[Its.an.education.project] untangling constructionism

[Bernie Innocenti]

Andreas.Trawoeger at wgkk.at wrote:

> My personal favourite is Celesin Freinet. Who bought his kids a printing 
> press and thought them typesetting to enable them to print their own 
> school books and newspapers.
> 
> Kids can be wonderful in teaching each other. But you have to mix age 
> groups (the older have to teach the younger) and really encourage them 
> to do so.
> 
> In normal classes kids are discouraged to interact with each other and 
> if it's done it is normally called chatting or cheating. Additionally 
> there is also almost no interaction between kids of different age groups.
> 
> This is an enormous loss, because quite often a person that had exactly 
> the same problem a short while ago can be much more helpful than the 
> best expert.

I 100% subscribe this.  A few years ago I tough two CS courses
disguised as a "videogame programming course".  My kids where 18 to 30
years old, some with a PhD, others with no previous programming
experience.

They made a lot of noise, and there were strong social interactions
sometimes, but they worked as a really good team, they had a lot of
fun and in both cases they came out with a kickass videogame:

  http://sourceforge.net/projects/dlab/
  http://sourceforge.net/projects/gfactory/

And we did not even heard of the word "constructionism" at the time.
It just worked... magically!

-- 
   \___/
  _| o |  Bernie Innocenti - http://www.codewiz.org/
  \|_X_|  "It's an education project, not a laptop project!"