beanz Magazine August 2019

Kids, Code, and Computer Science The Dreaded Zero-Day Virus

, a M , k o o g “L n i v i r D m ' I " ! r a aC

tting e G e Ar en If Cars v E ( r te n't)!

Smar e r A rs Drive

August 2019

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Physics From Scratch

“In the Middle" One of the First Makers

beanz magazine August 2019: Volume 7 Issue 1 Issue 43 (online) & 28 (print) ISSN: 2573-3966 (online) ISSN: 2573-3958 (print) beanz Magazine© is published bi-monthly, six times a year, online at http://beanzmag.com and in print.

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Publisher/Editor: Tim Slavin Staff Writers: Erin Winnick, Amy S. Hansen, Les Pounder, Bonnie Roskes, Simon Batt, Patricia Foster, Clarissa Littler, Jennifer Newell, Tim McGuigan, Bianca Rivera, Tim Slavin Contributors: David Dodge, Jay Silver, Jeremy Kubica, Colleen Graves, Daniel Fenjves, Ali Hagen, Emeline Swanson, Jean-Francois Nguyen, Paul Seal, Madeleine Slavin Back Office Magic: Wendy Garrison Copy Editor: Eileen Seiler Art Director: Kelley Lanuto Webmistress: Patricia Foster COVER IMAGE: AVI-RICHARDS, UNSPLASH

Publisher’s Note At the time you're reading this issue, school is just about to start.

We put together articles that might be fun to explore in the new school year.

Check out the citizen science projects, for example, and explorables using Scratch to manipulate data as a way to learn (and have fun!) in the classroom. There’s also Fritzing, an open source application anyone can use to design circuits without the bother of microcontrollers. We also have an article from Bianca Rivera, a librarian who works with kids ages 3-6, teaching them STEAM concepts and projects you can do too.

As you guessed by looking at the cover, there’s also an article about self-driving cars. In the future, kids and dogs and cats might be able to drive cars, or seem to, since it’s the car's computer that will do all the work. And speaking of dogs, do you know what dogfooding is? Find out inside. Plus articles about Scratch, making creepy faces with SketchUp, and the robot maker al-Jazari who lived in Turkey 900 years ago.

Finally, we’re really excited to introduce you to Jordan Reeves who built a unicorn glitter cannon she uses as a prosthetic arm.

Instead of shaking hands, she shoots glitter. Pretty neat, if you ask me. Jordan also likes to make lots of other things. Maybe she’ll inspire you to create fun practical things for your life?

Enjoy this issue. Thanks for reading, and have a great start to your new school year!

Tim Slavin, Publisher beanz Magazine beanz magazine (as Kids, Code, and Computer Science magazine, our earlier title) is a winner of Parents’ Choice, Tillywig, and Academics’ Choice awards: http://beanzmag.com/awards

Our Mission beanz magazine is a bi-monthly online and print magazine about learning to code, computer science, and how we use technology in our daily lives.

The magazine includes hard-to-find information, for example, a list of 40+ programming languages for education, coding schools, summer tech camps, and more.

While the magazine is written to help kids ages 8 and older learn about programming and computer science, many readers and subscribers are parents, teachers, and librarians who use the articles to learn alongside their young kids, students, or library patrons. The magazine strives to provide easy to understand how-to information, with a bit of quirky fun. Subscribers support the magazine. There is no advertising to distract readers.

The magazine explores these topics: Basics of programming and where to learn more, Problem solving and collaboration, Mathematical foundations of computing and computer science, Computational thinking, Recognizing and selecting computer devices, and the Community, global, and ethical impacts of technology.

August 2019

TRENDING TOPICS 2019, FLICKR

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Cover Story

Cover Story

Scratch Physics from Scratch

Concepts "Hey! There's No One Driving This Car!"

4 5 6 8 10

14

History What the Heck is Foo Bar Baz? Languages The Power of Weird!

Concepts Playing the Graphics Card History Gaming in the Dark Ages Concepts What Exactly ARE "Types"?

24 27

In the Middle Cover Story One of the First Makers

HTTP://MONKEYS.HYPERNOM.COM/

tidbitz

16 Mirror, Mirror, on the Monitor . . .

16 Getting Antsy 16 It's Just BASIC History 17 Engineers Create Life-Like Material 17 Olden Daze 17 Math Is Beautiful

11 12 13 18 21

Concepts Dinner Is Served!

Projects Citizen Science Concepts Cover Story Zero-Day Virus SketchUp Creepy Faces in SketchUp Projects STEAM Lab, Jr.

Projects Getting Your Analog on With Fritzing People Meet Jordan Reeves

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Parents

and Teachers Let's Explore!

contents

advanced

intermediate

beginner

scribe b u s / m ag.co m z n a e b http://

Concepts

2

Hey! There's No One

BY SIMON BATT

TARO THE SHIBA INU, FLICKR

Driving This Car! There’s a lot of buzz these days about cars which can drive by themselves. It’s the first step towards what’s called “smart cities,” where technology does all of the hard work for us. Unfortunately, a truly smart city is a long way off yet, but it’s fun and interesting to see how far we’ve come.

Driverless cars are one of the more exciting ideas involved with the concept of smart cities.

If engineers manage to design them well, and the public comes to like them, we may soon see cars driving around without someone behind the wheel. This does technically mean anyone could pilot a driverless car; maybe even kids!

The biggest problem facing these cars' designers is making them safe. As good as humans are at driving, we still make errors and get into accidents. Programming a robot to do all the hard work is even harder, so engineers need to really perfect this technology.

The main challenge with getting a car to drive itself comes from the way computers think.

Computers excel at doing small mathematical equations very rapidly but struggle at picturing concepts and ideas. A computer will be able to calculate 17 multiplied by 33 much quicker than a human, but if you then ask both of them to draw a cat, a human will do a lot better than a computer!

This is the problem that driverless cars have. If someone runs into the road, or an animal darts across, a human will be

able to respond appropriately. A computer, however, will simply see something move across its sensors. Was it a person? A car? A leaf? A candy wrapper? It needs to be able to calculate what it is without the same conceptoriented decision making process that humans go through.

So, how do computers know what’s around them? Driverless cars use radar to scan the surroundings and generate an image of what’s going on. It then has to use this data to figure out what to do.

The cars also use video cameras to get a read on what’s coming up on the road. For instance, if there’s a speed limit sign coming up, the video camera has to read it and tell the car to slow down. If road construction work is going on, the car has to be able to read detour signs and steer around the site.

Driverless cars can do one thing better than humans, however. Do you know how some drivers use GPS in order to get to their location? Imagine if the car itself can use the GPS to get around! This gives driverless cars constant access to the best routes in order to avoid traffic jams and other problems.

And what’s more, if smart cities become a reality, we might be able to see cross-communication. Cars will be able to talk to each other to avoid crashes. Traffic lights can update their status on the GPS so cars can pick routes with the fewest red lights. It’s a very exciting time for smart cars! b

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Languages History

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BY JENNIFER NEWELL

What the Heck Is Foo Bar Baz ?

