Syllabus and course outline

Tuesday, August 20 Introduction

Activity

Watching Toys from trash for learning; Discussion on what “creative learning” might look like.

Thursday, August 22 Creative learning with digital materials: Playing with Scratch

Activity:

Making Scratch projects to introduce oneselves and adding it to the class gallery

Readings:

  • Resnick, M., Maloney, J., Monroy-Hernández, A., Rusk, N., Eastmond, E., Brennan, K., … Kafai, Y. (2009). Scratch: Programming for All. Commun. ACM, 52(11), 60–67. https://doi.org/10.1145/1592761.1592779
Tuesday, August 27 Design, technology, and learning

Readings:

  • Winograd, T. (1997). The Design of Interaction. In Beyond Calculation: The Next Fifty Years of Computing (pp. 149–161). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-0685-9_12
  • Resnick, M., Ocko, S., & Papert, S. (1988). LEGO, LOGO, AND DESIGN. Children’s Environments Quarterly, 5(4), 14–18.

Forum post

Describe a memorable and engaging learning experience (it may be in or out of class) that you have had in the past. In your post, be sure to include the following elements: Who was involved in that experience? Why was it memorable and engaging for you? Will the same experience be useful for others?

Thursday, August 29 Everybody designs! *

Readings:

  • Manzini, E. (2015). Design, when everybody designs: An introduction to design for social innovation. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
    (Excerpts)
  • Brennan, K., & Resnick, M. (2013). Imagining, Creating, Playing, Sharing, Reflecting: How Online Community Supports Young People as Designers of Interactive Media. In C. Mouza & N. Lavigne (Eds.), Emerging Technologies for the Classroom: A Learning Sciences Perspective (pp. 253–268). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-4696-5_17
Tuesday, September 03 Perspectives on creativity

Activity:

Students present the “toy from trash” that they built, and reflect on the process of making the toy.

Readings:

  • Hennessey, B. A., & Amabile, T. M. (2010). Creativity. Annual Review of Psychology, 61(1), 569–598. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.093008.100416
  • Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1996). Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. Harper Perennial.
    (Excerpts)
Thursday, September 5 Learning and creativity

Readings:

  • Duckworth, E. (2006). “The having of wonderful ideas” and other essays on teaching and learning (3rd ed). New York: Teachers College Press.
    (Excerpts)
  • Resnick, M. (2007). All I Really Need to Know (About Creative Thinking) I Learned (by Studying How Children Learn) in Kindergarten. Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGCHI Conference on Creativity & Cognition, 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1145/1254960.1254961
  • Sawyer, R. K. (2006). Educating for innovation. Thinking Skills and Creativity, 1(1), 41–48. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tsc.2005.08.001
Tuesday, September 10 Initial project ideas

Activity:

Students present their ideas to the rest of the class. Each student should present three ideas. If you are building on an existing project, be sure to explain what you are doing to extend the current project.

Thursday, September 12 Agency

Readings:

  • Brennan, K. (2013). Best of both worlds: Issues of structure and agency in computational creation, in and out of school (Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology). Retrieved from https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/79157
    (Excerpts)
  • hooks, bell. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. New York: Routledge.
    (Introduction, Chapter 1)
Tuesday, September 17 Motivation

Readings:

  • Rusk, N. (2016). Motivation for Making. In K. Peppler, E. Rosenfeld Halverson, & Y. B. Kafai (Eds.), Makeology: Makers as Learners (pp. 85–108). New York, NY: Routledge.
  • Resnick, A. (2015). How Children What?

Forum post:

From the three project ideas that you originally presented, choose one for your final project. In your forum post, describe the motivation for your project, and a planned timeline.

Thursday, September 19 Identity

Readings:

Tuesday, September 24 Reflection

Readings:

Thursday, September 26 Creative learning with physical materials: Playing with the Micro:bit

Activity:

Making projects with Scratch and the Micro:bit

Tuesday, October 1 Foundations of creative learning

Readings:

  • Singer, D. G., & Revenson, T. A. (1996). A Piaget primer: How a child thinks (Rev. ed). New York: Plume.
    (Excerpts)
  • Papert, S., & Harel, I. (1991). Situating constructionism. In Constructionism (Vol. 36, pp. 1–11). New York, NY, US: Ablex Publishing.
Thursday, October 3 Evocative objects

Readings:

  • Papert, S. (1980). Mindstorms: Children, computers, and powerful ideas. New York: Basic Books.
    (Introduction)
  • Turkle, S. (2008). Falling for Science: Objects in Mind. MIT Press.
    (Excerpts)

Forum post:

In the spirit of Papert's gears, write about an evocative object from your childhood.

