from Sam Aaron on some specifics too.

One of the big questions I had was whether typing skills would be an issue with the primary age group. They are used to using drag-drop programming languages like Scratch and Espresso but would this translate to using the keyboard? The teachers thought that Sonic Pi’s minimal syntax would be really good with their children – the syntax highlighting (using colour and little lines to denote indentation) would be important to make it easier for them. One problem we noticed is that the syntax colouring might be able to go a little further – it could, for example be more context sensitive – e.g. the difference between a symbol that is user defined and one that is part of the system would be better to differentiate for explanation.

They considered the documentation, both ‘online’ as part of the interface and the wording of the tutorials was probably too prescriptive and in-depth (which to be fair is written for older children). More importantly the teachers loved the musical aspect, and immediately got into creating their own tunes (all mixing with the amen break 🙂 Initially the concept of MIDI notes was a confusion – “why is 60 middle C?”. A popular request was for some pre-written examples of familiar tunes to fiddle with.

The interface including visible debugging/errors was very popular, as it seems a lot of existing commercial software they use in classrooms does not to this well. Being able to ‘hear’ bugs was also important. It was also good to explain Sonic Pi in terms of musical livecoding and Supercollider, as this culture gives it a kind of extra spice which is exactly what we need when ‘coding’ can so easily slip into being about boring product-centric thinking.

Minecraft/Python

To contast Sonic Pi, in the afternoon we switched to the Minecraft world and the system we developed for teaching teenagers programming with Python. I’ve recently been using this for one-on-one teaching with an 8 year old, so I wanted to find out if they thought it would be useful in the classroom for this age group.

This setup relies on an IDE (we use Geany) which communicates with Minecraft via network messages running in a different window. The multiple windows and strange ‘always on top’ OpenGL rendering of the Raspberry Pi GPU makes this a fiddly business until you get the hang of it, but the upside is that this is the same approach as programming in the games industry – and kids like it when you tell them this. However it would be wonderful to be able to ‘dock’ minecraft in a Python IDE in a friendly way and have some of the features of Sonic Pi.

The projects we made with this system are again pre-created recipes without much information on things like how to get the coordinates right rather than just following the instructions. One of the teachers found out that you can use the player’s position to figure out what the coordinates should be, we need to include these kinds of hints and think a bit more broadly how to describe the creative process.

On thing I picked up from the teachers was that they had high expectations of the scale of what would be needed to capture interest for the children – for example that we’d need to write programs to create entire cities and a worry that the amount of code needed for a simple house seemed so much. However, what I’ve noticed when using this for teaching younger children – is that we’ve sometimes spent an entire hour on a single line of code. For example creating a block, changing it’s position and size in 3 dimensions and then trying changing the block type – seeing how water or lava acts in different circumstances. The strength of Minecraft is that it contains a lot of complexity which is already understood by children who play it, so they don’t really need to be convinced so much as given space to explore possibilities.

dBsCode summer school

At the end of July I helped out with the dbscode summer school. The idea of this two week course was to encourage algorithmic literacy, with focus on employment – agile methods and test driven development (TDD), and aiming at people about to enter, or re-enter employment rather than the teenagers we focused on in Easter. We were interested in teaching the culture the participants will encounter in modern software development, and this was driven by Cornish embedded technology company Bluefruit and John Jagger – consultant and creator of Cyber-Dojo. We had 9 participants from a mix of backgrounds, some recently graduated students and some experienced programmers wanting to catch up with software engineering practice.

We set up teams and provided a tricky example project using Raspberry Pi and an accelerometer sensor with the aim to develop a prototype to capture the movement of fishing casts, in the context of those already used for sports such as tennis or golf. The great thing about this problem is that it spans the entire range of software, from bit shifting and binary operations to extract sensor data from a device using the i2c protocol, all the way up to graphing in php/javascript, and all the storage, processing and networking in between. We tried hard to set the scene and atmosphere like a software company, and the feedback from the recently graduated students was (rather worryingly) that this was a totally different approach to that currently taught in colleges and universities.

