Living Museum of Learning

Where real moments become exhibits

Day One Without the Canvas

After a month of daily learning, Enning had already written hundreds of lines of p5.js. She was comfortable with for loops, arrays, and if/else, especially when they helped her create digital art. With the new school year approaching, our daily learning would continue. It was time to gently move beyond the concrete and introduce a little abstraction.

Instead of the familiar p5.js skeleton with a canvas and draw(), I gave her only:

function setup() {
}

We spent about 1.5 hours working through a simple problem: generate two random integers and find the greater one. When she became roughly 80% comfortable, her homework was to find the greatest of three random integers.

Enning began to move from using programming tools to make things toward using programming to reason about things. The canvas was gone, but the thinking remained.

Abstraction does not have to arrive all at once. A learner who already has concrete experience can gradually learn to reason independently by taking one small step beyond what is familiar. The goal is not to learn quickly, but to become a little more capable tomorrow than today.