George is a platform for creating and learning.

Create games, art, robotic instructions, digital tools, anything!
Learn math, physics, chemistry, languages. And learn real world programming!

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Why

Through programming and technology, allow children to:

• Learn programming, STEM*, languages, arts.
• Develop structural thinking, problem solving, creativity.
• Understand testing, research, scientific method.
• Experience the joy of creating, building, learning, mastery, personal growth.

*STEM: Science, Technology, Engineering, Math

Read some stories that motivates this project

How

• Develop necessary software and hardware.
• Develop teaching and learning methodologies and systems.
• Give children a safe environment to experiment, fail, "debug", and learn.
• Share information and knowledge about how and why to use the system.
• Facilitate maximal usage amongst children in and out of school.
• Start a movement.

What

• A software platform and applications. [1]
• A pedagogical concept and accompanying materials. [2]
• A community of designers & developers, instructors & teachers, communicators & evangelists. [3]

[1] The software

The software is free, and the main application code is open source (distributed under Eclipse Public License 1.0)

It can be downloaded as a native installer for Windows or Mac, or as a Java-runnable JAR-file.
(It contains a "launcher" which ensures a always-up-to-date version of the main application.)

[2] Turtle Geometry

Currently the one application in George is Turtle Geometry.
Turtle Geometry is a tried and true pedagogical programming concept developed by Seymour Papert et al at MIT - and extensively researched and applied in a variety of implementations.

The implementation used in George is based on a modern-day real-world programming language - thereby making possible continuous growth; from basic turtle commands, all the way to professional programming.

And while the children are seemingly "just" learning programming, what they are really learning is much more profound:

• Procedural thinking
• Destructing problems and composing solutions
• "debugging": The ability to analyze and test hypothesize

And along the way, they will also pick up a few words of English, a bit of math, spacial and geometric "feel", and more.

Tutorials and training materials are being developed and will gradually be made available.

Future versions may also contain elements of AI - for self-learning and machine-guided training.

[3] Activities

Development

There project is working to develop community of designer (UX and graphics) and developers. At present the current arena for this is the George Meetup Gothenburg. Here we learn Clojure together (the language both which the application is developed in, as well as the language the children learn to program in.) We study design and usability aspects of the application. And finally we get together for "hacking sessions" - where we sit down together and do actual development of the code.

And of course, the code is open-source and so anyone in the world may fork or clone the code, and work on it independently at any time, and then hopefully share their developments.

Usage

We are developing the "George Outreach Initiative", where we train instructors (volunteer IT professionals), provide them with materials and support, and send them out to work with school classes on a weekly basis.

Find a quick start tutorial for instructors here.

Also, we will soon start developing a Teacher training initiative - where we will offer whole-day courses for teachers, provide them with materials and mentors, and send them back to their schools to use George with their students themselves. For update on this and more, make sure to subscribe to the newsletter.

More?

Please don't hesitate to contact Terje by e-mail or phone for more information.