Imagine Logo based magazine Daniela Lehotská, [email protected]Department of Informatics Education, Comenius University Andrea Hrušecká, [email protected]Department of Informatics Education, Comenius University Abstract Four years ago we started to develop an interactive on-line computer magazine called Infovekáčik. It is aimed at children at the age of 6-10 years and their teachers. It consists of different interactive educational but still interesting game-like activities for constructivist teaching and learning, collaboration, development of creativity, logical thinking and problem solving. Each issue is oriented to some topic and most of the activities of the issue are adjusted to that topic. The magazine consists of several columns. In this article we would like to introduce the magazine, its columns and the most interesting activities. Figure 1 Mind map of the magazine Editorial includes short text about the actual topic. In Let’s Explore some term or phenomenon is explained in words and also using a microworld. Let’s Solve offers various activities for sorting, classifying, matching and others. In Let’s Play Together online activities enable cooperation of two children. In Let’s Sing children can learn a song. Let’s Paint and Build includes activities for creativity, like interactive building sets, decorate things, colouring pictures. Do it yourself gives children instructions for creating something by hand, like eye mask. About Nature includes specialities and activities dealing with nature. Slovak Towns describes nice places of Slovakia, gives tips for trips. Our Art is a gallery of pictures sent by children. In developing the magazine we participate with two primary school teachers. Our inspirations are (beside our own ideas) Slovak textbooks and some game and activity books for little children. All magazine activities are developed in Imagine Logo environment. Turtles and classes, events, dynamic programmable shapes of turtles, processes and net object are used mostly to program the activities. To browse the magazine, it is necessary to have the latest Imagine plugin. Keywords children, online magazine, interactive activities, creativity, constructionism, collaboration 1
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Imagine Logo based magazine Daniela Lehotská, [email protected] Department of Informatics Education, Comenius University
Andrea Hrušecká, [email protected] Department of Informatics Education, Comenius University
Abstract Four years ago we started to develop an interactive on-line computer magazine called Infovekáčik. It is aimed at children at the age of 6-10 years and their teachers. It consists of different interactive educational but still interesting game-like activities for constructivist teaching and learning, collaboration, development of creativity, logical thinking and problem solving. Each issue is oriented to some topic and most of the activities of the issue are adjusted to that topic. The magazine consists of several columns. In this article we would like to introduce the magazine, its columns and the most interesting activities.
Figure 1 Mind map of the magazine
Editorial includes short text about the actual topic. In Let’s Explore some term or phenomenon is explained in words and also using a microworld. Let’s Solve offers various activities for sorting, classifying, matching and others. In Let’s Play Together online activities enable cooperation of two children. In Let’s Sing children can learn a song. Let’s Paint and Build includes activities for creativity, like interactive building sets, decorate things, colouring pictures. Do it yourself gives children instructions for creating something by hand, like eye mask. About Nature includes specialities and activities dealing with nature. Slovak Towns describes nice places of Slovakia, gives tips for trips. Our Art is a gallery of pictures sent by children.
In developing the magazine we participate with two primary school teachers. Our inspirations are (beside our own ideas) Slovak textbooks and some game and activity books for little children.
All magazine activities are developed in Imagine Logo environment. Turtles and classes, events, dynamic programmable shapes of turtles, processes and net object are used mostly to program the activities. To browse the magazine, it is necessary to have the latest Imagine plugin.
Introduction Children don’t just have „to learn” new technologies but with their help they can better and more effectively learn everything else.
(Kalaš, 2007, p. 2)
To make teaching and learning more effective and interesting with the use of ICT we started to develop an interactive on-line computer magazine called Infovekáčik four years ago. It is aimed at children at the age of 6-10 years and their teachers. It consists of different interactive educational but still interesting game-like activities for constructivist teaching and learning, collaboration, development of creativity, logical thinking and problem solving. Each issue is oriented to some topic and most of the activities of the issue are adjusted to that topic.