We mixed this group challenge with Cyber-Dojo, which meant we could do little 45 minute programming exercises each day. My observations, based on sporadic visits throughout the two weeks – were that one of the biggest surprises, particularly at the start, was that the level of improvisation and experimentation (rather than already ‘having all the answers’) was a key part of professional practice, rather than something they should avoid or feel embarrassed about. The focus on TDD helped very much with this as well as doing a project that we as teachers hadn’t tried before – this I feel is key to providing learning about how to learn rather than an overly didactic (and not terribly realistic) experience.

Why teach Kids Coding? (Royal Cornwall Show update)

Setup and coffee time at the Pi Cube before the crowds arrive

On Saturday I teamed up with Falmouth University’s Makernow team to do a kids coding event at the Royal Cornwall Show with a new Raspberry Pi cube (based on the one used at the DeerShed Festival last year). We had a constant stream of families and kids wanting to try Scratch coding, and we had a 50/50 gender balance in terms of helpers which I think with these sorts of events is critical.

The part I like best about public events like this are talking with the parents and teachers. The best questions are the fundamental ones: “why should we be teaching them how to program?” which was a great opportunity to get my thoughts straight – the official economic reason is not one I’m so motivated by: “to encourage more talent in the tech sector”. The actual reason I do all this (mostly on a voluntary basis) is the feeling that as we find ourselves living in a computational society, where everything we do is algorithmically processed, the future for people who only know how to consume technology is very different from those who are not afraid to question it, who know it’s possible to take it to bits and rebuild it in new ways.

This is also the reason that I can’t get very excited when teachers tell me they are buying iPads for use in their school – there are some interesting programming environments on them, but the kind of creativity they support cannot, due to Apple’s core business model, encompass this kind of questioning – they can’t escape the sandbox. For example, when I last checked, you can program iPads, but not share the code or work collaboratively as it would bypass the AppStore distribution model to do this.

This relates to the answer I gave to “why should we get a Raspberry Pi” – as it provides a platform that encourages a fearless relationship with technology, it doesn’t have the family email account on it, it’s cheap and nobody cares if you manage to delete the entire operating system, just copy a new sdcard. This stuff has to be possible, and encouraged – if we are to eventually have a society that can have any meaningful debate on increasingly thorny computational/network/society issues such as those related to GCHQ mass spying.

Back to the kids – it was interesting that the majority of the older ones had already used Scratch, either as part of their normal school lessons, or an after school activity (anecdotally, this is sharp improvement over the last year or so). Some of them were keen to show off their skills, which was a great way to demonstrate to the younger ones what was possible.

For the older ones I’m continuing work on the Minecraft API coding project – making simple 3D primitives to demonstrate functional programming in Python. You can explore the results of your programs by walking around and digging into structures generated in a familiar world. More on new versions of that soon.

Thinking Digital 2014

Last week I had the honour of both performing with Alex and presenting at Thinking Digital 2014. Suzy O’Hara invited me to represent the intersection of art, science and education of FoAM kernow and present the work I’ve been doing with the Sensory Ecology Group at Exeter University. I did a quick Egglab game demo and related some thoughts on working with scientists and how it connects with my experience teaching programming in the classroom.

It was an interesting and unusual venue for me, organiser Herb Kim is very much developing on the TED theme – so lots of extremely well considered, motivating and inspiring talks. Much of the context was one of venture capital and startup business so it was interesting to see an explosive talk by Aral Balkan on the implications of Facebook and Google’s business models on the future of our society (he included some of the other presenter’s companies too). This reminded me very much of the themes we explored in Naked on Pluto, but coming from a new angle.

