[IAEP] An example on statistical (Bert Freudenberg)

[Edward Cherlin]

On Tue, May 27, 2008 at 6:21 AM, Greg Smith (gregmsmi)
<gregmsmi at cisco.com> wrote:

> Hi Alan and Yoshi,
>
> Thanks for your insightful comments. Nothing like an e-mail from Alan
> Kay to trigger an interrupt in my e-mail processing queue!
>
> As Pappus said of Apollonius "he spent a very long time with the pupils
> of Euclid at
> Alexandria and it was thus that he acquired such a scientific habit of
> thought."

I guarantee that there was more to it than that. One of the great and
underappreciated. I have wondered for a very long time how it was that
nobody involved with Greek mathematics ever noticed the parabola
formed by a jet of water.

> I hope to learn how to build useful educational applications, but I
> clearly need to do my homework. My goal is to acquire an educational
> habit of thought by spending many small slices of virtual time with the
> pupils who have the most experience (e.g. you).

I started out to be a mathematician but discovered too many other
things I wanted to do. My brother is a math professor at Rutgers.

> When I comment without personally going through the educational process,
> I try to include my perspective so you know how to value (or not) my
> input.
>
> I read your "eToys and learning" PDF. That gives me a better perspective
> on the whole learning cycle and capacity of students before they get to
> this subject. If I understand correctly, having the kids build the
> simulation is the most important aspect of the learning. In that case
> I'm not sure what kind of input would be helpful on Yoshi's Combined Gas
> Law simulation.
>
> Anyway, input from the teachers and students will be more useful than my
> comments so I'll listen for that.
>
> In general, do eToys projects try to direct kids to build something
> which the teacher has already defined?

We are engaged in the somewhat difficult art of determining how much
guidance individual children need. It is important to understand that
the goal here is not to get every student to discover the same things,
but to get each student to understand the experience of discovering
something wondrous, not just once, but over and over again. What is
obvious and pedestrian to some can be new and wondrous to others.

> The only book on pedagogy I have read is Pedagogy of the Oppressed by
> Paolo Freire. Freire taught me that the process of finding meaningful
> themes is the key to getting students engaged in education. In that
> sense the kids and teachers together would choose the Ideal Gas Law as a
> relevant theme for them. Then together they can find a simulation that
> helps them overcome barriers to understanding it.

An excellent beginning. We will have to create an annotated
bibliography. I personally recomend Bruner, Holt, and Montessori for
many of the essentials, and many others for details, particularly
subject matter experts who understand the discovery process. For
example, The Natural Way to Draw has been described as not just the
best book on drawing, but the best how-to book on any subject.

> Once the kids-teachers choose a theme, the challenge may be to to ensure
> that the right "objects" are available for them to work with. Then
> Yoshi's simulation is one example of how they might assemble the
> available objects. The work for outside programmers is only to build the
> right kind of pre-made pieces, a point also raised by Tony. Let me know
> if that is a useful area of inquiry or perhaps we assume the kids
> already have all the objects they need and there is nothing required
> from outside programmers.

One can build immense conceptual structures on very simple bases. One
of the glories of Greek geometry was not simply proving lots of
theorems and performing lots of constructions in lots of areas, but
determining the most economical substrate for the largest possible
systematic exploration.

> I hope that's not too far off track. If so I apologize for the churn.
> I'll read, test and code more before commenting in the future. Any
> suggestions for further links or areas of study appreciated.
>
> On a practical note, I couldn't get to the project from your etoys.image
> in IE 6.0 or Firefox 2.0 on windows. I see the "gallery of objects
> cloud" and can run "justpaintedcar" but can't scroll to the "bottom
> row". Probably  because I am using windows and that etoys.image appears
> to be for XO/Sugar. Let me know if there is a different etoys.image file
> that I should be opening in Windows. I tried IE 6.0 or Firefox 2.0 in
> all tests.
>
> Just FYI as I got it running on my XO build 656. Its very slow and
> doesn't quite give me the bubbling sensation I got with
> windows/gamemaker. I tried setting it to two or two hundred particles
> and that pushed the "lid" off the top! I wonder if that's how an Ideal
> Gas would behave or if its a bug.

Real gases do blow the lid off devices meant to confine them. You have
just found a limit of the model, not a bug. Discovering failure modes
is an essential part of an engineering education. Although we want to
get to the point of being able to calculate failure modes, so that
nobody gets killed by our design errors.

> I need to think about the law some
> more to decide... I got the lid back on by toggling through the
> topEdgeMode options.
>
> I need more time to get beyond adjusting the existing variables but its
> seems I found an off ramp from The Royal Road :-)

It is helpful to imagine a map with numerous possible routes rather
than a road. And to realize that there is no off-ramp from the
territory.

> Have a great weekend.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Greg S
>
> PS In high school, Appolonius' conic sections excited me much more than
> algebra. Like Euclid, its a geometric and continues conception with no
> numbers. I wonder what programming language would help teach that way of
> thinking...

There are several interactive geometry programs like Dr. Geo that
allow you to create interactive diagrams. This is related to various
non-procedural constraint programming languages.

-- 
Edward Cherlin
End Poverty at a Profit by teaching children business
http://www.EarthTreasury.org/
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."--Alan Kay