Take a look at the pseudocode below: def foo(bar): “Happy Birthday “, bar end Can you guess what the following code will produce: foo(“Eva“)?

Since we replace the word bar with “Eva”, instead of reading “Happy Birthday ”, bar, it will print out Happy Birthday Eva. But what is a foo? How about a bar?

Foo and bar are commonly used placeholders in example code. They are not part of any particular programming language, and can easily be replaced by other names. In the example above, foo is used as the name of a function that takes in a name (such as Eva), and prints out Happy Birthday followed by whatever name was entered. Bar plays the same role.

It's a placeholder used to stand for whatever name will be entered.

Foo and bar (and baz as well) can represent functions, variables, or

parameters in example code.

Who thought of such strange names to use in example code?

There's a good chance that these words originated in a popular comic series, Smokey Stover, between the 1930s and the 1970s.

It is said that the author, Bill Holman first came across the word Foo on the underside of a statue in San Francisco’s Chinatown. He began using it in nonsense sayings and license plates throughout his comics (in Chinese, foo, often spelled fu, means happiness and good fortune). The term foo was most likely popularized in general hacker culture by MIT’s Tech Model Railroad Club, and finally became commonplace in computer science.

Today the terms foo, bar, and baz still pop up fairly frequently when a programmer is using an example to explain a coding concept. Other references to foo, bar, baz include Google’s “secret” coding challenge, Google Foo Bar, which can only be entered through

invitation, and a well-known annual hacker event, Foo Camp. However, using somewhat nonsensical terms of this sort is not usually the best idea when coding.

Take a second look at our original code, in which the function foo and parameter bar, are renamed to better describe their purpose: def insert_name(name): “Happy Birthday “, name end The function that inserts a name is called insert_name and the name that will be inserted is aptly called name. The mystery of the funny sounds within the code is gone, replaced by a description of what the code does. It is good to be familiar with terms such as foo, bar, and baz as you navigate your way through the world of coding tutorials and explanations, but you will often be better off using more descriptive names when writing your own programs. b

“Tent City" at Foo Camp MICHAEL EDSON, FLICKR

Does anyone like types in programming languages? If you’ve used typed languages like C or Java you might think of types as annoying things that get in the way. You have to annotate the labels with your code so that the compiler accepts the program you already KNOW is correct.

That’s why people like languages without type checking like Python, JavaScript, Lua, and Ruby.

But what if there was a language where the types are not only NOT annoying and DON'T get in the way, but let you do cool things Python can’t touch: a compiler that interactively helps you write code or proves your code works with no guesswork?

You're in luck, dear reader, because there are multiple languages like this! They're called dependently-typed languages. In this article, we'll be focusing on what I think is the most practical of them: Idris. Idris was created only a few years ago by Prof. Edwin Brady at University of St. Andrews in Scotland. (I have to point out that he also created the-absolutelyuseful-and-not-at-all-a-memelanguage Whitespace that ignores every character that isn't a space, a tab, or a newline.)

To get started with Idris you need to download it from the main website (https://www.idris-lang. org/) and install it. If you're on Windows or OS X there should be up-to-date binaries you can download, otherwise you'll have to build the compiler yourself—which is less intimidating than it sounds!

For the interactive programming experience you'll also need to download the code editor Atom (https://atom.io/)

and then install the Idris support by going to the Settings tab, clicking on Install, and then searching for and installing the Idris package.

Idris is a general purpose language suitable for a lot of things: web programming, graphics, and—if I have my way over the next couple of years— games writing.

The best introductions to Idris are the official Idris tutorial (http://docs.idris-lang.org/en/ latest/tutorial/index.html) and Edwin Brady's book Type-Driven Development with Idris (https:// www.goodreads.com/book/ show/26331996-type-drivendevelopment-with-idris).

I want to give you a taste of what dependent-type languages are, why they're weird, and why you want to use them anyway.

There's also a companion piece in this same issue, What Exactly ARE Types?, that covers some of these topics in a more conceptual way apart from programming.

The simplest way to explain dependently-typed languages is that they're languages where the types aren't just attached to data and checked at compile time. The types are data just like any other, and they can be returned by functions or computed in your program. Types can depend on data so that they can take a variety of shapes.

Here's an example of a family of types, one for each natural (i.e. whole and greater than or equal to zero) number: the lengthindexed vectors. These are lists that carry how many elements they have in their

BACKGROUND PHOTO BY VÉRONIQUE DEBORD-LAZARO, FLICKR; INSET PHOTO BY TODD TRAPANI, UNSPLASH

type. I'll show the code just as an example but then describe in words what it means. data Vect : Nat -> Type -> Type where Nil : Vec 0 a (::) : a -> Vect n a -> Vect (1 + n) a We're defining a new datatype called Vect. Vect depends on a natural number, which will represent the length, and another type a to represent the things that will go in the list. The next two lines define that there are two ways to make a Vect. The first is that it can be empty, or Nil, which means it has length 0. The second is that you can take an item of type a and put it into a Vect of length n in order to make a new longer Vect.

Vect can help prevent errors like writing past the end of an array, which is cool and helpful, but I think we’re ready to get really weird. If you check the online version of this article I’ll show you the code for defining, typechecking, and interpreting a tiny programming language into Idris.

Dependently-typed languages are weird, in the best way possible!

I hope you'll check this one out. b

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Languages

The Power of Weird!

BY CLARISSA LITTLER

Concpets

6

BY CLARISSA LITTLER

Playing the Graphics

If you're a gamer, you may be familiar with the idea of a graphics card. The graphics card is that really expensive brick of fans and metal that you plug into your motherboard in order to make your games look awesomer. But it's also an extra chip in your laptop or smartphone that's a lot less flashy. And what exactly does it do? It makes the graphics! Okay, article done, thanks for reading!

Wait, no. That was silly. Let's go through what exactly it does, but let’s work backwards.

You're staring at your screen.

Maybe it's your phone screen, or a laptop, or the 4k monitor on a sick gaming desktop. Either way, the screen is made up of millions of squares called pixels. These pixels can each display one of millions, or even billions on nicer monitors, of possible colors. Well, that's a subtle lie. It creates all of these many colors by mixing red, green, and blue light together.

How do all these pixels get their colors on the screen? All the data

for them was sent to the monitor from the frame buffer of the video RAM. What's the frame buffer? It’s like a flipbook: where there's a stack of paper and you flick through them so fast it looks like a smooth animation. Except the frame buffer is a flipbook where the page behind the page you can currently see is getting drawn while you're looking at the one on top of it.

The "page" gets flipped 60 times per second, or 120 times a second for really fancy monitors, and the computer has to start drawing the next page.

Next, let's talk about how each pixel in the new "page" gets drawn. Each pixel needs to know what color it will be for this new frame. These colors are calculated independently on a pixel-by-pixel basis by the fragment shaders, which are the last phase of computation by the graphics card.

