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Technically, the first module for my degree course will start 1 October.  But that’s a Saturday.  Who starts anything on a Saturday?  Heck, even weekends start Friday night.

So there are realistically two other dates which combine for a ‘soft start’ to the module, ahead of the 1 October hard start.  These dates are the Module Website Live/Open date, and the date materials are received.  One might think that this would be one or two days after the Materials Despatch date, but often materials seem to be received the day before this date, so who knows.

The website open date for TU100 this year is 6 September, and the Materials Despatch date is 9 September.  Since that’s a Friday, I expect that the materials will probably show up the following Tuesday.  So I’m going to call the Soft Start date for TU100 this year 13 September.  We’ll call that three weeks away.

So what’s happened lately, and what’s going to happen?

Yesterday, our Introduction Forums opened.  They’re rather hard to find, though.  The site they’re on is called “Student Support Forums” allegedly under the Student Planner.  But I can’t actually find a link to the Student Planner anywhere.  That’s one of the major flaws of the OU: They keep coming up with great new ideas, but they don’t remove all the old ideas, so it’s kind of like trying to find your way through a really old London hotel that’s been cobbled together from a few other buildings.  You can’t necessarily get to the next room by walking in a straight line.  It may require you to go back up the hall, take a lift down, over a hallway, take a half flight of stairs to a mezzanine, and then swing across a chasm to the room.

Anyway, don’t lose your link, or you’ll never find your way back to the Student Support Forums.  I think it’s because they’ve opened them before opening our website.

The Introduction Forums have been positively flooded.  There’s several dozen posts already for Computing & IT, and only the Psychology forum comes close to the same number.  And the Psychology intro forum looks like someone’s kicked over an ant hill.  There’s hundreds of conversations all over the place, so I don’t know if it’s lots of different people talking, or the same three creating a new thread every time they have a new thought.  I suspect the former, however, as I’ve read that Psychology had the largest intake of new students every year.

This kicked off a new spate of new Facebook groups. I think that’s really a good thing, though.  Because if each of these groups has a slightly different flavour, it’s going to be easier to find one that works for me and my specific needs.

It also brought up a topic which had been brought up a few times in the past couple of weeks: Sense.  Once again, Sense is the customised version of Scratch developed specifically for TU100.  Our Introduction Forum moderator sort of warned everybody that they’d damage their brains if they downloaded Scratch, and that they’d be risking eternal damnation if they downloaded Sense from the OU before the Official Grand High Link from the Module Website opened.

Which is rubbish.  Download Sense and play with it.  It’s not as good as modern Scratch, but it’s fun.  If you want a more useful language that’s still exactly as simple, download Scratch or use the cloud version.  Heck, download Scratch 1.4, which is nearly identical to Sense except for TU100 specific things.  If you want to know what to do with Sense, search for tutorials on Scratch 1.4.  Or, y’know, wait for the soft start.

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Course Title: CS002x Programming in Scratch
Provider: Harvey Mudd College via edX
Price: Free
Level: Introductory (suited to children)
Effort: 6 hours per week for 6 weeks, commencing on a set date
Prerequisites: None
Completion awards: Verified Certificate for USD$49

About the course:
This is not at all a bad course.  It’s well-suited to children, or really just about any ability level.  The children do need to be able to understand a fair amount of logic.  It’s a bit much for my 6-year-old son, even though he enjoys using Scratch.  (His ability level is simply knowing that command blocks are instructions for sprites, and lists of command blocks can be strung together.)

The course is described as a computer science course, but I really can’t feel like that’s justified. It’s a tour of Scratch’s capabilities, but doesn’t often describe theory or reasons for much.  There is an excellent amount of work with iteration, however.  One brief section also compares Scratch to industry standard programming languages, to show how the learning can be applied outside the Scratch environment.

Aside from it using Scratch, there was no prior indication that it was aimed at children, which it really is.  As Open University’s TU100 uses Sense, an off-shoot of pre-1.4 Scratch, there’s no reason to believe that a computer science course which uses Scratch must be a de facto children’s course.  There were plenty of students across many abilities and ages, so the discussion forums were a bit uneven at best.

The tour of Scratch begins with Scratch as the idealogical descendant of Logo incorporating a turtle graphics system.  This was bizarrely effective, because I was able to recall line-for-line programmes I wrote in Logo back in 1986 or ’87 after two weeks of lessons during elementary maths.  I reproduced it with just the addition of colour.

It winds past variables, iteration (as mentioned above), input, sprite-interaction, if-then-else logic, more iteration, functions, external calls, and even implies recursion with sprite clones.  Okay, for me, it took about 10 or 11 hours to get through everything but the final project, but that’s quite a list, and I can easily see it taking a young student a few weeks to get through that all.  But they will get through it all.  It’s all very logically laid out, it’s interesting, fun, and cool to keep them engaged, there are always lots of examples, and the progress made is a great confidence builder.

One confusing aspect is that the course has been adapted from some other curriculum, so it occasionally refers to weeks or other structures not present in the online, self-paced course.  It’s easy enough to ignore, but raises questions of how thoroughly prepared it is.

Two questions you might have for me are why did I take it, and what did I learn.

