Boxer down-under - 2023

Boxer Down-Under (2023)

Quick Intro to Presentation

Who am I, who are we?

How did we get involved in Boxer ?

Who did what in Australia with Boxer?

What is the legacy from ‘Boxer days’?

What might we do now with Boxer?

Who am I, are we?

In the early 1970s, I was a young law lecturer, coping with the frustration of students who were very different from each other yet normally compelled to the same ‘educational’ experiences. I was attracted to gaming to give them different experiences and I provided multiple assessment points from which they could choose. I used computers!

I was offered a year in the US working on Plato but rejected it on the advice of a young child who used it.

In the late 1970’s, my young son Charles was programming something at a university with a nice young woman. He seemed to enjoy what he was doing. That was all that mattered to me.

I was ‘summoned’ to a talk by Alan Kay and others and was weirdly frustrated by what I heard.

I sought the local computer guru, Tony Adams, and asked what was happening. I was fascinated.

Someone introduced me to recursion, mistakenly thinking I would understand it. I loved it.

Wow! I abandoned the law, and became a chelenomorph!

How did we get involved in Boxer?

In the 1980’s, I was a crazed advocate for all things Logo, including having all children having their own (personal) computer so we could anticipate what we thought would be the future.

I understood Logo to be an environment in which children (and others) could explore artificial environments – microworlds – and could model their own interests.

I knew both Andi diSessa and Hal Abelson and was interested in their ideas about where we might go with computers.

In 1986, I was employed by the Australian Council for Education Research (ACER) to lead their Technology and Education research work.

I convinced the Director, Barry McGaw, to explore the future with me in preference to ‘analysing the past’. I took note of John Seely Brown’s ideas of pioneering research.

We started the Sunrise Project – with schools of the future the particular interest.

Who did what in Australia with Boxer?

At ACER, we developed the Sunrise Schools or Centres, providing personal computers for everyone. We used the best environment we had - Logo and LogoWriter where we could not have Boxer.

Tony Adams (at RMIT) and I travelled to the Napa Valley, bought some good wine, and wrote a legal agreement with Berkeley for us to use Boxer down-under.

We now had hundreds of kids with their own computers and some schools with Boxer for small groups.

We received a grant to fund 6 people to come to Australia and raise the anti! - Andi was the first but we also invited Hal Abelson (MIT), John Mason (OU in the UK), Bill Higginson (Queen’s Uni in Canada), and Richard Noss (IoE in London).

Our goal at ACER was to help Boxer development, get funding for that if we could, and to use Boxer to learn more about the future possibilities by playing with Boxer. We set up a Boxer Think Tank to discuss the possibilities and we had a Boxer Conference, the first.

We were very excited about the possibilities but, like many others, were battling then against the tide of the Microsofts of the world.

I moved to the Sunrise Research Laboratory at RMIT University in 1989.

The SRL continued working with 3 schools where all kids now had their own laptop computers but still worked in all subject areas using the Logo environment.

On the side, we now had a great home for Boxer Down-Under and some graduate students to work with us.

Then I got a small commission – make this university hi-tech please! This became Sunrise at RMIT, a 3-year project that involved 50 professors.

Charles Nevile, the tutor for school kids using Boxer, became our university tutor.

And online, when things were tricky, we had Richard Noss in London with his students (while we slept).

Charles, my son, visited several schools weekly to work with the students.

David Williams, at the SRL, worked with kids on Boxer. One group did an impressive project on an influenza pandemic.

Mike Gigante, a faculty member who helped us a lot, built an environment for students to explore the various conceptions of time that are important for engineers. (1990)

A friend of a Margaret Carnegie, an incredible supporter, Basil Eliadis built a small environment for modeling the cultural circumstances of two indigenous communities and comparing their survival strategies. (1990)

A grad student, Peter Nunn, built a library cataloguing system. (1992)

Another graduate student, Cielito Baria, built what we called her personal space, looking at how being able to build her own space differed from the usual set-up of one’s computer and from a typical software development exercise. (1993)

Charles Nevile

Charles had used Logo since he was 10, struggling to demonstrate the value of procedural programming in a range of contexts and confusing school teachers with his easy use of programming, including recursion, and often resorting to procedural explanations of real-world phenomena.