Before we get any further let's stop and think about the mindblowing implication of this: we need to do calculations on millions

of pixels one by one and we need to do that in less than 17 milliseconds. That'd be impossible if you actually had to do a pixel at a time. That's what makes your graphics card special! You don't have to do these calculations one at a time but rather hundreds or even thousands at a time. How can a graphics card do this but the CPU in your computer can't?

Basically, it's because the graphics card's many tiny processors are a lot more specialized than the CPU that runs your operating system. They're only good for a small number of operations: the ones they need to do to render graphics!

The author’s rendition of OpenGL giving commands to all the shaders

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Card

So how do the fragment shaders calculate the color of every pixel? Well, the fragment shaders are given a bunch of tiny triangles to work with. These tiny triangles either have a color at each vertex corner or some data about which part of a pre-made texture they cover. The fragment shader can take this data and "fill in" the appropriate colors to the interior of the triangle.

Where do the tiny triangles come from? They're put into place by the vertex shaders. The vertex shaders take in the 3D models of your game, which even when they look smooth are made up of a ton of triangles and squares, and then perform all the transformations to rotate, scale, and place them in the "3D space" of the game to figure out which triangles are visible and which ones are blocked by other solid objects.

We're almost to the beginning now! The code that loads up the 3D models, textures, and tells the shaders what to do and how to transform the graphics all comes from the game. But how This is not a bad drawing of a slice of pizza. This is does a game the author's redition of the fragment shaders communicate interpolating between colors in a triangle. with the graphics

card? Through specialized APIs like OpenGL, Metal, or Vulkan!

These are libraries of code that every game engine, like Unity, Godot, or Game Maker, uses under the hood to render graphics.

So that's a little summary of how a graphics card works, but it's not even remotely the end of the story. There's also the story of GPGPU, general-purpose GPU programming, where people use graphics cards to do all sorts of cool things unrelated to graphics.

There's also the newest cool thing in graphics that only a few graphics cards can do: real-time ray tracing! We'll talk about all of these in future articles. b

SENTO, FLICKR

History

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Gaming In the

BY SIMON BATT

If you own a games console, or you play games on your PC, you’ll know about CDs, cartridges, and downloadable games. These are really useful ways of playing games, but what did people do before these things were invented? Yes, that’s right; there was a time where people played games that weren’t on CDs or downloaded off of the internet!

You may remember a few issues ago, we discussed how developers used to distribute their games over floppy disks. These were sort of like

CDs, but they were very fragile and, well, floppy! They had to be housed in a square, plastic shell to keep them safe.

They didn’t store a whole lot of stuff -- they only had room for 1.44MB of data! As such, if you wanted a game that was larger than that, you’d have to get multiple floppy disks, all with a different “part” to them. You had to swap them out during installation, or

even during gameplay!

Did you know, however, that people could distribute games before even these disks were around? Once upon a time, games came on cassette tapes. If you don’t know what these are, cassette tapes were an early way to play music. They were music files on long strips of tape, which were played on tape recorders. It was like music on a mini scroll!

Of course, keeping tape with music on it would be messy, so cassette tapes were small plastic houses to keep the tape safe. You put the whole cassette into the player, and it would read an exposed piece of the tape to play the music. It would even automatically go through the tape, reading all of the data on it.

Some smart people realized they could use cassette tapes to load programs into computers.

You hooked a cassette player into the computer’s microphone port, then played a tape with a program on it. The tape would then make an awful screeching noise which wasn’t pleasant to hear. This noise

BACKGROUND: MATHEW SCHWARTZ, UNSPLASH; CASSETTE TAPE IMAGE BY JORDAN WHITT, UNSPLASH

wasn’t for us to listen to, though; it was data in audio form for the computer to hear.

Do you know about binary? It’s those weird 1s and 0s that appear when computing stuff is shown on TV, or in the movies. It’s the very base of computer language, and it represents ‘on’ and ‘off’. 1 is on, and 0 is off. The tape played two different tones depending on if it wanted the computer to load a 1 or a 0, and the computer would hear it and load the corresponding data.

Of course, in order to load the data, you had to play the tape and have it transmit all the sounds to the computer. This took a long time to do, so it wasn’t uncommon to wait up to 20 minutes for your game to load!

Because games could be loaded using noise, this means you could share entire computer programs over sound alone. There was an experiment where games and pictures were sent over the radio, and people could record the sound and play it on their own cassette tapes. Of course, it didn’t quite take off, but it must have been exciting to record these games and wonder what you’re about to be playing!

The next time you download a game, imagine what it’d be like if you had to record your game off of the radio and play it to a computer for 20 minutes. Once upon a time, that’s how games got around; if anything, it makes you appreciate broadband connections more! b For more info on this article and ALL articles in this issue, check out the links on the back cover!

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Dark Ages I hop e this game finish es loa ding soon ...

Concepts

10

BY CLARISSA LITTLER

What Exactly ARE “Types"?

The phrases "statically-typed" and "dynamically-typed" describe programming languages: static typing means that a language has a phase where the types of all the data and functions are checked to make sure the program makes sense, and dynamic typing means that it does not. I think it’s better to call "statically-typed" languages just typed and "dynamically-typed" languages untyped since types that can't get checked or understood by the compiler/interpreter can’t really do anything except crash the program when a type error happens.

But what ARE "types"? They’re things that label and describe data.

Most typed languages have types for things like integers, strings, booleans, or arrays. Ever noticed that Scratch is a typed language?

The shapes of blocks correspond to the types. Triangular edges are booleans. Round edges are numbers or characters. Scratch won't let you put the wrong shape in a spot, which is its version of type checking.

Shapes are a really good way to describe types! They're also a good way to start talking about one of the cooler kinds of types that languages like Idris, also featured in this issue, have: inductive types.

Inductive types are a language feature that lets a programmer define an entirely new type by how it’s built. Here's our first inductive type as a scheme of shapes:

These two connectors form the entire description of this type. You can make any data of this type by fitting them together along their connectors.

What is this data, though? In a very real sense, these are the natural—that is, whole and greater or equal to zero—numbers. The end-piece represents "0" and you add one to the number for each triangular piece there is. Like so:

The neat thing about writing numbers this way is that if I hand you one of these numbers, n, and ask you to do something n many times—no matter what it is—you can easily write an algorithm that describes exactly how to do it because every traversal, or movement across the data, has the exact same logic as counting the data. For example, let's assume "the thing to do" is "jumping jacks" (because exercise is important): Look at the front piece of the data. If it's an end piece, stop exercising. If it's a triangle piece, peel it off, do a jumping jack, and then repeat this process for the rest of the data.

Let's modify our drawing a little bit so that it holds a slot for some other kind of data inside it: a left or right facing triangle, which represents true and false respectively.

Now we've got a thing that can hold data and ways to build it. It looks almost the same but now instead of numbers we've defined lists! Lists of booleans to be specific!

