What's is the problem with problem solving?

What is the problem with problem solving? on Prezi

Recent presentation:

Turner, S. and Al-Sherbaz, A. (2012) What's the problem with problem-solving? Seminar Presentation presented to: Insights into the future of learning and teaching at Northampton, University of Northampton, 3rd December 2012.

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Problem-solving or computational Thinking

Confession time, this has been a research interest for me, along with a number of colleagues, since around 2005. It started with undergraduate students - investigating teaching and developing problem solving skills as a first step in developing programming skills through the use of LEGO-based robots and graphics based programming for undergraduate students. The main vehicle then for developing the problem-solving skills was the LEGO RCX Mindstorms robotics kits and series of gradually more challenging robot-based tasks. Lawhead et al (2003) stated that robots “…provide entry level programming students with a physical model to visually demonstrate concepts” and “the most important benefit of using robots in teaching introductory courses is the focus provided on learning language independent, persistent truths about programming and programming techniques. Robots readily illustrate the idea of computation as interaction”. Synergies can be made with our work and those one on pre-

Free Computing Resource: Junkbots and Scratch 1

The Junkbots project has been running for a number of years as an initiative to bring sustainability, computing and engineering together by building bots out of junk details of the project can be found at. https://junkbots.blogspot.com/ . Junkbot is an extension of the Research into teaching problem-solving going on at the University of Northampton please feel to visit https://computingnorthampton.blogspot.com/2019/01/problem-solving-research-outputs-and.html for more details. One of the criticism of the robot programming part of the Junkbots project is not everyone necessarily gets a go at the programming. To address this a new feature has been added to the project, using Scratch to play with the ideas. This is the first of a set exercises to play with these ideas. The cleaning robot shown is loosely based on the LEGO Mindstorms RCX. The commands all in the My Blocks section Exercise 1: Moving the Robot Cleaner around.: Now go to https://scratch.mit.edu/projec

Activity: Writing a translation program in Scratch

Scratch 3 the gift that keeps on giving; including the new extensions are Text to Speech and Translate; Text to speech - does as the name suggests, turns typed in phrases into speech via Amazon Web Services. Translate using Google (and I assume Google Translate?) to translate text between different languages. As an experiment, I wanted to play with clapping my hands, have Scratch the Cat ask me to enter a phrase and then convert that into French, German and Spanish with different voices. The resulting code is shown below. It is all started by a loud noise like a hand clap. The two extensions have been added to the blocks and are ready to go. The voice is initially set to Alto and the text-speech block has had the phrase "Please enter a phrase" typed in and says this. The ask block has the same question permanently set and the answer produced gets feed into the translations. The remaining blocks do essentially the same thing - change the voice; - take the phrase ty

Problem-solving

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