Pi with Sugar and turtles as a learning tool

When the local Andalusian government in Spain decided to do away with Windows and the pseudo-interactive, rote-teaching software it ran and kit out all school computers with Guadalinex Edu (an Ubuntu-based Linux distro geared toward education), I was drafted as a teacher trainer to show school staff how to use some of their new tools.

My area of expertise at the time was Squeak, the Smalltalk implementation that came with Etoys, an educational layer atop Squeak that let students create scripts by dropping Lego-like blocks onto a workspace and snapping them together. If this sounds familiar, that's because Squeak was further developed into Scratch, the educational programming language that comes preinstalled in most Raspberry Pi operating systems.

As usual, I saw a certain amount of resistance among the teachers who were being forced to move beyond their comfort zone. One of them in particular was taking it especially badly and at one point exploded: "What am I expected to do now, learn how to program?!??!"

From Teaching to Problem Solving

On the inside I was unsympathetic, interpreting her attitude as "You want me to learn something that might make me a better teacher and help my students? How dare you!" However, I assured her that was not the aim of the course. Instead, it shifted material creation from teachers to students; hence, it was the students who were expected to learn how to program, not the teachers.

Squeak belongs to the realm of tools created to make student-centered education a reality. As such, these tools are meant to stimulate guided discovery. The teacher introduces the tools to the students and, at some stages, helps out if they get stuck, but for the most part, students should discover how to carry out tasks using the tools by themselves. Often, some students will end up knowing more about the tools than the teacher, and that's just fine in any student-centered classroom.

This approach flies in the face of what most information technology (IT) teachers and current national curriculums say should be taught. IT courses in schools concentrate on teaching tools for tools sake and the teacher's role is that of the dispenser of TRUTH. Teachers don't teach how to write, they teach the different options on Word menus; they don't teach accounting, they teach Excel functions.

The problem with this approach is twofold: First, it is not generative. As soon as students move to a different environment with different options, or the same options in a different place, or encounter a different paradigm (e.g., move from Windows to Linux or MS Office to LibreOffice), they hit a brick wall. Second, most of the functions of most applications are meaningless if they are not learned within the context for which they were designed. With a bottom-up, learn-about-tools approach, students become button pushers instead of resourceful computer users and problem solvers (see the "Problem Solvers" box).

The focus for the teacher, therefore, should be top-down – that is, setting the tasks and then letting students complete them with the Pi and its software and any other means the students deem necessary. To achieve this successfully, teachers on one hand need a working knowledge of the tools available so they know what is possible. As mentioned before, the teacher doesn't necessarily have to know everything about the tools, just enough to know how to start to solve the tasks set. On the other hand, the teacher also has to know the students well enough to choose tasks relevant to their lives and at the right level so that the projects will be challenging enough to engage the pupils.

Raspberries as Teaching Tools

The Raspberry Pi was designed precisely to be this sort of teaching and learning tool. The hardware is cheap and durable enough to be entrusted to students and small enough to be moved out of the computer lab. Additionally, the operating system and applications are generic and flexible enough to allow students to do whatever they want with them, as long as they solve their tasks.

However, I've found one set of tools missing from the default set provided with the Rasp Pi, and that is the Sugar Educational Desktop [1]. Fortunately, it is easily installed from the repositories with

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install education-desktop-sugar

Be warned that what follows is a loooong install, and the suite will eat up about 500MB on your SD card.

Sugar (Figure 1) was originally designed at Sugar Labs as the default graphical environment for the One Laptop Per Child project and implements many solid educational criteria. Once it's installed, you'll find an emulator in the Education submenu of Raspbian's LXDE desktop. If you would prefer to run Sugar full screen, type

Figure 1: The Sugar start screen shows a ring" that allows students access the different activities and tools.

sugar-emulator -f

from the command line (also see the "Sugar on Pidora" box).

yum update
yum install --skip-broken sugar-*

If you would prefer to run a standalone Sugar platform (this will make it snappier), log out from LXDE, type your username in the login text box (default is pi), and click and hold the left button on your mouse on the drop-down list that says Default Xsession to bring up a list of possible desktops. Still holding your left button, move your pointer down to Sugar and let go. Next, click the Log-in button, input your password (the default is raspberry), and click the Log-in button again to start the Sugar educational environment for you.

The Sugar "desktop" really isn't a desktop at all. The designers and educators in charge of developing the environment couldn't come up with any solid reason for implementing the traditional desktop metaphor for the classroom, so they scrapped it altogether and went with an activity-geared environment instead. In Sugar, you can only open one "activity" (application) at a time, and all your work is saved in the Journal, accessible through the notebook icon.

The activities are represented by the icons displayed around the circle and X that identifies the student in the center of the window. You can browse a list of extra activities by clicking the menu icon in the top right of the screen (Figure 2) and add new activities to the ring by clicking on the stars to the right of each item. Choose, for example, the Physics activity and then click on the circle with a dot in the center at the top right of the screen to return to the ring and see how this works.

Figure 2: The list view allows you to choose from all the activities installed.

As a side note, you can install more activities from the Sugar Labs website [2], but what you have installed is fine for the moment.