STEM Activities: Learning by looking things up
The power of Googling your problems, from Robotics & Beyond.
Hi! I’m journalist Caroline Delbert and this is The Toolkit from Robotics & Beyond 501(c)3. Our goal every Tuesday morning is to give you some videos, projects, and products that help kids (and parents) get inspired by science, technology, engineering, math, and creative design.
This week in issue 12 we’re going to talk about looking things up. One of the major benefits to some kinds of code is that other people can copy and paste it, or download files to integrate into their own projects. And this is by design! You don’t invent a new calculator every time you need to do some complicated arithmetic. Knowing how and when to look things up is a key skill.
This week, a tweet from Dr. Tressie McMillan-Cottom, where she quote-tweeted Dr. Danna Young, that got me thinking.
There’s a hacky joke people like to make who believe that college, especially liberal arts college, is a waste of money, because of some thought like you can read books at home for free. The wildly climbing cost of higher education is a separate question, but I wonder if someone who says this line in earnest — and believes it’s a real zinger! — has ever taken a good class with a great teacher.
When I remember instructors who absolutely changed my life, there are a dozen or more, including the art teacher I’ve previously mentioned here. Could I have taught myself to draw by reading an instructional book? Maybe, and Kelly has even talked about favorite books that helped her learn to draw.
But my memories from her classes are of her hands-on instruction and support. She stood in front of our class and drew large examples of what we were learning, whether that was human eyes or perspective drawing. And I could look up examples later, especially now that YouTube combines the two into a massively searchable database of instruction.
Coding falls into a similar situation. Conceptually, all programming is similar — you want to achieve a certain effect, using tools like logical structures, methods, and variables. But all programmers find different ways to execute their work. Sometimes you know the answer already, sometimes you find it on Google, or you ask someone who’s an expert for help. If the outcome works, any process can be right.
In other words, you should never worry about looking something up.
Getting Better at Looking Things Up
I look up everything, whether that’s scientific papers for work research or just looking at the Wikipedia page for a TV show I’m watching. Because of that, I’ve gotten really good at it! And many of you are probably already really good at finding what you want as quickly as you can. Everything we search for online relies on the idea that you can find a specific word or string of words within any website. This idea only goes back to 1990, when a software developer made the very first version of a search engine. He named it Archie, which is just “archive” without the V.
To find Dr. McMillan-Cottom’s tweet about instruction I used Twitter’s search function. I remembered her tweet in a vague way and had to try a few terms before I got it right. The same was true of Kelly Eddington’s tweet about a book she received as a child. Sites like Twitter and Google really want to funnel you in a certain direction if you just type in words or click on trending terms. That benefits them, not their users, so I like to make my searching really work for me specifically.
Putting together specific searches uses chains of logic made of Boolean operators like AND, OR, NOT. Something cool is that the same logic applies in programming, where the most simple Boolean most people use is a variable that acts like a light switch. A Boolean, in that usage, is either on or off. But the term “Boolean operators” refers to a bunch of key words and ideas. Here’s a great primer from MIT Libraries on how Boolean operators help us put together search strings.
So let’s say I was making a game in a programming language called Ink, which is made by a game developer named Inkle. If I wanted to find information, I might type “ink language” into search. But that might turn up results about, you know, calligraphy. It’s not very specific! If I search for “ink language inkle” instead, I’m going to get exactly what I’m looking for. (This example is real! I do write games in Ink, it is made by Inkle, and their games are very good.)
This language makes games you can play in a regular web browser, so you can use HTML and CSS, the languages we use to code and add color and design to our websites. You might search for “html examples” and then learn HTML is written in pieces called tags and keep looking from there. You might look for videos about HTML on YouTube or search for it with an education site name like Lynda or Khan or Codecademy. The Q&A platform Quora has tons of answers, too.
But if you’re like me, and old enough that you remember the very first time you ever used Google more than 20 years ago, you have an idea where to go. I first look for W3Schools, the official education site of the World Wide Web Consortium or W3C. Then I search within their site for what I want: “site:w3schools.com colors” or “site:w3schools.com css fonts.”
(Last week’s newsletter was: Improve your coding vocabulary)
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Wow that’s cool!
The King of Random is turning everything into “whipped cream” using a xanthan gum and a product whose real name is Versawhip 600k. They mix beverages with the stabilizers and then put it all into a whipped cream canister. (This very fun channel embodies the values of looking things up! They keep trying and changing until they get it right.)