You can write your jumping-jack traversal for these lists like Read the front of the list. If it's an end piece, stop exercising. If it's not, look at the data inside it: if it's true then jump your jack, if it's false don't. Either way, repeat this process with the rest of the list.

Let's really put these tricks to the test. We're going to define a new datatype that's super-important in storing data for efficient search in databases.

Now how do we describe the generic traversal? Take a second and see if you can figure it out before I spoil it. Hint: there are two possible answers depending on a choice you make.

Were you able to get it? When you want to compute something for each part of the datastructure you either start at a branching part or an end node. If you reach an end node you're done with that part of the computation. If you have a branch, you need to act on the piece of data stored in the branch and then handle the left tree and then the right tree. (Or the right tree and then the left tree. You actually have a choice here!)

There's such regularity to these

They have both the tabs for the vectors that fit into each other and tabs to count the length of the list up near the top. You can see that as you put them together you're also building up the list as a natural number shape like we defined earlier! If you check the Idris article this corresponds exactly to the dependency the vector type has on its length.

The punchline here is that types have a structure that can be used to do neat things that make programming easier and let us express complex ideas simply. So as you learn more about languages like Idris, whenever you're confused just go ahead and try drawing the shape of the types!

Happy hacking! b

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Concepts

schemes for computation that languages like Idris and Agda can give you skeletons of code to fill in by just looking at the possible shapes the data can have.

There's even more complicated shapes you can make, which depend on the size of other shapes. Here's a drawing of the vectors from our Idris article

Dinner Is Served!

BY TIM SLAVIN

Dogfooding is short for “eating your own dog food.” As a software company or developer, this means using for yourself the software you write for your customers.

This has great advantages because you are able to see what the user experience is like for your customers. You are also more likely to fix a bug if it affects you in your daily work.

For a long time the compiler for Microsoft’s C# programming language was written in C++. Then the C# team at Microsoft created a new compiler called Roslyn, which is written in C#. It is a lot faster than the previous compiler and it has the advantage of now being crossplatform (it works on different types of computers). It's interesting that the code to compile the language into code is written in the language.

No one really knows where the term dogfooding or eat your own dog food comes from. In a 1980's TV commercial, actor Lorne Greene mentioned he fed Alpo dog food to his own dogs. And the CEO of Kal Kan Pet food also supposedly ate the company's dog food product at annual company meetings.

However, the first mention of the term in relation to computer programming was in a 1988 email from Microsoft manager Paul Maritz, titled Eating our own Dog Food, encouraging another Microsoft manager to use their products as a way to understand and improve them.

So now that you know what dogfooding means, can you find ways to try it yourself when creating a tool or application for other people?

What software do you use, or could you use, that you might also build for other people? b

YOUR BEST DIGS, FLICKR

Projects

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BY TIM SLAVIN

Citizen Science While it’s tempting to leave science to the scientists, it’s also easy to forget we live in the natural world of trees, lakes, rocks, and scientific data! Citizen science projects are a fun way for schools, families, community groups, and individuals to contribute hands on to science and our understanding of the natural world.

All you need is a smartphone, time, and an internet connection. Scientists post their projects and use data collected by non-scientists for their research.

For example, NASA has a citizen science project asking people to take pictures of trees from the ground so one of their satellites orbiting the earth can correctly calculate the number of trees on our planet. Turns out their satellite can count trees but can’t calculate the height of trees.

If you’re interested, here are several places to start. Search citizen science online and maybe add your country name to the search to find local opportunities.

SciStarter Citizen Science https://scistarter.com/page/ Citizen%20Science.html US Government Citizen Science Projects https://www.citizenscience.gov/ catalog/ Zooniverse https://www.zooniverse.org/ National Geographic Citizen Science Projects https://www.nationalgeographic. org/idea/citizen-science-projects/ Scientific American Citizen Science Projects https://www.scientificamerican. com/citizen-science/ Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_ of_citizen_science_projects Help NASA Measure Trees with Your Smartphone https://www.nasa.gov/feature/ goddard/2019/help-nasa-measuretrees-with-new-app NASA Globe Observer Citizen Science Program https://observer.globe.gov/ b

PAULA LAVALLE, UNSPLASH

Zero-Day Virus The phrase “zero-day virus” may seem very scary, as if a virus is some sort of zombie outbreak! But, zero-day viruses are very important to security and antivirus companies, as watching out for them makes up the backbone of the work they do.

But what are they?

First, let’s look at how an antivirus works. To make sure nothing nasty creeps into your computer, an antivirus has a log of every virus known to man. This is known as the “virus definitions,” and is essentially a log of programs known to be bad.

If an antivirus detects one of these programs trying to sneak onto your PC, it locks it away in a process known as “quarantining”.

Let’s imagine the above scenario is like a group of stores. These stores are experiencing a nasty shoplifting epidemic, so they all hire the same security company to protect them. This security company sets up a camera at the front door of every store to read people’s faces as they enter.

When the security company hears that someone has been found to be shoplifting,it takes a face scan of that person and puts it in its database of shoplifters. Then, when a shoplifter enters the store, the security company can warn the store about them.

This sounds great at first, but there's a problem. This method doesn’t stop someone who hasn’t shoplifted at all from stealing.

Someone can enter a shop, take something, and leave without the camera alerting the store of the problem. Only when a thief is actually caught are their details

uploaded to the database.

A zero-day virus is like this shoplifter. They’re viruses that were learned of on that very day; hence, “zero-day.” Because they were made that day, antiviruses don’t have a definition for them. That means the virus can sneak onto computers without being detected and cause havoc.

Antivirus companies have to be on constant guard for these zero-day attacks. As soon as they spot one, they need to design a definition for it and upload it to everyone’s antivirus software. If they don’t do it fast enough, people’s PCs may get infected as a result!

This is why it’s very important to keep your antivirus updated. When you update it, you’re giving it all the latest news on the virus scene so it can do a better job protecting you. This means fewer viruses can sneak under your antivirus’ radar as a result.

Of course, there are ways to detect viruses without a definition. In the shoplifting example, the security company can fix this flaw by installing cameras around the stalls and watching for people stealing. Similarly, an antivirus can look for programs trying to mess with important files and stop them before they can.

But what if we didn’t have to rely on definitions, and can instead tell a computer what

TIM DOUGLAS, FLICKR

a virus looks like and how to stop it? That’s exactly what antivirus companies plan to do in the future with AI-driven decisions. Instead of relying on sending virus definitions to users, an AI-based antivirus can catch a zero-day virus the moment it appears and keeps it from spreading. Very smart stuff!

The next time your antivirus asks permission to update itself, be sure to let it. Who knows; it may be protecting you from a nasty zeroday virus! b

13

Concepts

BY SIMON BATT

14

e h t f o e On Makers t s Fir

In the Middle: A Deeper Dive Into Everyday Stuff

BY TIM SLAVIN

If Badī' az-Zaman Abu l-'Izz ibn Ismā'īl ibn ar-Razāz al-Jazarī were alive today, we would call him a maker. Born in 1136 in what is now modern day Cizre in southeast Turkey, al-Jazari lived until 1206 during the Islamic golden age.

