No materials for the event yet, sorry!

Over the last 6+ years, EDC, with funding from the (US) National Science Foundation, has designed and built a set of microworlds in which children use programming as a language to express and explore the mathematics they are learning. Our prior presentations at SnapCon and elsewhere have primarily been about the nature of these worlds, the principles and ideas behind them, and the exciting results we've seen.

In this workshop, we will share the Microworld Base that we designed for building these microworlds and will illustrate its use by examining one of our microworlds. The base allows microworld designers to add and remove certain elements from the Snap! UI, manage the flow of puzzles users solve, and otherwise tweak Snap! to be more conducive to their pedagogical intents. Our aim, within the one-hour workshop, is to help participants build and save a simple microworld of their own so that they understand the underlying structure and can later elaborate and extend it independently. Participants could focus their microworld on music or linguistics or art or mathematics or whatever exploration they would like.

We have written full documentation of our Microworld Base, roughly 5000 words and accompanying images of scripts in Snap! and will make that available to participants beforehand.