LKL (April 2012) - Computational Thinking and Computer Science in Schools

During the last event I attended at the London Knowledge Lab, I made some quick notes about some concepts I would like to think about more carefully. I will not give too many details in this blog, as I am in the process of comprehending how an idea comes into reality.

1) Teachers, researchers, pedagogues and policy makers should come together to design a more appropriate curriculum.

2) There are a few layers that should be taken into account and which come along each single activity: (a) understanding of the emotions that the student has towards the task (M. Balaam) - could that improve participation? should students work on something they care about? (b) selection along the variety of tasks: programming, designing, constructing (note the implicit participatory manner of 'constructing' - does it remind of constructionism?). I find potential for the Raspberry Pi and TookTalk (c) assessment (d) and similarly to Cognitive Science, would we like something that reaches different topics/areas? how will we melt it with other subjects form the curriculum?

3) Some things to remember are: computational thinking, digital literacy (how what we use works?).

Sorry about the disorder of ideas, but there is more time than life...

G

Language and Teaching

I guess this is the blog that should contain this information. Yesterday, I went to a talk by Neil Mercer about what "it is known" about dialogue and child development. I found it quite interesting and very clear. Here, there is a summay of some of the points I understood.

WARNING: Note that I might have misinterpreted something so be careful when reding the paragraphs below! Also, I haven't check the references yet; therefore they might have errors!!!!!


* It seems that the amount of talking between children and parents make a difference in their development (Hart & Risley, 1995)
* Elaborative talk can help to long time retention (Goswami and Bryant, 2007)

So, quality of talk seems to be important. Also, language is related with a social mode of thinking and individual cognition (sorry, I am thinking how to phrase these sentences).

* Teachers make use of language in order to know:
-What children know and think about something
-Encourage metacognition
-See a learning trayectory
-For reasoning and arguing

Some works also point out about how to make questions and a comparion of quality of this can be found in Rojas-Brummond & Mercer 2004.
Some thinks that work and do not work can be found in Wolf, Crosson & Resnick 2006.
A hands-on activity and discussion - Murphy, 2007?2004?

The Other Meaning of Cognitive Science

Well, as this blog is for thecnicas issues about my research in every thing I am doing, then I am going to start with issues about Cognitive Science.

As well as you I need to get involved in this topic so here there are some links with some ideas of External Representations (one of the main topics that I am going to try at the USussex):

Diagrams
Graphic communication

If I found something more I'm gonna put it in the "comments" of this post.

See you!

Tomcat Memory Allocation

Well, in fact, change the memory settings in tomcat is so easy. Just you have to change catalina file in the $CATALINA_HOME/bin directory.

Just add for Linux the next two lines to catalina.sh:


# ----- Change memory settings ----------------------
JAVA_OPTS="$JAVA_OPTS "-Xmx30M" "-Xms38M


And for Windows the next two lines to catalina.bat:


rem ----- Change memory settings ----------------------------------------------
set JAVA_OPTS=%JAVA_OPTS% -Xmx30M -Xms38M


That line adds to JAVA_OPTS two parameters more, one for stablish the start memory for tomcat (with -Xms parameter) and the other stablish the maximun number of MB to assing to tomcat (with -Xmx parameter). The next value for the parameters is the number of MB to be assigned. Your must to change that as you prefer.

NOTE: If you use tomcat.exe for start it, then you have to give the parameters of memory in the command line.

For getting more information about how you can add other non standar parameters for java just type java -X in your console.

I was a little of fun trying to prove the memory assigment for java with the next code:


public class arreglo{
public static void main(String[] args) {
if(args.length>0) {
try {
int size = Integer.parseInt(args[0]);
String[] arr = new String[size];
for(int i=0; i < size; i++)
arr[i] = "tipo="+i;
} catch (Exception ouch){}
} else {
String[] arr = new String[500];
for(int i=0; i < 500; i++)
arr[i] = "tipo="+i;
}
}
}

That code has some funny results:


grecia@adso:~/pruebas$ java -Xmx1M arreglo 10000
grecia@adso:~/pruebas$ java -Xmx1M arreglo 100000
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space
grecia@adso:~/pruebas$ java -Xmx2M arreglo 100000
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space
grecia@adso:~/pruebas$ java -Xmx10M arreglo 100000

http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif

For more information about this topics please refer to Tomcat FAQ memory.

RSS Test

This is a test for proof if this site can read RSS feeds:

RSS feed for my bookmarks

Proximately...

I was thinking in describe in words the use, techs and newas about semantic web. I belive that it could be a very easy way for gettin in it. My plan is this:

First describe the first goal marked by T. Berners-Lee. After that I will describe more about the techs that now are getting more attention for people. Before i will talk about software that manages the models of data representation.

Regards,
Grecia

otro blog

Sólo por jugar ya tengo otro blog, pero este si tiene mi nombre ...
es grecia's blog... que ocurrente :)

Pues la aplicación web ya está arriba, así que ya me pueden empezar a hacer correcciones. Si necesitan saber algo más la página es la siguiente.