[IAEP] Teaching science up through grades 7-8 .....Re: Physics - Lesson plans ideas?

[Alan Kay]

Pretty much everyone is behind the 8 ball here. 
 -- Our human brains are bad at this kind of thinking (this is why we have been on the planet as a species for many 10's of 1000s of years before finding out how to do it). 
 -- The teachers in the early grades are often not invested with how to do science and how to teach science. 
 -- The children (and often the adults) lack the mathematical apparatus that allows scientific theories to be represented as models that can cover and predict over wide ranges.
 -- And it would be great to have a bigger bag of emotional payoffs for the many children who just aren't directly excited about finding out more about how the world works. 
 -- The tough student teacher ratios make it difficult to deal with the very important individual styles of the students (and also how those styles match up to the styles of the teachers).
 -- And so forth.

On the other hand, we don't want to slide back to a kind of "Guitar Hero" which combines the use of technology with the loss of the subject, and is flashy enough so that unsophisticates could declare victory.


I think of all of this stuff (especially wrt children, but also in the pro adult game) as a larger "what's out there?" game that has 4 aspects (in historical order) Technology, Engineering, Math, Science (TEMS). Most adults who concentrate in one of these aspects wind up having to get fluent in the other 3 (even in the most ad hoc aspect of "technology" aka "tinkering"). For children one can hardly go wrong by thinking of these 4 aspects most of the time as one art form.

And I also think that trying to segregate out these aspects into separate subjects in not only not a good idea but in many cases some of the strongest routes to learning one of these often journey through the others. 

For example, the logic of every kind of physical machine (including electrical ones) is not just strongly tied by necessity to science, but also to the internal logic of mathematics. Jerry Bruner and others have written persuasively about these connections. 

This is one of the reasons I invariably urge teachers and parents to get strongly acquainted with the work of Arvind Gupta and his many books about "Toys From Trash". These "toys" are wonderful buildable little gems of engineering which often use a deep principle of "what's out there?" in order to work. These artifacts made by the children are great starting places for deeper "tougher" looks at what is going on.

I've justly lauded Papert many times on this list. He just had the most amazing insights into what children could understand and learn that was also profound and important. The computer provides a medium for kinds of mathematics that can be closer both to the situations being modeled and to the minds of the children who are trying to learn how to be both crisper and more general at the same time.

Another point here is that science is wide and deep, so "coverage" is not going to be successful. Probably better to aim for real depth on a few critical aspects of science. Find ways for the different styles of learners to get to that depth where the real thing is happening.

A "big project" that involves TEMS can be one way to get to depth. The NY public school I attended for 7th and 8th grades was nothing special to put it mildly. But Cortland Street in the city had many surplus electronics stores where "raw stuff" could be bought for a few mowings of lawns. I and a few friends got very enamored of high voltage as 12 year olds and we were able to find how to books, stuff to wind coils and make huge capacitors, etc., to make a series of Tesla Coils. 5 years later my brother got into van de Graaf generators, etc.

We were hampered by not having a lot of help from adults, so getting beyond "T" was difficult. But a good Tesla Coil actually can't really be tinkered together, so we had to learn a lot more about engineering than we thought in the beginning. The science was more difficult, particularly because the first coils we made were quite dangerously unstable -- they needed something like a vacuum tube oscillator rather than the tank circuits that Tesla used (eventually we wound up using a push-pull oscillator using RCA transmitting triodes that could handle a lot of power). I was the most mathematical of the 12 year olds, but I didn't know calculus at that time and we were somewhat limited to using formulas from the CRC tables. However, we were smart enough to do some experiments and to get a better sense of just how these very high frequency high voltage oscillators with huge secondary ratio "kind of " worked.

A few years later doing electronics at Brooklyn Technical High School I realized that only some of what we found out for ourselves and by reading was good for us. All in all, having an adult we could reliably go to with questions would have allowed us to get further, do more designs and experiments.

But my bottom line opinion is that a physical payoff for doing a little real science and real math that energizes a lot of technology and engineering is pretty darn thrilling for most kids.

The children who did the real world gravity science got quite a payoff from building their simulations in computer stuff (and being able to use their gravity model to fire projectiles, make games such as Lunar Lander and Shoot The Alien, etc.). But I could imagine other real science projects that would pay off in construction projects in the real world.

There are so many very "complete components" available today that the "T" in Tinkering is starting to act the part of the technology in Guitar Hero. It is possible to make something in real world hardware or computer world software in which nothing interesting and important needs to be learned, nor is learned. Many well meaning projects involving robots, or rockets, are of this sort. (This is rampant in the semi and pro worlds of computing today, and has seriously undermined many school programs.)

It's up to those in the system who understand TEMS to make sure that what's special about each of the aspects is not lost to "T". And it's up to the system to make sure that these important vitally needed people are a part of it.

