Voyage of the Mimi

ROBERT SCAROLA: Television has been in the schools as a learning and teaching medium for years, both as a means to provide video transmission of courses and as a means to visually represent events or ideas. Marlin Perkins, Carl Sagan, Jacques Cousteau . . . the lights goes on and on. We have public television to thank for what are, most of the time, the only programs worth watching on "The Tube."

Now we also have to thank the Bank Street College of Education for teaming up with Holt, Rinehart and Winston, publishers, to produce the Voyage of the MIMI series for public television, and to partner the series with a software and documentation package that has to rank as one of the best produced in 1984. The idea is simple and unique: send out a real sailing ship (the MIMI) with a mixed crew of adults, teens and children on an expedition to track, observe, and catalog humpback whales off the Georges Bank in the Gulf of Maine. Videotape their adventures and create a series of 15-minute segments for broadcast on public television during the school day. Along with the physical drama of seeking out the humpback whales, learning to sail, encountering storms at sea, and learning to navigate and maintain a sailing ship, add the human drama of people learning to live with each other on a small ship at sea. Spice that with a greybearded captain and a deaf teen who teaches everyone sign language and you've got an engaging series for kids.

But that's only the beginning for the Voyage of the MIMI. It's not just Marlin Perkins running before the wind. The people at the Bank Street improved on the use of video as a learning medium by providing an extremely well done package of learning materials that keys in with the series. The package includes a softcover text that recounts the story of the MIMI in words and pictures; a companion teacher's guide; a navigation chart of the waters off the Georges Bank; a colorful wall poster of whales and other mammals; and, most importantly from my viewpoint, a set of software programs that not only attempts to reinforce learning about whales, direction and navigation, but also introduces the concepts of problem-solving and programming.

These software programs are carefully produced. The first set of two programs (there are two disks in each set) introduces the student to logical concepts of computing by employing LOGO-based commands which the student uses to steer a "ship" (actually an enlarged "turtle" triangle) around the screen in order to "hit" a trapped whale and free it. When the correct series of commands is finally achieved and the whale is freed, it swims away, spouting water and eventually diving. The student can then play again to try to free the whale in fewer moves. There are also directional and distance aids which the student can activate on the screen by simple commands that provide an easy means of establishing the degree on the circle the student must enter in order to aim at the whale, and the distance the student must move in order to hit the whale, both of which require LOGO commands like RT 90, FD 200. Once the student masters this first level of activity, the next challenge is to hit the whale by navigating around a series of islands that appear on the screen. Finally, the student is challenged to get close enough to the whales to identify their flukes by taking a snapshot of them and then reading the fluke lines as you would a set of fingerprints. When he's had enough whale bumping and fluke reading, the student can go to "Doodle Mode" and do some free-form graphics using the LOGO commands he or she has learned.

The second set of disks goes further in the direction of teaching LOGO programming procedures. You can challenge a partner in this series and see who can develop a program that will most efficiently move over a random series of spots on the screen. You use commands like REUSE, LIBRARY, and REPT, write programs, save your programs, and make procedures. At the end of this series there is a "Super Doodle Mode" for doing more advanced drawing. Thus, in the context of a sailing adventure, students learn programming skills to find their way around. And these are eventually directly transferrable to more advanced programming in LOGO.

Then, for students in junior high, or for students who have successfully completed the first two sets of programs, there are two more sets designed to teach navigation, charting, compass direction finding, and speed, time, and distance relationships. These programs are designed as games, finding "Pirate's Gold," being "Lost at Sea," and performing a "Rescue Mission." They make use of the computer as an interactive X-Y coordinated graph, a simulated Radio Direction Finder, and a simulated radar screen and bridge of a ship. In all these cases a specific task is presented and the tools to accomplish the task provided, so that as nearly as possible the passive experience of watching someone else's adventures on televion can be transformed into the active experience of navigating in a computer simulation.