You’re Never Too Old to Learn Like a Kid

Course Leaders: Sheilagh Johnson and Tom Naps

Welcome to the course home page for the fall term OLLI course “You’re Never Too Old to Learn Like a Kid ”. The course will meet in the Coffey Computer Lab (Room 50) for three Fridays 12:30 - 2:00 starting November 1. Feel free to contact Tom (mailto:thomas.naps@gmail.com) anytime you have questions or concerns about the course.

Course description from OLLI catalog: These days, kids are actively learning across all disciplines by using technology. While it may be true that some children spend too much time on social media, technology also has tremendous potential for helping us to help them learn better. We’ll explore that upside in hands-on fashion, providing a curated review of online educational resources for a variety of subjects and letting you playfully explore them. And who knows? Along the way we might learn a lot about ourselves and our own ability to better communicate with the technology-obsessed youngsters in our lives.

Course outline

• Week 1 (Sheilagh): “Hour of Code” activities
• Week 2 (Tom): Slides
  • Building on the “Hour of Code” for those who want to explore computer science
    • Scratch
    • Fractals
  • More comprehensive learning platforms that span multiple subjects
• Week 3 (Tom): How should we gauge the effectiveness of an online learning resource? Slides

Materials for each week will be posted shortly before class. The link for the Hour of Code activities in Week 1 is https://hourofcode.com/us/learn

Course resources

• Instructions for using the campus wireless with your laptop or tablet
• Some additional Hour of Code challenges beyond what we do in Week 1:
  • See if you can complete the Hour of Code “Star Wars Challenge” at https://studio.code.org/s/starwars/lessons/1/levels/1
  • See if you can complete the Hour of Code “Dance Party AI Challenge” at https://hourofcode.com/dancepartyai
  • The Hour of Code 3D T-Rex game https://hourofcode.com/hatchxrtrex
• YouTube “subscriptions” from recognized educational media creators. These subscriptions provide good partial glimpses of the creator’s content at the cost of harvesting your data from browsing on YouTube, which is then used by Youtube and its owner (Google).
  • Videos by the “Scratch Team” at the MIT media lab. The Scratch code to accompany some of these videos is available using the “Scratch tutorials” link appearing below under the heading “publicly funded educational content creators”
  • STEMinGAMES - Beginner programming tutorials using games and robots
  • BrainPOP
  • Griffpatch’s Scratch tutorials
  • Tynker
  • College-level courses many of which require fees if you register for credit
    • edX
    • Udacity and it’s “nano-degree” programs
    • Coursera
    • Harvard’s introductory CS350 course over the last decade
      • Including a version of this course in that was done in Scratch
        
• Non-profit publicly funded educational content creators
  • A collection of Scratch tutorials - developed by the “Scratch Team” at the MIT media lab.
  • PBSKids - largely aimed at ages 8 and below
  • Khan Academy
  • PBS Learning Media
  • The OpenCourseWare project
• Fee-based content creators. These fee-based sites offer many more interactive and engaging activities than their YouTube subscription lists referenced above.
  • BrainPOP Education animations in a variety of K-8 subjects, usually accompanied by mastery quizzes on the material. Note that they have provided us with a temporary login that will end November 15. Username and password were given in Week 2 slides.
  • Tynker Block-based programming similar to Scratch and follow-up instruction in the programming language Python.
    
  • Griffpatch Academy