The magazine is prepared by four members of our department and two primary school teachers. Sometimes also our students (future informatics teachers) help us with some ideas or simple programs. We can’t forget primary school children which contribute their pictures, poems or stories. The activities we have been creating are inspired by our own ideas, by Slovak textbooks or some other game and activities books for little children.
Most of the activities in the magazine are developed in Imagine Logo programming environment. We have chosen Imagine Logo because in our department there is a long tradition in programming in this environment. Also our students have lessons in Imagine Logo programming and so we sometimes use their projects in the magazine. Turtles and classes, events, dynamic programmable shapes of turtles, processes and net object are used at most to program the activities. To browse the magazine, it is necessary to have the latest Imagine plugin.
We will describe all the columns and introduce some interesting activities in following parts.
Editorial The first page of every issue of the magazine is editorial. Children can read short text about actual theme of issue there. Sometimes it is like a riddle – we don’t reveal the title of the theme and children have to guess, what the issue is about (for example about winter, the book, the calendar). The reading is important activity for children. They can develop their vocabulary and linguistic skills by these activities.
Let’s Explore In the first three years the Let’s Explore section was meant for K3 pupils. The goal of the section was to explicate three words not well-known for children. These words are connected to actual topic of issue -- we always choose them from editorial. We offer three possibilities of explanation for each word. The task for children is to choose the right meaning. If they choose the right answer, the picture which represents the word will be shown. The answers are often funny and children have no problem to guess the right answer, even if they don’t know the word.
In present time we try to focus on explaining some term or phenomenon in this section. We give children a tool – microworld – simple simulation, which enables them to “grasp” the term and play with its model, explore, change the important parameters. For example, in the issue Time we developed microworld, which shows how sundial works. In another issue we developed environment, which shows how the country is changing, when the temperature is changing, especially about temperature 0ºC. Children can control the temperature by the slider. In issue Snow, children can learn that the snowflakes can have different shapes and structure and can play with microworld, in which they choose from variety of snowflakes, change their scale and the speed of snowfall and then they can watch, how snowflakes change the country. In the issue Musical Instruments children can play virtual piano and observe the funny notes, which are put on the stave while pressing the keys. In the issue My Room children can read about cleaning the room and they can also try it virtually – they have to put the scattered things to the right places in
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prepared microworld. In issue Ice Hockey they can try shooting the puck to the hockey goal with goalkeeper from different positions.
Figure 2 (a) Sundial, (b) Piano
Let’s Solve In Let’s Solve column we can find various activities in which children can “prove“ their knowledge and skills in mathematics, native language and sciences. Activities are oriented to classifying, sorting, looking for pairs, looking for all combinations etc.
Classifying activities The aim of classifying activities is to categorize a set of objects into several subsets according to a given key or to identify objects with given properties. The tasks are for example:
to assign fallen leaves to the right trees, to distinguish fruits and vegetables, to classify words to nouns, adjectives and verbs, to classify letters to vowels and consonants, to find all multiples of a given number, to classify traffic signs according to their geometric shapes.
Sorting activities In sorting activities children sort objects according to a given criterion. For example they
place bowknots on a kite tail according to their size or tint, sort the packets according to their weight (scales are available), change the word order to create a meaningful sentence.
Looking for pairs In these activities the aim is to find pairs of objects that have some common property or they logically belong together, like:
an animal and its young one, homonyms – pictures illustrating two different meanings of the same word, a state on a map and its name, capital, river, typical food, an animal and a simile/metaphor related to it (e.g. as proud as a peacock).
Combination activities Examples of combinative activities are:
to give out three ice scoops of three kinds to two (three, four, five, six) children so that each child has another order of ice scoops and nobody has two or three scopes of the same ice,
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to create all possible pairs of hockey teams, to look for all possibilities how to distribute one (two, three, four) ice cubes into two
(three) glasses.
Figure 3 – (a) Sorting packets according to their weight, (b) Distributing ice cubes to glasses
Other activities Other activities include tasks to find out how many objects are there in the picture or vice versa to collect a given number of objects, to balance a scale, to find an object in a set of objects which doesn’t logically fit into the set, etc.
