Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies

When computer literacy was almost synonymous with programming, the programming-in-education advocates were divided into two camps: those who supported BASIC as the language of choice and those who supported the Logo language. BASIC, developed at Dartmouth and with a long history of use in educational settings, had a head start, a strong 'installed base' of users, master teachers, and teaching materials. Logo, developed in Cambridge-based research centres and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, had been built from the start with child users in mind. It presented itself as the language that could best use programming to transmit programming's most powerful ideas.

Seymour Papert's book Mindstorms, first published in 1980, has had a profound impact on the ideas (and lives) of a generation of educational technologists and designers. This paper re-examines several of the most compelling ideas from Mindstorms in the light of recent advances that blend computational technology and materials science. In some respects, this growing détente between the physical and virtual lends greater force to Papert's ideas than did the original examples in the book, centred as those ideas were on the then current portrait of the desktop computer.

We live in a society where concepts of self, community and 'what is right and wrong' are constantly changing. Consequently, there is a need for learning environments that encourage young people to actively explore their identity as well as the personal and social values they live by. Computational tools have the potential to foster learning about these issues. However, there has been little research in this area. This paper shows how online collaborative environments can serve as tools to facilitate young people's thinking about moral and identity issues. The paper describes two pilot experiences in which bilingual middle and high school students and their teachers, in five different sites around the world, used Kaleidostories, a web-based narrative tool to support the formation of a virtual community to exchange stories about shared values and role models. The goal of this research project is to explore how new technologies can assist young people to discover their own selves as well as the underlying patterns of thought and behaviour that connect the worldviews proposed by different cultures. The project shows how teachers were able to use the online community to complement and augment their face to face activities and interactions by integrating Kaleidostories into different curricular content areas.

Educators broadly agree that interest plays an important role in learning. In our work, we develop learning environments that align learner interest and important adult-defined learning objectives. Through this work we have come to recognise the complexity of the enterprise of this kind of learning environment design.¹ At this stage, we have a relatively stable design model in the passion curriculum design approach.² Missing, however, is a basis for analysing the interests and engagement of individual learners as they interact with a learning environment over time. This paper describes the theoretical and design frameworks we use, and recounts our most recent curriculum implementation, Multimedia Studio, and how it exposed this critical gap in the design model. We found that designing for learner interest is an even more complex undertaking than we originally understood. The lessons learned demonstrate the challenges of interest-centred approaches to curriculum design and can inform the work of other learning environment designers and researchers working in similar contexts.