He helped his school mates by writing their Basic programs and the expected process print-out for them, all in a word-processor.

Charles was very useful. He had no formal ‘computer’ training but ‘intuited’ his way with Boxer. He does have an amazing capacity with languages and treated Boxer as just another language.

In recent years he has re-discovered some of his former ’students’ who are now significant players in the world of technology and claim they got the bug “way back then”.

David Williams

David worked with what we called ‘work experience’ students – school kids in ‘real world’ working environments. They were say 12 – 14 years old but often had poor educational histories for various reasons.

One day he offered them Boxer with which to explain why an influenza pandemic was so difficult to manage and how to model it for predicting the future. This was, in fact, a final year mathematics exam question for kids 5 or 6 years older.

The children thought of the conditions described in the original statement of the question and built a set of tools to take them into account . Their final environment was useful for modeling the situation and offered a clear explanation of the behaviour of pandemics.

Mike Gigante

Mike was concerned that many of his students were not comfortable with the myriad of ways in which ‘time’ is an important concept.

He built a Boxer microworld where they could play with turtles controlled by different parameters.

Mike said his Animator microworld “presents users with notions of time which can be used at a variety of levels of complexity, and which are also used in ways which are consistent with the concept of object oriented programming – something else which was proving to be a difficult concept for the students … The mathematical and physics concepts are not made explicit by the microworld, but it is our conjecture that familiarity with the objects of the microworld and experience in interacting with them will make the abstraction of formal mathematics, physics etc more accessible to the student”.

Basil Eliadis

Basil was interested in learning more about indigenous peoples and used Boxer to design an environment for discovering and comparing cultural practices.

He imagined a class of students learning about and comparing the Australian Parbardu tribe and the American Hopta tribe (both hypothetical tribes).

Basil demonstrated the value of a space in which teams of students could work together. Basil made extensive use of the hypertext features of Boxer.

Peter Nunn

Peter was a library science graduate student who wanted to investigate how Boxer might be used to build a library catalogue system.

He built a prototype library catalogue with images, a thesaurus and hypertext.

Peter concluded that, despite there not yet being a full-scale Boxer system, it does have a future “as a general programming environment and as a personal information organiser”.

Cielito Baria

Cieli came from the Phillipines to study in the Business Faculty at RMIT University.

She wrote a minor masters thesis originally called, “An organic design methodology of information systems and the role of users in systems development”.

The final version is called, “A New Approach to Building Information Systems and the Role of Users in the Development Process”.

Cieli was interested in information management for a commercial organisation. Her main concern was with the question of the user’s role in system development.

She studied two cases:

• where a lawyer developed an extensive legal management system by working with a programmer in a fairly conventional way, and
• where she used the Boxer environment to assemble the electronic tools that she wanted to use, as she found herself wanting them.

Cieli’s personal space development led to a very personally defined environment that she could change at any time.

What is the legacy from the ‘Boxer days’?

Well, I guess other things encroached and at SRL we assumed the newly emerging ‘Web’ would somehow be like a Boxer world.

We embraced the Web, taught thousands of people worldwide to build their own space, built Webs for organisations and became very involved in accessibility of the Web and the use of metadata.

The legacy, I believe, lies in the belief that computers provide spaces in which individuals should be able to build a personal world to enrich their lives and those of others.

The diSessa principles of understandability, agency and utility continue to challenge us as we put together our electronic assistants.

My ongoing work

I ‘retired’ years ago but I work on making the Web an inclusive environment by enabling people with disability to specify what they would like in terms of forms and content of resources. We want their needs and preferences to be matched for them by inclusive Internet services (as we see starting now in schools in Norway).

What might we do now with Boxer?

Recently, I have particularly enjoyed contacting many of the people from the Boxer days. They all speak with passion of the possibilities and we will hopefully reconnect some time this year.

I have a lot of old audio and video tapes, and other things, that I will digitise this year for sharing. We still have one of the Sun Sparks which we hope to resurrect.

I plan to give what the Australian Sunrise RL has to the Boxer Sunrise!

Thank you !

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