About Nature The goal of the About Nature section is to familiarise children with nature and its inhabitants, to make children think about nature, pay attention to their surroundings, respect and take care of nature. The information and activities in this section can encourage them in forming relationship to their environment.
Figure 4 Parts of About Nature section
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Children can familiarise with trees and animals which they can see in Slovakia, with animals from ZOO, with plantlets on meadow or in the flat… They can also learn remarkable things from nature such as how to get to the top of the oak, which tree grows fastest, which animals are the fastest, how the plants can protect. Some issues include simple games in this section. Some of these games can be used to repeat and practise the new pieces of knowledge, some are just for fun like composing the puzzle with a nature motif.
Figure 5 (a) Leaves and fruits, (b) Evolution stages of animals
Slovak Towns This section is aimed mostly at Slovak towns and their surroundings. The goal of the section is to introduce our country to children.
Figure 6 Parts of Slovak Towns section
In this section children can not only learn about Slovak towns, but they can find out how to determine cardinal points, which sights are written in the UNESCO registry, what are Slovak “best of”,… In some issues they can find also various games and activities. Children can for example colour the town crests, fill in the right letters to uncover hidden picture, guess the names of Slovak towns, rivers, do a jigsaw.
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Figure 7 (a) Colouring the crest, (b) Jigsaw
Let’s Play Together One of the modern ways of learning is collaborative learning. Collaborative Learning is a philosophy: working together, building together, learning together, changing together, improving together (Wieserma, N., 2000). Collaborative learning can be realised in different ways. In the magazine we concentrate on cooperation of children via the internet. Most of our net activities are intended for two “net players“, but there is also a possibility to use it without the net connection (either a version for two children on one computer or a version for one child). Here are some examples of the net activities and suggestions of their usage for teachers.
Memory Game Memory Game is aimed at enriching the English, German or Hungarian vocabulary related to some topic. One card in pair illustrates an object, the other one contains a picture of an object with a name of the object in a foreign language. We developed memory games related to, for example, fruit, trees, flowers, means of transport, toys, instruments etc.
Ludo In our version of Ludo game the aim of the players is to get to the destination on the road full of obstacles. The obstacles can be overcome by answering some questions like in a quiz. If the answer is right, the player can go on, if the answer is wrong, the player has to stay one round.
Drawing activity This is a simple activity enabling two children to paint in a shared paper and thus to create common works. Children from different places can for example paint with each other, what’s the weather like in their countries, how a concrete season looks like in their countries, how they spent last holidays, they can together design a maze, dream house or dream car, paint a bogey, an alien, a clown or anything according to their fantasy.
Cards The principle of the Cards activity is assigning titles to pictures – a word or a phrase. There is a set of pictures. For each picture two titles can be given – each player writes his/her own.
This activity can serve as a bilingual picture dictionary – each player writes own title for the picture in different language. It would be perfect, if the players were children from different speaking countries – they could teach each other own languages in this way. Other possibilities for application of this activity is looking for attributes of the objects in the picture (one child writes the name of the picture the other one an attribute), looking for synonyms, looking for diminutives.
Fairy Tale In this activity two children can create a simple fairy tale or an interesting story combining words and pictures together via the internet. A set of cliparts and a tool for writing simple text is
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available for them. Children put the cliparts and write pieces of sentences in the common “paper”.
Figure 8 (a) Cards, (b) Fairy tale
Mind Map In this activity children are given a central concept (a word) and they look for and add other concepts which relate to the central concept together. Applications of this activity can be various: either we can add arbitrary words or we can concentrate to certain types of words, for example attributes of the central concept (adjectives), verbs related to the central concept, synonyms etc.
Associations Looking for a concept (association) related to another concept is also the aim of the Association activity. For example cheese is an association to milk. Unlike Mind Map activity, where children look for words related to a central concept and thus create structures looking like a star (see Figure 9a), in Association activity children create a chain of associations (see Figure 9b), that means next concept always somehow relates to previous concept. Activity can be used to create various sequences, for example sequence of consecutive events, sequence of numbers, sequence of words such that next word starts with two last letters of the previous word (fish - shine – net …).
