Practice into Theory: from Serious Work about Learning in Classroom Environments to Serious Questions about the Playful Nature of Control and Coordination in Computing

Summary form only given. The current talk reports on work that starts with a pressing social problem - the problem of maximizing equity and excellence in K-12 education - and one strategy for addressing this problem - the development of mobile, wirelessly connected tools to support classroom learning. It mentions the development and use in real classrooms of two suites of such tools (one for middle school math and one for 5-11 th grade science). The practice of using these wirelessly connected, mobile devices raised important theoretical issues about the nature of coordination and the computational support for coordination. We have been using tuple spaces (a framework for allocating work between parallel distributed actors) to build systems that explore the opportunistic control of the individual over their own actions, socially emergent negotiation of system goals and coordinative practices, and the relationship between content and coordination. These control structures and the contribution of the machine as compared to human participants are better described by analogy to playground games than to work situations. This analogy (along with the values it presupposes) is at variance with the object world of software engineers, which foregrounds the capabilities of the machine rather than the situation of use.