Tuesday, October 8 Things to learn with

Readings:

Thursday, October 10 Ways of creative learning

Readings:

  • Papert, S., & Turkle, S. (1992). Epistemological Pluralism and the Revaluation of the Concrete. Journal of Mathematical Behavior, 11(1), 3–33.
  • Resnick, M., & Rosenbaum, E. (2013). Designing for tinkerability. In M. Honey & D. Kanter (Eds.), Design, make, play: Growing the next generation of STEM innovators (pp. 163--181). New York, NY: Routledge.
Tuesday, October 15 Ways of creative learning (contd…)

Readings:

  • Lessig, L. (2008). Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy. Penguin Press HC.
    (Excerpts)
  • Tseng, T., & Resnick, M. (2014). Product Versus Process: Representing and Appropriating DIY Projects Online. Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Designing Interactive Systems, 425–428. https://doi.org/10.1145/2598510.2598540
Thursday, October 17 Fall break: No class
Tuesday, October 22 Creative learning together

Activity:

In-class remixing of Scratch projects

Readings:

  • Bruckman, A. (2005). Learning in online communities. In R. K. Sawyer (Ed.), Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences. New York: Cambridge University Press.
  • Roque, R., Lin, K., & Liuzzi, R. (2016). “I’m Not Just a Mom”: Parents Developing Multiple Roles in Creative Computing. Presented at the Transforming Learning, Empowering Learners: The International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS), Singapore. Retrieved from https://repository.isls.org//handle/1/177
Thursday, October 24 Who gets to learn?

Readings:

  • Margolis, J. (2008). Stuck in the shallow end: Education, race, and computing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
    (Excerpts)
  • Buechley, L., & Hill, B. M. (2010). LilyPad in the Wild: How Hardware’s Long Tail is Supporting New Engineering and Design Communities. Proceedings of the 8th ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems, 199–207. https://doi.org/10.1145/1858171.1858206

Forum post:

Think of a toy or an educational technology that you like. Describe it, and write about who is excluded from using the toy or technology.

Tuesday, October 29 Who gets to learn? (contd…)

Readings:

  • Ladner, R. E., & Israel, M. (2016). “For All” in “Computer Science for All.” Commun. ACM, 59(9), 26–28. https://doi.org/10.1145/2971329
  • Stangl, A., Kim, J., & Yeh, T. (2014). 3D Printed Tactile Picture Books for Children with Visual Impairments: A Design Probe. Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Interaction Design and Children, 321–324. https://doi.org/10.1145/2593968.2610482
Thursday, October 31 Creative learning with physical materials: Playing with the Circuit Stickers

Activity:

Making projects with Circuit Stickers

Tuesday, November 5 Design insights from the field

Readings:

  • Resnick, M., & Silverman, B. (2005). Some reflections on designing construction kits for kids. Proceedings of the 2005 Conference on Interaction Design and Children, 117–122. https://doi.org/10.1145/1109540.1109556
  • Ryokai, K., Marti, S., & Ishii, H. (2004). I/O Brush: Drawing with Everyday Objects As Ink. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 303–310. https://doi.org/10.1145/985692.985731
Thursday, November 7 Design insights from the field (contd …)

Readings:

  • Silver, J. (Jay S. (2014). Lens x block: World as construction kit (Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology). Retrieved from https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/95590
    (Excerpts)
  • Mellis, D. A., Jacoby, S., Buechley, L., Perner-Wilson, H., & Qi, J. (2013). Microcontrollers As Material: Crafting Circuits with Paper, Conductive Ink, Electronic Components, and an “Untoolkit.” Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction, 83–90. https://doi.org/10.1145/2460625.2460638
Tuesday, November 12 Design insights from the field (contd …)

Readings:

  • Resnick, M., Rusk, N., & Cooke, S. (1999). The Computer Clubhouse: Technology fluency in the inner city. In D. A. Schön, B. Sanyal, & W. J. Mitchell (Eds.), High technology and low-income communities: Prospects for the positive use of advanced information technology (pp. 263–286). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  • Lui, D., Kafai, Y. B., Walker, J. T., Hanna, S., Hogan, K., & Telhan, O. (2019). A Revaluation of How We Think About Making: Examining Assembly Practices and Artifact Imagination in Biomaking. Proceedings of FabLearn 2019, 34–41. https://doi.org/10.1145/3311890.3311895
Thursday, November 14 Technocentrism

Readings:

  • Papert, S. (1987). Computer Criticism vs. Technocentric Thinking. Educational Researcher, 16(1), 22–30. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X016001022
  • Brennan, K. (2015). Beyond Technocentrism: Supporting Constructionism in the Classroom. Constructivist Foundations, 10(3), 289–296.
Tuesday, November 19 Learning and Politics

Readings:

Thursday, November 21 Critiques and Reflections

Readings:

Tuesday, November 26 Class reflections

Activity:

Students reflect back on what creative learning and desigining for creative learning mean for them, in light of the class

Thursday, November 28 Thanksgiving: No class
Tuesday, December 3 Final project presentations

Activity:

Students present their projects

Monday, December 9 Final project paper