Figure 9 (a) Mind Map, (b) Associations
Guess a Trade This game was developed for the issue called Trades. Player A thinks on a trade. Player B asks player A simple questions via the internet. Player A answers the questions, but he/she uses just yes, no or I don’t know answers. On the basis of the answers, player B tries to guess the trade A is thinking on. If B guesses the trade within 10 questions, he/she is a winner – the roles of
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players change (A will guess and B will answer) and the game can start again. Otherwise the trade is revealed and the game starts again with the same roles of the players.
This kind of game can be used for practising properties of geometric shapes, properties of animals and flowers, for guessing persons‘ properties, numbers etc.
Let’s Sing Almost every month children can learn a new song in the magazine. A note record of the song is presented and it is possible to listen to the melody of the song (the whole one, just a verse or a concrete note). While playing the melody the actual note is highlighted. The child can choose from instruments for playing melody (e.g. piano, guitar, violin, flute, bells). Songs are usually related to the topic of the issue or to the actual month.
Sometimes the section contains different musical activity instead of learning a song. There are activities where children can compose a short melody using some instrument or special subjects (for example icicles, screaming ghosts, singing frogs). In others children listen to short melody at first and then they have to repeat it.
Figure 10Let’s Sing: (a) Learn a new song (b) Repeat a melody
Let’s Paint and Build One of the most famous children activities is colouring a black-and-white picture. In the Let’s Paint column we modify this activity. Children have to decode at first which colours to use to certain parts of the picture. In the black-white template there are just codes of colours, e.g. lower-case letter, arithmetical problem, geometrical figure or a digit. The second part of the code they can find in the palette, e.g. capital letter, result of the arithmetical problem, rotated figure or a Roman numeral.
Besides colouring pictures there are many activities for creating or building things in this column.
Research has shown that many of our best learning experiences come when we are engaged in designing and creating things, especially things that are meaningful either to us or others around us. When children create pictures with finger paint, for example, they learn how colors mix together. When they build houses and castles with building blocks, they learn about structures and stability. When they make bracelets with colored beads, they learn about symmetries and patterns. Like finger paint, blocks, and beads, computers can also be used as a “material” for making things – and not just by children, but by everyone. Indeed, computer is the most extraordinary construction material ever invented, enabling people to create anything from music video to scientific simulations to robotic creatures. Computers can be seen as a universal construction material, greatly expanding what people can create and what they can learn in the process.
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(Resnick, M., 2002, p. 33)
One group of creative activities include activities with the character of decorating or stamping. First the child chooses one basic object (e.g. gingerbread, mug, traffic sign, clock face) and then decorates it with varied decorations (we can also call them stickers, stamps or cliparts). Decorations can be coloured and moved. Completed piece of work can be copied to another application through clipboard, where it can be printed or saved to a file (from safety reasons print and save operations are not allowed in Imagine web projects). Here are some examples of this kind of activities:
creating an autumn collage from varied leaves, chestnuts, mushrooms etc., decorating gingerbreads – gingerbread with the shape of circle, star, flower, house or
snowman can be decorated with nuts, candies or coloured “sugar“, dressing Christmas tree with various kinds of Christmas decorations like balls, bells,
candles, apples, nuts, decorating ceramics – a piece of ceramics (jug, plate, teapot, mug) is decorated by
stamping varied ornaments (see Figure 11a), designing own traffic sign – using cliparts and basic templates of traffic signs it is possible
to create signs like No entry for scooters, Dance couples, Pathway for ghosts, designing clock showing actual time – choosing a clock face, type of hands, font of
numbers and kind of numerals (ciphers or Roman numerals), creating Christmas decorative chain lies in designing the chain shape and stringing
beads or stars. Beads and stars can be stringed “manually” one after another or a pattern for stringing can be designed – short sequence of beads and stars which are then automatically repeatedly stringed on the chain (see Figure 11b),
building a dream castle – several kinds of walls, bricks, windows, gates and dungeons are available.
