Frankel's Disease

February 09, 2017

Unplugged Lesson 8.2 from Stephanie Merkle on Vimeo.

The following is a story told by physicist, Richard Feynman as part of recounting his time at Los Alamos in the 1940s working on the first atomic bomb.

“Well, Mr. Frankel, who started this program, began to suffer from the computer disease that anybody who works with computers now knows about. It’s a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble with computers is you play with them. They are so wonderful. You have these switches - if it’s an even number you do this, if it’s an odd number you do that - and pretty soon you can do more and more elaborate things if you are clever enough, on one machine.

“After a while the whole system broke down. Frankel wasn’t paying any attention; he wasn’t supervising anybody. The system was going very, very slowly - while he was sitting in a room figuring out how to make one tabulator automatically print arc-tangent X, and then it would start and it would print columns and then bitsi, bitsi, bitsi, and calculate the arc-tangent automatically by integrating as it went along and make a whole table in one operation.

“Absolutely useless. We had tables of arc-tangents. But if you’ve ever worked with computers, you understand the disease - the delight in being able to see how much you can do. But he got the disease for the first time, the poor fellow who invented the thing.”

― Richard Feynman, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character

“Absolutely useless.” Of course, if you’re trying to win WWII and spending time using one of the first electronic computers to reproduce tables that already exist, contracting Frankel’s disease is a problem. However, if you are a new teacher or a young person learning take control of a machine that is now a ever-present part of our lives, Frankel’s disease is a wonderful thing to catch. As we in the LTEC group work with teachers who are new to coding, we see that they are often very anxious about what they don’t know at first. But with a low-floor, high-ceiling programming environment like Scratch¹, they are quickly transfixed by the possibilities.

Once a few blocks are put into place and the sprites begin to move, teachers’ imaginations are kindled and questions follow. As part of our work, we use a manual that guides them through activities that introduce the concepts of sequence, iteration, conditionals, variables, and modularity. A minority of teachers will work straight through the manual. However, typically teachers catch Frankel’s disease, see something that sparks their interest, and follow that tangent away from the manual.

At a recent workshop, an arts teacher made a short horror movie. Another created an aquarium screen saver. Neither activity was part of the manual. One teacher took a calendar activity that WAS in the manual and personalized it so that when the date passed his daughter’s birthday, a ballerina would appear and dance a few pirouettes. This last effort took an hour of experimentation to make the conditionals function as expected. The teacher needed to write the functions and debug them. This was his own project, remixed from the work of others.

We see the same enthusiasm with young children. Kindergarten children were asked to make pictures of aquaria scenes and put fish sprites on them. Most did this very easily and were rapt with the computer work. There was substantial structure to the activity, but also room for great variation in backgrounds with water images and sea plants. When they gathered at the carpet after 50 minutes of work, the teacher asked what they enjoyed and what they had trouble with. They liked Scratch and the sprites. They had a hard time with drawing seaweed; “it’s hard to make the squiggles.” What do they want to do next? “Make them move!” Watching five-year-olds sit still for almost an hour’s work and seeing them want more was enough to convince us that they had caught Frankel’s disease.

Recently, a group of pre-service elementary school math teachers met for an hour with one of our team members. They saw the materials for walking a polygon and then used Scratch to make polygons. There were 25 of them, and all were seeing Scratch for the first time. Making a square was quick and easy. Then a discovery when attempting to draw a triangle: “Oops, 60 degrees is not the correct turn!” Soon, hexagons started to appear. But the symptoms of Frankel’s disease began to show after 15 minutes as the teachers discover more sprites and different backgrounds. They immediately wanted to make it their own.

This becomes both the joy and the challenge. How long should one spend on the personalization and how long on the academic content? We have all seen the students who will spend minutes going into hours finding just the right sprite and background. This suggests one terrible cure for Frankel’s disease: make a curriculum so structured that there are no opportunities to jump off. This is very tempting for some. Teachers love structure. It keeps order. Students stay “on task.” And management struggles will always make curriculum coverage difficult. But, it is also a real danger, as limiting students’ explorations can prevent them from seeing the wonderful possibilities that learning computing makes available to them. So, teachers and curriculum developers alike have to take the risk and find the balance of open exploration and guided instruction.

Cite this post: LTEC Project Team. (2017, February 13). Frankel’s Disease [Web log post]. Retrieved from: http://blog.everydaycomputing.org/2017/02/09/frankels-disease/

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