Fwd: a message from Gary McCallister

[WendyPetti@xxxx]

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To:	<MWcybercourse-owner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject:	Re: Welcome to MWcybercourse
From:	"Gary McCallister" <mccallis@xxxx>
Date:	Tue, 28 Aug 2001 09:44:34 -0600

Hi! My name is Gary McCallister. I am a Professor of Biology at Mesa State
College in Grand Junction, Colorado. I became interested in MicroWorlds and
Logo from my interest in artificial life and education. My biology students
are being left out of an important area of science: artificial life and
artificial intelligence. Yet we have much to offer in the way of biological
understanding. However, most of them can't afford to spend several semesters
taking computer science courses to see what can be done, or to try their hand
at some of the ideas. Logo answers the need for a easy entranceinto
programming so they can explore this area.
I started learning Logo at a summer institute in St Paul and have alsoattended
a workshop at Stonington. For the last five years Michael templehas put on a
summer workshop here at Mesa State College in Colorado. We hope to continue
those for some time. However, i still feel like a novice at this programming
thing. It is great fun and I am making progress, but itis slow.
We have concentrated on MicroWorlds because it is the most common Logoin the
public schools around this area. We wanted to support the teacher in service
that is going on so we started with that platform. However, I like all the
bells and whistles that it provides as well, personally. It makes it easier
and faster for beginners to make progress.
This year I have some release time to work in our center for teaching and
learning on campus. I hope to make additional progress in learning MicroWorlds
during this time while I am teaching it to local people. I hope to use this
forum as a specific reference for my problems.
I am also working on creating a set of projects that I have used to explore
biological subjects in MicroWorlds. So far I have about 10 or so projects that
explore things like randomness, evolution, sensing the environment, growth,
silicon mosquitoes that can always find their host, etc. I hope to extend this
into a tutorial for my class in Technobiology. I may callit BioLOGOlogy. :-)

>>> MWcybercourse Moderator <MWcybercourse-owner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 08/27/01
> 02:27PM >>>

Welcome to the MWcybercourse list! MicroWorlds Cybercourse is a community of
new and experienced users of MicroWorlds who are interested in sharing ideas,
questions, and projects. We would like to explore effective strategies for
helping students to program with MicroWorlds, while strengthening our own
programming skills. 

Some of the discussion on this forum relates to a collection of online
MicroWorlds materials at the "MicroWorlds in Action" website, currently under
development at:
http://www.openworldlearning.org/owlb/projects.htm 

Please reply to this message and tell us a little bit about yourself!  

1) What is your background in learning or teaching MicroWorlds?

2) What do you like best about MicroWorlds? What do you find difficult or
frustrating?

3) How do you hope this group can be helpful to you?

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Wendy Petti
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