Kojo explorations
Scope[edit | edit source]
Learning coding to children using Logo language in a dedicated IDE. This book is about interactively exploring different topics in Math, Art, and Science via Programming. Here’s a quick word on these important areas of learning:
- Math is the language of structure and pattern, and underlies all of our efforts to understand the world around us in a systematic way.
- Art helps us to appreciate beauty and experience the mysterious, and kindles the creative and joyous spark in us.
- Science is our way of trying to make sense of nature (using Math).
- Programming is a systematic way of representing structure and pattern – in a formalism that can be executed directly on computers by us to do useful things like the following:
- playing with ideas (in Math, Science, and Art) .
- creating information structures (like the Internet).
- automating the world around us.
These are crucial subjects for kids to get comfortable with – to be literate, knowledgeable, and happy citizens of the 21st century world.
This book helps with the learning of these subject by getting kids to create things using them. With the help of this book, they create drawings, algorithms, electronic circuits, and sound effects. Later volumes in this series will help them create animations, games, robots, and more.
The interactive software used to explore the above areas in the book is called the Kojo Learning Environment. Kojo is an award winning open-source app that is used by tens of thousands of people around the world. It is powerful, feature rich, and robust, and is available on Linux, Windows, and Mac.
The ideas used in this book while creating things include:
- Math – unit length, distances, integers, rational numbers, fractions, ratio and proportion, percentages, estimation, angles (definition, supplementary, interior and exterior), circles, arcs, polygons, coordinate geometry, LCM, HCF, BODMAS, equations, arithmetic sequences, random numbers, symmetry, simple interest, averages, and visual and numeric patterns.
- Art – all kinds of shapes and colors, brought together creatively. • Programming – turtle graphics, values and variables, commands and functions, algorithms, primitives, composition, and abstraction.
- Science (Physics) – atomic structure, potential difference, current, resistors, and ohm’s law.
This book has a couple of additional, very important, goals – to give kids practice, via Kojo, with the following:
different modes of thinking – inductive, deductive, systematic, analytical, creative, etc.
learning how to learn new things using exploration, discovery, and feedback.
This includes helping them to learn various problem solving strategies.
These are essential skills for the dynamic, information based work environments of the 21st century.