ASB Unplugged (Gary Stager – Featured Speaker & Workshop Leader)

Gary will return to The American School of Bombay for the 5th time and his 3rd ASB Unplugged Conference.

His sessions include:

Programming: The New Liberal Art – Why and How to Teach It (full-day preconference)

In the mid-1960s, Seymour Papert asked, “Does the computer program the child or the child program the computer.” Programming is a way of seeing.

Beyond vocational benefits, computer programming gives young people agency over an increasingly complex technologically sophisticated world. Programming is fundamental to engineering, science, making sense of data, and mirrors the writing process. If your goals are as modest as to improve achievement in ab otherwise unchanged mathematics curriculum, then we would teach every child to program computers since programming is one of the few contexts for using the math taught to kids. Without programming, computational thinking becomes a rhetorical exercise.

Despite these self-evident benefits, schools go to extraordinary lengths to deprive students of programming experiences.

This workshop will provide hands-on experience with creating beautiful art in Turtle Art, controlling external devices with Snap!, and flying drones with Tickle (an iPad dialect of Scratch). Examples of K-8 programming integration projects will be shared and we will look at options for teaching the new Computer Science Principles AP course. Strategies for teaching programming across the curriculum and various grade levels will be discussed.

Making: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas (3-hour talk repeated on consecutive mornings)

While this presentation will explore the virtues of learning-by-making and its theoretical and historical contexts, we will discuss the structural changes necessary to for schools to gain benefit from the maker movement. We must recognize that making is not new, but may still become a short-term fad without a coherent constructive educational vision having little to do with the construction of a “space.” The roles of expertise, continuous growth, prompt setting, project development, and curricular design to create the conditions necessary for sustaining and learning from making.