He was a scholar, mathematician, inventor, mechanical engineer, craftsman, and artist.

He was chief engineer at the palace of the rulers of eastern Anatolia, a region of Turkey at that time. He built water systems, clocks, and automatons, mechanical robots that amazed people who saw them.

In 1206, al-Jazari wrote a book, The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices, to describe 100 devices he had built, with instructions on how to build them. It was essentially a DIY book for the thirteenth century!

He illustrated his book with beautiful, intricate paintings of his work, some of which you can see here.

His contributions include countless significant developments in mechanisms, methods, and process that are still used today.

Many consider him the da Vinci of the Muslim world (and consider da Vinci the al-Jazari of the European world, for that matter). Imagine if al-Jazari had lived today with sensors, LEDs, Pis and Arduinos, soldering irons, and all the tools we use to make things.

Elephant Clock The Elephant Clock used water weight to track time. The elephant moved and made sounds every half hour. The clock also included a human automaton, as well as a dragon and phoenix. There are two modern examples of this clock you can see in Dubai and Mardin, Turkey.

15 BORDER ART IMAGE: STINGING EYES, FLICKR; ALL OTHER IMAGES:WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

Musical Robot Band This drawing shows four musician robots that rode in a boat on a lake to entertain guests. The boat used water flow and pegs to bump levers to play a drum machine.

Candle Clocks al-Jazari improved on the ability of candles to burn at a steady rate, for example, removing burnt wax and using the weight of the remaining unburnt candle to push it up at a constant speed to track time. His clocks also used dials to display time.

Castle Clock Eleven feet (3.3 meters) high, this clock kept time and tracked the transit of the zodiac signs, sun, and moon. A crescent moon acted as a pointer which travelled across the top of the clock, causing doors to open every hour and reveal mannequins. The clock also tracked varied length of days and nights over the year.

b

tidbitz

16

Mirror, Mirror, on the Monitor...

A smart mirror projects HTTPS://MAGICMIRROR.BUILDERS/ weather, calendar, and other useful information on a mirror, for example, in a bathroom or hallway. While it sounds like a difficult and exotic project, it’s a one-way glass mirror set into a frame with a computer monitor behind and a Raspberry Pi as the computer. The monitor size determines the size of the mirror glass. There’s also an open source project called the Magic Mirror platform with code and help. If you’re interested, definitely check out the project. b https://magicmirror.builders/ https://www.howtogeek.com/414647/how-to-build-a-smart-mirror/

Getting Antsy

While a single ant can’t do much, colonies of ants can do amazing complex feats due to the biological algorithms or rules they follow. Deborah Gordon, a biology professor at Stanford University, studies red harvester ant colonies in the Arizona desert. She studies the way different ant species have developed algorithms to respond to their environments, for example, to balance water intake, build routes, and find food. These algorithms can benefit humans, too. b https://www. wired.co.uk/ article/antalgorithms-nature PUBLICDOMAINVECTORS.ORG

It's Just BASIC History Before the Python programming language, in 1964, two math professors at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire created one of the first user-friendly computer programming languages. It’s called BASIC, for Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. Versions of BASIC are still in use today. The US state of New Hampshire recently posted a roadside marker to recognize the creation of BASIC, an honor usually reserved for bridges and places where famous people did famous things, like all the places George Washington slept. b https://www.concordmonitor.com/BASIC-Dartmouth-Kemenytime-sharing-historical-26164409

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Engineers Create Life-Like Material Cornell engineers used DNA to create a material with the three traits of life, metabolism with the ability to self-assemble and organize itself. While the material is life-like, it is not alive. Yet. Their research explores how to create materials that mimic organic life like humans and animals, as well as the elements that we recognize as life. b https://news.cornell.edu/ stories/2019/04/engineerscreate-lifelike-material-artificialmetabolism

CORNELL CHRONICLE: NEWS.CORNELL.EDU

Olden Daze

To celebrate 10 years of Minecraft, the developer Mojang has released a version of the original game— complete with bugs!—that can be played in a web browser. There are only 32 types of blocks to build with, for example, and a simpler interface. It’s a fun way to experience the difference between today’s version of the game and when it first became available. b https://classic.minecraft.net/ https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/article/ embrace-past-minecraft-classic Hey, Paw! Let's go play classic Minecraft, just like the old days!

Yer right, Maw. Old-fashioned games make me SO happy!

Math Is Beautiful

Journalist Stephen Ornes has published a book that explores how math concepts and equations can generate beautiful images that reveal their inner workings.

Unlike finding math in paintings or sculptures, these images are generated from math concepts.

While he didn’t include Monkey See, Monkey Do because the threedimensional image doesn’t fit a twodimensional book, you can go to the link below to see them move on the full screen. b https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ beautiful-math/ https://www.sterlingpublishing. com/9781454930440/ http://monkeys.hypernom.com/

SketchUp

18

BY BONNIE ROSKES

Creepy Faces in SketchUp This easy project starts with a harmless looking 2D face:

And turns it into something a bit weirder (and creepier?):

When you start modeling in SketchUp, you start in this view, with Josh standing on the ground. He isn’t needed in this model, so press E for the eraser, and click on any of Josh’s edges.

Now that Josh is gone, we want to start the model in Plan view (also known as top view or bird’s eye view). Click the Views icon on the right side.

SketchUp is a free program for 3D modeling. You can use SketchUp to design just about anything, from furniture to a dream bedroom to an entire city.

There is a downloadable version called SketchUp Make, which you can get at https://www.sketchup. com/download/all. The free, web-based version of SketchUp can be found online at https://app. sketchup.com/app.

In the Views window, click the Top view icon.

Now we’re looking straight down at the “ground.”

Press C for the Circle tool and draw a circle anywhere, at any size.

Draw another two arcs for the mouth.

To make a copy of the eye, it must be selected first. Press the Spacebar for the Select tool and click the eye shape.

Add another circle for one eye.

The second eye will be a copy of this one.

Then press M for the Move tool.

If you’re a PC user, tap (don’t hold) the Ctrl key to make a copy. Mac users: tap the Option key. Click anywhere to start the move, move your mouse to the right, and click again to place the copy.

For the eyelid, press A for the Arc tool. An arc is created with three clicks: start, end, and middle.

Clean up the eye by using the Eraser again, removing the top part of the eye circle.

Now all small faces inside the circle need to be erased. Activate Select and press and hold the Shift key to select multiple objects. Then click all three shapes (two eyes, one mouth) to select them.

Press the Delete key, and the three faces are gone.

This 2D face needs to be pulled up, so we need to change the view.

If you have a three-button mouse, keep the middle button (which is usually a scroll wheel) pressed and drag the mouse up. If you don’t have this kind of mouse, press O for the Orbit tool and drag the mouse up

Press R for the Rectangle tool, and draw a rectangle on the “ground” that surrounds the 3D face.

