Study code, not explanations.

Study Lenses is a design principle for learning environments that prioritizes code comprehension and investigation. The reasoning behind Study Lenses goes something like this:

1. Explicitly teach learners how to study and understand code.
2. Provide tools that support free code investigation.
3. Write level-appropriate programs for your learners to study.
4. Learners explore the code freely, with your study suggestions.

Watch this little guide before reading on, the rest of this page will make more sense once you've seen Study Lenses in action:

Peel-Away Design

Think of Study Lenses as training wheels one a bike, not as a tricycle. Study Lenses adds layers of support on top of existing development environments. As learners progress they are able to peel away these layers to reveal a full-fledged programming environment.

Lenses add new ways of seeing, understanding and exploring a program. Lenses do not change the way your programming language or development environment works. As an educator you can configure Study Lenses to suggest which lenses may be most helpful for a specific program, but learners are always free to ignore your suggestions and either use a lens of their choosing or ignore Study Lenses all together and simply run their code in its native runtime.

Accesible Authoring

Three of the most important design constraints behind Study Lenses work together to ensure learners and educators can easily adapt and own their curriuclum:

• All code should be content: A learner should be able to open any file of code and use Study Lenses to help understand it.
• Rely only on web-standard syntax & languages: Programs written and configured to be used with Study Lenses should not rely on any non-standard syntax or tooling, every program should be valid code or data that can be reused elsewhere.
• Content curation should use standard develpoment workflows: All Study Lenses content should be hosted, developed, versioned, and distributed as a standard code base. A learner or educator with experience using Git, GitHub and an IDE should already have all the technical skills necessary to curate their own curriculum.

Implementations

Study Lenses is an idea not an implementation, and because each programming language and each development environment is different, there can never be one Study Lenses. You would need to design and build one implementation for each setting. Study Lenses could be implemented as an IDE plugin, as features in an existing learning environment, or as a stand-alone application.

For the Browser

source: DeNepo/study-lenses (opens in a new tab)
install: npm i -g study-lenses

This implementation is designed for learning JavaScript/HTML/CSS offline, so it is built around a localhost web server and opens code to study in a new browser tab. Learners can explore their code in different lenses by changing the page's URL queries (see the demo video at the top of this page). The "home base" lens (called study) is simply a code editor; because this implementation was designed for teaching web development, the learner is expected to practice using their browser's devtools to run, trace and debug their JavaScript. This implementation is designed around a plugin system, so developers are not limited to the lenses that ship with Study Lenses.

You can try the online Study Lenses demo (opens in a new tab) (this may take a minute to start up if no one has used it in a while). Besides showcasing the Study Lenses learning environment, it also shows different ways you can organize programs for learners to explore.

Or you can clone the demo repository (opens in a new tab) and try the demo locally to save your changes.

You can also install Study Lenses as a global NPM module and use it to open any folder of JavaScript/HTML/CSS, adding layers of study to any existing code:

$ npm install -g study-lenses
$ cd <a-folder-of-js-html-css>
$ study

For VSCode

source: yoshimalaise/Explorotron (opens in a new tab)
install: VSCode Marketplace (opens in a new tab)

The extension allows learners to add new perspectives and layers of interactivity on top of existing JavaScript Code. Every lens focuses on a specific aspect of the code that has to be studied. Lenses follow CER best practices such as PRIMM, scaffolding and expertise reversal. For more information on the theory behind the extension we suggest reading our papers on Computing Education [CSEDU (opens in a new tab), Koli Calling (opens in a new tab)].