As stated, TU100 at the Open University, my first degree course module, uses Sense, which is based on Scratch.  Though I’ve played with Scratch before, and been impressed by it, I haven’t done anything in depth with it.  I was unaware of its true capabilities.  In a way, it’s a bit of a tragedy that I did that.

Scratch 1.6 is amazing.  It has functions, clones, lists, recursion … It’s great.  Sense, based on 1.4 or before, does not have clones, has no in-built stack for handling recursion data, and has to use calls for functions.  It appears as though it does have lists, in a custom solution.  I haven’t used it yet, so I’m still not sure.  I’m just lamenting that if I want to do recursion, I’ll have to use those lists to build my own stack.  Every. Single. Time.

And what did I learn?  Plenty!  One of my favourite moments was when I was polishing up my final project, and I wanted a custom score counter.  I searched the Internet for a Scratch solution, but couldn’t find anything that worked the way I wanted.  The closest I found was one which had a pre-set number of digits, with a separate sprite for each digit.  I realised that I could use recursion to call new clones of a single sprite to dynamically create as many digits as I wanted.

Another great moment is when I wanted to re-write a Rock-Paper-Scissors demo to include Rock-Paper-Scissors-Lizard-Spock.  The course wanted an If statement for each of the possible outcomes.  With Rock-Paper-Scissors, that’s just 6 possibilities.  With Spock and Lizard in the mix, it goes up to 15, and that’s already annoying.  So I diagrammed out the possibilities, saw a pattern, applied some modal maths, and realised there were really only three possible outcomes after said application.

So here are a couple of the things I created.  You can look inside any of the programmes to see how I did them, keeping in mind that I was learning as I went, so it’s not always the most logical way in the simpler programmes.

Jet Bike Steve: You Win Some, You Jetsam (Final project) WASD or arrow keys, up, W, or space to fire. 10 points per second survived, 10 points per star shot or collected, 25 points per bomb shot, and 50 points per guided-missile shot.

Derpa Deadfish (a game for my oldest boy)  You can go down, right, or left, but can only float up. Collect worms, avoid sharks (or turn them off), and use the safe-zone pad at the bottom.

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Course Title: How to Code – Systematic Program Design
Provider: University of British Colombia via edX
Price: Free
Level: Introductory
Effort: 5 hours per week, 5 weeks per course, 3 courses – about 75 hours
Prerequisites: None
Completion awards: Verified Certificate for each of the three courses (USD$49 or $50, depending on which link you click on), automatically awarded XSeries Certificate if all three Verified Certificates are awarded

About the course:
Go.  Sign up now.  I don’t care if you hate computers or have been programming professionally for years.  This is an amazing series and getting through the course is highly rewarding.

There’s a lot to say about this series.  For one thing, the level of effort required is very real.  It took me three or four weeks to get through all three courses, and I was staying up late for hours on end.  And I’m considering working through it all again so that I retain it longer.

Beyond that, let’s start with the concept.  The SPD course introduces the idea of designing a computer programme as an abstraction layer between the solution and the coding.  It’s a tool for producing a template for a solution which is orthogonal to the language being used.  And it’s genius.

SPD takes this method from the How To Design Programs book, by Matthias Felleisen, Robert Bruce Findler, Matthew Flatt, and Shriram Krishnamurthi.  It focuses on data-driven programme design, which was a new concept for me.  You define data, which informs what can be done with it, which influences function design, and so on.  By the end of the course, there were still experienced code-jockeys decrying the lack of well-named variables, without realising that when you’ve clearly defined your data and what it can and can not represent, it’s irrelevant. You can’t possibly be confused what “variable c” means when you’ve stated that the only valid data type for variable c is degrees Celsius.  If you’re an old hand at programming and haven’t used data-driven programme design before, it’s worth a look to evaluate why you do things the way you do them.

It uses its own beginner language that isn’t outrageously useful outside educational context.  It is Turing complete, but it’s a bit of a pain to use in real situations.  Its environment is also quite slow.  The reasons for not using a commercially viable language are discussed early on, and I wholeheartedly embrace those reasons.

By the end of the first course, you’re already designing your own programmes using the data-driven model. It was around this point that I realised the beauty of defining the data and describing functions based on it.  If data X has properties Y and Z, then I can write functions for X that read and/or modify Y and Z, either by itself, or in relation to other data.  It dove-tails beautifully with object-oriented programming, but the course doesn’t cover application of its high-level theories to low-level techniques with other languages.  (However, the ProgramByDesign project is also working on How to Design Classes which features at least a subset of Java.)

Professor Gregor Kiczales is one of the best technical instructors I’ve ever seen, and I used to do that professionally.  His focus is on getting the programme design right, so that the code can flow naturally from that design.

It is an amazing foundation for how to approach programming design.  Playing with Scratch, I didn’t imagine I could possibly apply the HtDP principles to such a strange and specific programming environment.  However, I ran into a few bumps so I broke out data definitions and templating, and solved the problems in minutes. (Note: Never underestimate the power of testing well-chosen and well-defined examples.)

Anyway.  Just sign up.  Sure, it’s 50 to 80 hours out of your life, but it re-introduces you to the digital world in a way which will undoubtedly increase your comfort with it.