We need to make a change to the face, but this can’t be done while the face is “locked” inside its group. So right-click on the face group and choose Edit Group. (You can also activate Select and doubleclick a group to open it for editing.)

Activate Select and select the top face of the group.

can close the group. You can either activate Select and click anywhere in blank space, or right-click in blank space and choose Close Group.

Now orbit to a view like this, select the group, and activate Move.

Move the group straight down, just a bit, so that the rectangle is around the middle of the 3D face. Tapping the Up arrow keeps the mouse exactly vertical.

Right-click on the rectangle and choose Intersect Faces/with Model.

Press P for the Push/Pull tool, click the face, and pull it up a bit.

To twist the face, press Q for the Rotate tool. Click to place the protractor somewhere around the center of the face.

Activate Select and press Ctrl + A or Cmd + A to select everything.

Then right-click on any selected face and choose Make Group.

Move your mouse away from the center, and click anywhere to start the rotation. Then click again to end it when the rotation angle is around 30 degrees.

Once a group is created, it is highlighted as a single object. Having this as a single object will make it easier to erase later.

Now that the face is twisted, we

This creates edges everywhere the 3D face meets the rectangle.

You can already see how these edges form a zigzag border.

Now erase the group - it’s easy to do since it is a single object and can be erased with one click.

In order to make all of the small Continued

19

20 faces separate, select everything again and run Intersect Faces/With Model again.

Now you can get creative! An easy thing to do is to create offset curves. The Offset tool is part of the Push/Pull flyout toolbar on the left.

To create offsets, click the face to offset, move the mouse a small distance, and click again.

To paint your face, open the Materials window, and click the Browse icon to find the categories of colors and materials.

Click the color to paint with, and paint faces one at a time. b There's lots more online. Check the link for this article on the back cover.

A preschooler programs a Code-a-Pillar and shows off his work

Children and a Librarian look on while preschooler works with Start-Up Circuits

HENRY BURROWS, FLICKR

STEAM Lab, Jr.

A typical preschooler’s schedule is packed. Think you can’t squeeze in coding and circuits between preschool and play dates? Think again!

In response to the push for STEAM starting even before elementary school, our library now offers pre-coding programs for preschoolers! Our STEAM Lab Jr. programs allow children ages 3-6 the chance to work with popular STEAM learning toys including Code-a-Pillar, Code & Go Robot Mouse, Scratch Jr., Start-Up Circuits, Snap Circuits Jr. and Gears! Gears! Gears!

Children learn best by experimenting through play and STEAM learning toys are a natural choice for teaching computational thinking. Read on for tips on how to manage your own program.

Things to Consider

Cost All of the following recommended STEAM learning toys can be bought online at reasonable costs. Our initial startup cost (not including the iPads for Scratch Jr.) was approximately $250. We decided the following was the appropriate amount of equipment for a group of up to 12 children.

Preschoolers creating with Scratch Jr., mirroring their program on the Smart Board

• Code-a-Pillar: $30 each (we bought 5 for a total of $150) • Code & Go Robot Mouse: $40 • Start-Up Circuits: $20 • Snap Circuits Jr.: $20 • Gears! Gears! Gears!: $20 • Scratch Jr. is free but you will need tablets (not available for PCs)

Location, Staffing, Time of Day Our STEAM Lab Jr. programs take place in an enclosed room at the Library. The floor is tiled (a must as the Code-a-Pillars should not be used on carpet). We set up 4 small tables and several chairs for the table top activities. The Code-a-Pillars are left on the floor. A library staff member sits at each station to manage the activity. We encourage parents to engage with their children and help them through the activities.

We found we had to offer the programs two times a day (morning and afternoon) to accommodate children that are in preschool or cannot attend the morning program due to naptime and lunchtime.

Attention Span Attention span is an issue. Children at this age have the most difficulty with tasks that involve sitting, listening and learning in group settings—all factors that are important when teaching pre-coding skills.

Educators recommend some strategies to overcome these issues.

Instructions should be broken into small, incremental steps and demoed before the children try. Activities should be short—no more than 8-10 minutes per activity. Children should be given a choice of which activities they can do.

Overall, I have had nothing but positive feedback and have been asked if this was going to become a regular offering. I’m thrilled to see there’s an interest in preschool STEAM and cannot wait to see what new STEAM learning toys become available in the future. b

21

Projects

BY BIANCA RIVERA

Scratch

22

BY CLARISSA LITTLER

Physics From Scratch Hi Scratchers! Let's talk about movement in Scratch. The movement blocks can be connected together to change your x and y position, to move in the direction your sprite is facing, or move smoothly between two points. It's harder to move more realistically.

Let's define a few terms: Position, Velocity, and Acceleration. Position is where you are, Velocity is how your position is changing, and Acceleration is how your velocity is changing.

The difference between velocity and speed? Speed is how fast you're going, but Velocity is your speed and the direction you're moving.

You can't feel velocity. You can be going super fast but not know it, like if you're in a train that's on smooth tracks. You only can feel acceleration!

With coordinates in Scratch we can move up and down and left and right, which are our y and x coordinates, respectively.

Scratch already has the x and y coordinates defined for a sprite.

You'll need to define x and y velocity variables yourself, though: A This is too simple, though. We're not having realistic acceleration. To do that we need to change all our code that sets velocity to blocks that change velocity: B Holding down the arrow keys moves you faster, but you start slow.

Next is gravity. We'll look at both the simplified gravity for when you're close to the ground as well as the full version of gravity that governs how planets orbit the sun.

The simple version you'd use in a platformer: assume gravity is a constant acceleration down. Here's a "flappy bird" physics example: C

Our gravitational acceleration in this case is the line that changes velocity to be more negative every loop. It follows the same pattern.

Here's our first example where the acceleration isn't constant either: planetary orbits!

Gravity gets weaker the further you are from the object. The acceleration due to gravity if you're orbiting a planet, in the x and y direction respectively, looks like a_x = - g*xD/r^3 and a_y = - g*yD/ r^3 where xD is the distance to the planet in the x direction, yD is the distance to the planet in the y direction, r is the distance to the planet, and g is a gravitational constant that you can set as you wish in a game: D This is a realistic simulation of planetary orbits, and we did it on a site for making video games!

You can even make pendulums— which physicists call "harmonic oscillators"—easily: E This is tricky. Can you read through this code to figure out what it is? Here, our acceleration and velocity aren't for the x and y coordinate! Instead, our coordinate is the angle our pendulum is swinging through. 0 degrees is pointing straight down at rest and pointing right is 90 degrees, pointing left is -90 degrees. So the math for a pendulum is the same as the math of a weight bouncing up and down on the end of a spring.

That's a whirlwind introduction to making realistic movement in Scratch. If you keep in mind the difference between your position, velocity, and acceleration you can code up all sorts of things! b

Check out the link on the back cover of this issue for full versions of all these code snippets.