Personally his talk was challenging to me as he roundly attacked the free software movement, for essentially providing a great sandbox for enthusiasts and well funded companies – but incapable of doing much more in terms of data security for real people. As a designer, he sees this as essentially a design problem – one that these companies have solved for themselves but is utterly lacking in devices such as the Firefox phone OS. For Aral, this is fundamentally a design problem that needs it’s own movement, and new business models to be developed. These business models need to take into consideration long term usability (for which user privacy is an essential feature) rather than ultra short term profit ‘pump and dump’, selling of people’s information for vast amounts – i.e. silicon valley ‘business as usual’.

Two things are apparent to me following this talk – one is that I have been labouring under the impression that a particular focus on design is somehow implicitly tied with specific business practices – simplification as wallpapering over data harvesting, and other tactics. This is very much a short sighted developer view, and is wrong – they can of course service different types of businesses.

The other point came during his 3 slide explanation of how to start your own social network (1. fork a github repo, 2. set up a server and 3. install it). Clearly even this satirical simplification is beyond all but existing software developers (many of whom are working for companies reliant on user surveillance in some indirect or direct way). The challenge for me is that I can’t ultimately see a way to make ‘interface as user experience’ ever converge on anything other than exploitation. Can ‘user experience’ ever regard people philosophically as anything but consumers – regardless of the underlying business model?

The problem in solving that is that we now have two problems – the terrible state of software engineering preventing accessibility (i.e programming at large still stuck in the 70’s) and the lack of understanding in society of what a computer is and how it works. The second of these problems is being addressed in some part by the activities of CodeClub (Aral is [correction: was] a director of this organisation) and similar education initiatives. Regarding pushing software engineering forward, in some way I think recent livecoding takeup by musicians over programmers is a fascinating development here, in terms of showing us how programming – when it’s taken and twisted into very strange and new forms, can start to make sense and work for ‘real people’.

Thoughts on teaching programming with Minecraft and Python

Saturday saw the first dBsCode taster workshop, for budding programmers between 11 and 16. We set up 20 Raspberry Pi’s, which we networked together and used our new procedural Minecraft 3D shape primitives to build a number of projects in Python involving castles, spiders and an infinite house generator.

Networking was very important – it enabled them to jump into each other’s games which started as a major distraction, but ended up being useful – as people could see what each other were doing and work together.

As part of this, some level of ‘griefing’ was present (where other players interfere in your world), but asking them about this during the breaks, the consensus was that this is part of the culture of Minecraft – I even instructed victims to pull their network cables out, but they saw that as completely unnecessary. Most of them took turns in both constructive/collaborative and programming activity and destructive/graffiti like activities associated with griefing, and this was acceptable to them. The use of code to easily rebuild structure after damage (or being able to remove people with liberal procedural application of lava) was therefore quite an attractive feature of the code approach.

It was common to adapt the programming to fit their understanding of Minecraft, so it seemed natural to take on a hybrid approach to building – using Python to do the heavy lifting (building, or extracting large areas) or repetitive tasks, after which they did the fiddly or more creative bits manually as normal. For example one student used the sphere primitive to extract huge caves underground, and then filled them with little hand made shrines and sculptures.

What was interesting was that to some extent the ‘experts’ at Minecraft (many of whom already document their creations on Youtube channels) found this more challenging in many ways than those less attached to the Minecraft culture – who were more accepting of new ways of doing things.

The manner of programming we used here – running Geany (a lightweight Python IDE) at the same time as Minecraft, was completely in line with livecoding practice, as programs interacted with the Minecraft world in realtime with network messages. The great thing about the rather slow network bottleneck is that you can walk around a structure while the program is creating it, which allows a much better understanding of how the process is working than if it instantly popped into existence.

Strange terraforming

Working on the upcoming Raspberry Pi programming workshop for dBsCode, I’m wrapping the Minecraft Python API with a functional style one to reduce the amount of syntax we’ll have to teach. The idea is to build complex 3D shapes via abstraction, out of simple primitives.

The IDE we’re using is Geany which seems to run well alongside Minecraft on the Raspberry Pi so far. It’s great how Minecraft stays on top of the display at all times – more an unintentional feature of the GPU driver, but very useful for teaching.