Another group of creative activities can be called interactive building sets. Some of them are famous (mathematic) puzzles. In these activities children construct from varied pieces e.g. triangles, squares, pentominoes and solve given tasks. In many of these tasks rotation and reflection of pieces is necessary, sometimes also dynamic change of the shape (deformation) is used. Examples of these activities are:
tangram – all tangram pieces, tools for rotating, flipping and colouring pieces are available. Children can either solve a given collection of tasks (pictures, which can be put together from the tangram pieces – see Figure 12a) or create their own picture,
pentominoe – similar like tangram, children use pentominoes to cover given area or to build own pictures,
tessellation – at first children create an “Escher tile” deforming a square. Then they use it to tile a plane either automatically (tiling is realized by computer, children just select two
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colours – see Figure 12b), or manually (they place tiles to each other, rotate or flip them if needed and finally colour them),
building symmetric patterns in a square grid – children place little squares, circles or triangles into the grid. Simultaneously with the children’ construction a horizontally or /and vertically flipped construction is created (depends on the setting). In another mode one half of a picture and an axis is given – the task is to complete the picture so that the given axis is its line of symmetry. Size of the grid can be changed.
Figure 12 (a) Tangram, (b) Tessellation
Do it yourself In this section we offer some suggestions for skilful children. Instructions how to fold different origami (cap, boat, frog, steamer), how to make a kite, a bookmark and a book wrapper, carnival masks, finger puppets, paper watch, how to make Christmas stars from narrow strips of paper, paper tulip, recipe for buns, gingerbreads and so on can be found here. One of the goals of this section is to improve children’ fine motorics and creativity.
Figure 13 (a) Propeller with millhouse, (b) Picture with penguin
Our Art In Our Art section children can present their pieces of art. It comprises paintings with actual theme (see Figure 14a), which young magazine readers send us. Sometimes we obtain also literary works like stories or poems which are related with actual issue. We were surprised and pleased, when the fourteen years old pupil sent us his musical activity that he developed in Imagine Logo (see Figure 14b).
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Figure 14 (a) Our Art, (b) Musical activity
Our plans In the future we would like to prepare two new sections – one about “programming” and second about brain-twisters. We would like to improve children’ algorithmic thinking by tasks in which children have to manage characters for example with icon commands. In section brain-twisters children will solve tasks for development of logical thinking for example simple sudoku, painted crosswords or they will solve different crosswords.
We also would like to aim at teachers and acquiring feedback from them. We would like to know, how they use particular sections with their pupils, which activities are most popular and which activities are missing in the magazine.
Conclusion We believe that activities in internet magazine for children Infovekáčik contribute to constructivist teaching and learning of primary school pupils. Every month new activities and games appear on the web page infovekacik.infovek.sk, which children can use in schools with their teachers or they can play and learn at home. Children can contribute to the magazine with their paintings, stories or poems teachers can become involved in the development of the magazine by sending us ideas of activities or topics which will fit them for teaching.
References Kalaš, I. (2007) Formy rozvoja informačnej gramotnosti a informatickej kultúry detí (výskumná správa projektu Infant). FMFI UK, Bratislava.
Resnick, M. (2002) Rethinking Learning in the Digital Age [online]. In Kirkman, G. (ed.). The Global Information Technology Report: Readiness for the Networked World. Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 32-37. Retrieved March 28, 2007, from http://llk.media.mit.edu/papers/mres-wef.pdf.
Wieserma, N. (2000) How does Collaborative Learning actually work in a classroom and how do students react to it? A Brief Reflection. Retrieved March 29, 2007, from http://www.city.londonmet.ac.uk/deliberations/collab.learning/wiersema.html.
Infovekáčik magazine (2003-2007). Retrieved April 2, 2007, from http://infovekacik.infovek.sk.