23 A

B

C

D

E

For info on Scratch go to https://scratch.mit.edu

Projects

24

r u o Y g n i t t Ge n O g o l a n g A n i z t i r F h t i W

BY LES POUNDER

Ta-dah!!

For this issue we do away with complex micro controllers and CPUs and we go analog! We shall design a simple circuit to turn on an LED using a free application called Fritzing. Then we will challenge our family to build the circuit for real! Can they follow the instructions and create a flashing LED? In this project we will learn how to create circuits using Fritzing, how a circuit works, how to create a Bill of Materials (BoM), how to use our diagram in applications, and how to test our circuit diagram by building the project.

What Is Fritzing?

Fritzing is an open source application created to enable anyone to design circuits using electronic components. It is a powerful tool, yet it is accessible to all thanks to an interface that works in a similar manner to Adobe Illustrator/Inkscape. With Fritzing we can design circuits on breadboards, protoboards and circuit boards. We can then export those diagrams to use on the web or in Word /

Powerpoint etc. We can even create a shopping list automatically in HTML format!

Installing Fritzing

Fritzing is a free application available from http://fritzing.org/

and it is available for Windows, OSX and Linux computers. Download the version for your operating system and install as per the instructions. In this tutorial we shall be using the Windows version.

25

l • An LED You'l • Male to male jumper wires : Need • Breadboard • AA (or AAA) battery holder with wires

The User Interface

Fritzing presents us with a large breadboard, a component that enables us to test circuits without soldering. Breadboarding projects is always the first step when designing a new project. This is called the Breadboard area and it is where we will build our circuits. To the top right you can see the components in a section called “parts”. These are the parts we use to make a circuit. Just under the parts section, the bottom right of the screen is the “Inspector” which provides detailed information about a part and enables us to edit the properties of a part. For example if we select a resistor, we can change the resistance value to match our needs. We'll do that later.

• A 220 Ohm resistor (Red-Red-Brown-Gold) • A push button • 2 x AA (or AAA) batteries • A computer running Windows or OS X

complete look down the parts to find the “Battery” component. Left click on the component and in the Inspector section you'll see it's a battery pack. 2 x AA batteries for 3V.

Now drag this part into the main area. We positioned it a little to the left, enabling us to build the circuit on the right.

Your First Circuit

Let's start by deleting the large breadboard. Click on it and press the Delete key on your computer, or you can right click and select “Delete”. Now go to the Parts section and click on the spy / magnifying glass to search.

But before we can search Fritzing we'll need to scan all of the parts.

Once done type in “3V battery” and press ENTER. When the search is

component. Drag a resistor into the Breadboard area and then take a look in the Inspector section. We need to change the resistance to 220Ω. Use the dropdown menu for “resistance” to do this. You will see that our resistor changes color to Red-Red-Brown-Gold which is the correct four band color code! The resistor is used to stop the LED from drawing too much current from the batteries. LEDs are very greedy and will take as much current as they can get. This will give us a bright LED, but it will soon burn out. Using a resistor means that we can reduce the amount of current that the LED can use and save the LED from burning out.

Lets add another component.

We once again use the spy/ magnifying glass to search, but this time we are looking for a “mini breadboard” and it should appear

So we have power, but now we need another component. This will be a resistor which can be found in the “Core” parts. It is the top left

as the third component on the top row. Drag this to the Breadboard area and then place the resistor on top of the mini breadboard. The resistor will drop into place.

We have two components, our resistor and power supply, but they are not connected. So to connect them we need to draw a wire between them. To do this, left click and hold the breadboard hole under the left leg of the resistor. Then drag the wire to the red wire of the power supply. Then let go. The two

26

are now joined together and this means that power from the battery can flow through the resistor.

To change the color of the wire we need to look to the Inspector section and change the color to Red which is the traditional color for wires handling voltages. We can change wire colors at any time. Just click on the wire and change it in the Inspector.

The next component that we require is an LED, a Light Emitting Diode. The LED can be found in the CORE section of parts, in the Output subsection. Drag the LED to the breadboard area but do not put it in the mini breadboard. Before we can use it we need to “Flip” it. Why? Well, an LED is a diode and that means that current can only flow in one direction. So in order to use it in our project we need to click on “Flip” so that the bent leg of the LED is on the left. Now place the LED on the mini breadboard so that the

left leg is in the same column as the right leg of our resistor. This means that they are electrically connected in the circuit.

The next component is a push button, which can be found in the CORE parts under Input. This button is sometimes known as a momentary switch and when pressed it can make or break a circuit. Drag the push button to

the breadboard and place it over the grey bar in the middle of the breadboard so that the top left leg is in the same column as the right leg of the LED. The grey bar represents a break in connections between the

top and the bottom halves of the breadboard. The button will bridge over the gap. When the button is pressed it will connect the top left leg to the bottom right, enabling the flow of current from the red wire, via the LED and resistor, through the button and to the black wire (GND) which completes the circuit and causes the LED to light up. When the button is not pressed, the circuit is broken and the LED is unlit.

The last step is to make a connection from the bottom right of the push button to the GND (black wire) of the batteries. This will complete the electrical circuit. All we need to do is draw another wire from a hole in the same column as the bottom right leg to the black wire of the batteries. Again change

the color using the Inspector. Black is traditionally used to indicate Ground (GND). Save your project as LED before moving on.

Exporting Images and Creating a Shopping List

Fritzing makes it really easy to export our work for use online or in print. Go to File >> Export >> As Image and you will see that there are different options. We can export as bitmap images for use online or in documents or we can export as an SVG, PDF for use in vector

applications like Adobe Illustrator or Inkscape. Exporting as an SVG is very useful if you wish to edit the diagram further, for example adding backgrounds and images to illustrate the project.

Let's create a shopping list of parts. Still in the export menu we can see List of Parts (Bill of Materials). Click on this and it will ask you to name and save the file.

The default name is the same as our Fritzing project and the save location is the same as where our project was saved. Click on Save

and the Bill of Materials (BoM) will appear in a web browser showing us the exact parts we need for the project. This can be shared online and used as an insert for any projects/kits made with Fritzing.

Using the Fritzing Project to Assemble Our Circuit

Using the Fritzing diagram and the BoM, challenge someone to build the circuit. Don’t give them any help, let them try it and make a few mistakes before helping them. A true test of a diagram is in how easy it is to use. Lego instructions show step by step how to build a project and are regarded as among the best instructions in the world! b

Just because you're only 13 doesn’t mean you have to be limited in what you can do. Jordan Reeves is the perfect example. From partnerships with Barbie to her new book Born Just Right, she is balancing school, business, and a love of making. Probably most famous for Project Unicorn, the glitter shooting prosthetic arm she created, Reeves isn’t afraid of a challenge. Let's learn more about this STEAM superstar!

craft supplies at first. Then I worked on a base design in Tinkercad. I attached craft supplies including cut-open Nerf bullets to the 3D printed ring around my arm.

I kept trying until something worked.

be a part of that group?

What has been the most enjoyable experience you've had because of the project?

