What I Told Professor Resnick
"I LOVE YOUR LANGUAGE, SEND ME STUDENTS!"
SUBJECT: “I LOVE YOUR LANGUAGE, SEND ME STUDENTS!” (The Curriculum Ontario Needs, or “What I Told Professor Resnick”)
Professor Resnick:
Please allow me to introduce myself, I have been teaching Scratch for 5 years now and I love it! I’m hoping you can refer students to my new online school for a 10% commission in-perpetuity: goldingcode.com -- I always teach your comic book.
I also operate locally in Toronto...
goldingcode.org is a twin non-profit that maintains an open curriculum / reading list which your work forms the backbone of, along with that of the late Professor Gensler. It aims to provide the shortest ethical path, through published books, to Russell & Norvig, the holy bible of AI.
In addition to teaching this curriculum in my private business, training teachers in it, and providing it as an open reading list, I am advocating its inclusion in every school in Ontario, including Toronto’s 4 school boards, one of which I ran to be on while running ultimatecoders.com, which are currently also experiencing a provincial government takeover!
This is a prime opportunity to cut through the noise and work together to bring Scratch and other real skills to every child, and teacher, in the province of Ontario -- in addition to referrals, you may wish to review the curriculum proposed, and provide your feedback to The Ontario Government, cc’ed here -- the “Ontario Code Curriculum” barely exists!
Sincerely and Resolutely,
Adam Golding
Founder & Director
Goldingcode Academy
curriculum.goldingcode.org
PS here’s a history of how I came to teach Scratch:
1. Started coding BASIC on my TRS-80 in grade 3...
2. Completed most of two other degrees at UofT, before finishing my AI degree: Music Composition with a heavy emphasis on Music Theory, Mathematics and Philosophy, and Cognitive Science & Artificial Intelligence -- I had the privilege of taking Hinton’s class and of learning education directly from the Psychology department.
3. Taught logicola aggressively at this time as a private tutor to other undergraduates (student president) and became a Formal Logic junkie, then got hooked on Prolog before I even touched Russell & Norvig, I’m almost sad to see them convert everything to Python -- the next book we need is a more basic “LOGIC PROGRAMMING FOR KIDS” using blocks somehow -- and to pick up where Gensler left off with logicola, making it easier for younger ages...and bridging to LEAN for computer proofs.
4. Got work at a startup developing rule-based Music AI and then teaching JAVA & PYTHON to teens for Digital Media Academy at various campuses: UofT, Harvard, Yale, GWU
5. Met Professor of Programming Languages Gary Baumgartner, a LISP & Racket Junkie and was sold on many aspects of the Racket community’s educational methodology
6. At the time, as we discussed the woes of the language landscape and how Scratch was onto something...Gary had rigged up ways to make racket plaintext look more like Scratch blocks!
7. ... I was also reasoning around this time “I wouldn’t wish JAVA on my own children, so why am I inflicting it on these poor teenagers when I could be teaching music? If not me, someone will have to develop something actually suitable for education” ... logicola was the gold standard for me, from its success in teaching logic to undergraduates
8. Around this time I became a kind of deccelerationist for awhile, since I was studying where improvisation had left off in classical music in the early 1900s, and connecting that to what I learned as a Music AI developer (eg https://strasheela.sourceforge.net/strasheela/doc/Example-Realtime-SimpleCounterpoint.html -- this guy works for AIVA now.) -- I chose to ‘install’ all of this in human minds as a piano teacher, thinking about how David Cope destroyed his original music algorithms to save us from AI music slop...
9. I also spent this time applying logic to politics...
10. While my musical language matured via the local scene here, Scratch also matured, and then COVID came... spelling the demise of my home piano studio -- and I decided against teaching piano on ZOOM because of what I know about latency and operant conditioning in connection to learning rate...
11. Then, the market spoke, and I was summoned, again, and again, to teach Scratch for various businesses including Bright Champs where I was trained in teaching Scratch by their top-converting teacher Priyanshi Bhardwaj, another master Scratch Educator you should know: https://www.linkedin.com/in/priyanshi-bhardwaj-572446163 -- I could tell then than YOU had solved the problem, and that Scratch was the missing link I was waiting for!
12. Today, the time has come for me to also fully handle the business side, as I was originally accustomed to doing as a piano teacher, but with more emphasis on online classes -- I will be differentiating myself from griffpatch.academy, while recommending his public videos after “SCRATCH BOOK 3”, with a) an open curriculum, an b) a music composition curriculum c) a logic curriculum d) an ethics curriculum, as a prelude to AI ethics...I am no longer a deccelerationist, as the cat is now fully out of the bag, and I look forward to the new Scratch AI Agent...
Regards,
Adam
--
adamgolding.ca