I am so inspired by many of the other members of the STEAM Squad, including Julie Sage, Taylor Richardson, Allie Webber, and Gitanjali Rao. I’m so proud of my friends for working hard and speaking up to make sure we all celebrate success in STEAM.

What inspired the glitter cannon?

Tell us about the book you wrote with your mom.

I went to a workshop and was given the challenge to create something for my body. I thought it would be really fun to shoot glitter out of my little arm. I gave it a cool name, Project Unicorn. After I teamed up with a design partner, my idea eventually turned into a 3D printed prosthetic arm in the shape of a unicorn horn that shoots glitter.

What was the creation process?

It started with brainstorming and drawing. Then prototyping.

Just with RG ATE.O PEEDG PLAYS

The best part is meeting kids and seeing how they are inspired to create because of my work. And I’m just as inspired by their creativity and confidence to keep going.

My book is the story of my life from birth until right before middle school. I wanted to share how my differences helped me be a creator and talk more about disability. I got a lot of attention from an invention I made, and I've gotten the chance to meet amazing people and have so many different experiences through summer camps and all kinds of meetups with kids and adults with limb differences. I also share how my parents helped me by giving me the room to figure out how to experience a one-handed life in a two-handed world.

What do you hope people take away from it?

I hope everyone who reads it will realize they can be a creator, and if something is important to them, look for ways to speak up. I also hope kids will realize that failure is a big part of creating. I know my ideas wouldn’t be where they are without hitting problems along the way.

You're also a founder of the STEAM Squad.

What inspired you to

27

People

Meet Jordan Reeves

BY ERIN WINICK

STEAM Squad came out of a group of awesome STEAM-powered girls on Twitter. I am constantly inspired by my friends who have dreams to change the world in all kinds of different ways.

Who are your STEAM role models?

With all of this, you're still a student too.

What advice would you give to students who want to run their own businesses and projects on the side?

Communicate with your teachers. When opportunities come up during the school year, my parents expect me to coordinate my homework and make-up tests with my teachers. They have a rule that if I can keep up with my grades and classwork, I can continue to travel and speak. I work on my school stuff during downtime—in hotel rooms, airport gates, cars, airplanes— whenever I can.

You have to set aside time to work on what you love to do or you won’t keep moving forward. b Jordan’s book: https://smile.amazon.com/ exec/obidos/ASIN/1534428380 Jordan’s website: https://jordanjustright.com/ Jordan’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/ jordanjustright

PROJECT UNICORN IMAGE FROM LEARN.COLORFABB.COM, BOOK IMAGE AND PHOTO OF JORDAN FROM AMAZON.COM

Parents and Teachers

28

Let's Explore!

BY TIM McGUIGAN

A recent encounter with a virtual tornado sparked a new perspective on media and student engagement for me. During a 7th grade meteorology unit, students interacted with an explorable computer simulation of the Tornado intensity scale (or Fujita scale). Using a slider, they increased or decreased the environmental conditions and watched as their tornado’s intensity increased from an F0 to an F5. Kids being kids, the exercise was quickly turned into a game, with some students attempting to make their tornadoes more powerful while others aimed for F0.

By learning through interactive play, these students were developing a higher-resolution of understanding than they would by reading a book or watching a slideshow. The simulation gave students a sandbox to explore the destructive power of tornados and encouraged many to search out more information and ask more questions. I was amazed at how the simulation held their attention and how playful the exercise turned out to be. This was a good sign. As a rule, I find that whenever I encounter students playing in a school setting, learning is happening behind the scenes.

While writing computer programs to create an instructive simulation is not a new concept, new technologies such as HTML5 have made explorables an emergent new technology in education. In 2011, designer and computer scientist Bret Victor

coined the term “explorable explanation” and referred to these instructive tools as a new “dynamic medium”. Interactive models are powerful because they encourage the user to not just consume content, but to play with multiple variables in a complex system. From anthills to world economies, explorables help students grasp the influence that factors can have on tricky concepts.

While interacting with an explorable creates a strong understanding of a concept for a user, creating an explorable is a different task altogether.

This level of making requires a solid understanding of a system and its factors. Being able to translate this understanding into a simulation for others is no simple task, but it is incredibly worthwhile. A class can create a set of explanations that can help explain the concept to next year’s group, creating a continuum of play. In fact, I believe that working with data and simulations could possibly merit a new revision to the age-old learning goals in Bloom’s Taxonomy.

The good news for teachers, however, is that a simple tool found in many primary computer science classrooms was designed for such a purpose. Scratch, with its easy access to variables, sliders, and animations, is perfect platform for elementary and middle schools students to build explorable explanations.

In fact, Scratch’s predecessor, Squeak, was designed to allow for such a task.

In my first foray into explorables, I asked a group of motivated 6th grade students to create an explorable that represented their data from a creek health project. Students had already collected data from the creek in the weeks prior. The first step in the Scratch portion of their project was to create variables and sliders for dissolved oxygen, number of invertebrates, and other factors. They thoroughly enjoyed the process of creating varying backdrops and sprites representing the health of their creek. As the sliders were moved and the variables changed, the students programmed their sprites and backdrops to respond accordingly.

Figuring out the math and the conditional statements was the most challenging part for the students, but the majority in my group were highly motivated throughout the project.

As we start a new school year, my goal this year is to add more interdisciplinary explorable projects. In my mind, the increase in student engagement and understanding far outweighs the Scratch learning curve required. As students gain more competency in creating simulations, I imagine they could move on to more technical platforms such as Idyll, Processing, or HTML5 by high school. In the end, as teachers, our goal is always to increase student understanding and competency, and explorable explanations are playful projects that help to do just that. b

29

JORDAN WHITE, UNSPLASH

“Programming is like poetry.”

—Ed Fries

Thank you for reading this issue of beanz !

Check out the links below to read stories from this issue online with links to learn more.

"Hey! There's No One Driving This Car!" http://beanzmag.com/ driverless-cars-see What the Heck Is Foo Bar Baz? http://beanzmag.com/ foo-bar-baz The Power of Weird! http://beanzmag.com/ idris Playing the Graphics Card http://beanzmag.com/ gpu-explained Gaming in the Dark Ages http://beanzmag.com/ games-history

What Exactly ARE "Types"? http://beanzmag.com/ types

STEAM Lab, Jr. http://beanzmag.com/ steam-lab-jr

Dinner Is Served! http://beanzmag.com/ dogfooding

Physics From Scratch http://beanzmag.com/ scratch-and-motion

Citizen Science http://beanzmag.com/ citizen-science-projects

Getting Your Analog on With Fritzing http://beanzmag.com/ fritzing

Zero-Day Virus http://beanzmag.com/ zero-day-explained tidbitz http://beanzmag.com/ august-2019-news-wire Creepy Faces in SketchUp http://beanzmag.com/ sketchup-creepy-faces

Meet Jordan Reeves http://beanzmag.com/ jordan-reeves Let's Explore! http://beanzmag.com/ lets-explore e! scrib Sub

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