Best wishes,

Alan


________________________________
From: Alan Kay <alan.nemo at yahoo.com>
To: Bill Kerr <billkerr at gmail.com>
Cc: iaep SugarLabs <iaep at lists.sugarlabs.org>; Brian Jordan <bcjordan at gmail.com>; Asaf Paris Mandoki <asafpm at gmail.com>
Sent: Saturday, August 22, 2009 5:52:17 PM
Subject: Re: [IAEP] Physics - Lesson plans ideas?


Hi Bill,

I'm not at all critical of children playing games. There are even games where you can learn interesting and important things by playing them. I think these can be thought about separately. So I would merely ask whether the second possibility obtains here.

This isn't about "Etoys or Scratch or Logo against X", but I would ask if the "simulations are the same sort". 

One way to answer this question is to compare not the results of the simulations, but the nature, kind, and amount of the mathematical description used. For example, is having a canned invisible differential equation solver with canned "physic routines" and allowing parameters to be tweaked the same as being able to choose and understand all the math used? (E.g. could one try out an inverse cube gravity relationship in the "physics simulator"?)

(Not a rhetorical question ...)

Cheers,

Alan




________________________________
From: Bill Kerr <billkerr at gmail.com>
To: Alan Kay <alan.nemo at yahoo.com>
Cc: Gary C Martin <gary at garycmartin.com>; iaep SugarLabs <iaep at lists.sugarlabs.org>; Brian Jordan <bcjordan at gmail.com>; Asaf Paris Mandoki <asafpm at gmail.com>
Sent: Saturday, August 22, 2009 5:40:38 PM
Subject: Re: [IAEP] Physics - Lesson plans ideas?

hi alan,

I have read your views about what science is and it's importance. I'm not claiming to understand it as deeply as you do but it has influenced me and my teaching significantly (and I wish had become aware of your views earlier in my teaching career)

However, I can't see why you appear to be critical of the physics program when it is used:
- as a game
- to do simulations in the same sort of way that etoys does  simulations

That was  my original response in the thread
- that my students seemed to see it as a game (but this does require further discussion with my students)
- that the name ought to change to something like toy physics
- that bad science would inevitably occur when it or any other software is used by a teacher without a deep understanding of science




On Sun, Aug 23, 2009 at 9:19 AM, Alan Kay <alan.nemo at yahoo.com> wrote:

Hi Bill
>
>Let me try again, but not as long winded. (after looking below, I can see that I failed).
>
>
>Everything in a language describes something in a "story space". That is all language can do. There is nothing instrinsically about the form of any story that makes it relate to "what's out there?" in any necessary way. Math tries to be consistent and to chain reasoning together but this is not enough to reveal anything about the universe. It's still a story.
>
>Science is the process of trying to put what we can investigate and think about "what's out there" in as close a relation as possible with what we can represent in symbols. In practise this is a kind of coevolution.
>
>What people
> do in Etoys on computers is *entirely stories*, and some of these count as math (special kinds of consistent chained together reasoning stories). Some of the stories count as "scientific mappings". None of them are science.
>
>So when they learn about the ideas of speed and acceleration with the cars they draw, they are learning a nice math way to do this (the computer's ability to do fast loops with simple arithmetic or vectors allows the equivalent of integration in calculus to be done very simply and easily -- this is a very good thing). 
>
>This was Seymour's genius to realize that the computer could allow certain things in mathematics to be done differently and much more simply but without losing what's powerful and central -- and that this would allow these kinds of mathematics to be learned much more easily and earlier in life by children (and adults).
>
>But these ideas of speed and acceleration have no necessary connection to
> "what's out there?" (and in fact we know that the seemingly reasonable idea of adding speeds (they don't) doesn't obtain in the universe we live in). Saying it again *science is not the same as the languages of science*.
>
>Let's take the Lunar Landing example. 
>
>This is done after the children have done some real science and have figured out the Galilean approximation to model gravity by taking a movie of a dropping object, measuring the increase in speed for each equal unit in time, and (to the limits of their ability to measure) decided that the this increase in speed looks "pretty constant". 
>
>Four months earlier they did some play with this with the cars on their screen and are able to see that this should be the same model, but vertically not horizontally. They write a script with the two "increase by"s and then find a way to see if their simulated ball moves the same way as the dropped ball on the video. And it does.
>
>This
> was real science in every particular. It's wonderful to watch them do it.
>
>Now they have a "pretty good" mathematical model of what they could observe in "what's out there?". (Or as Newton liked to say "pretty nearly".) The model isn't the same as what's out there. It doesn't depict "what's out there?". 
>
>They can use this to do many kinds of further math, such as the lunar lander, shooting projectiles, etc. 
>
>The Lunar Lander is not science or a presentation of science (there is no further observation of "what's out there?", etc. no further attempts to relate what it does to the real world -- it's making a story assumption -- that what obtains on earth also obtains on the moon). There is science to make that plausible, but we don't present it. There have been visits to the moon, but we don't cite them.
>
>Lunar Lander is a *game* children make using the results of some real science that they did.
>
>We *don't* teach any
> children science by showing them Etoys that simulate something (this isn't teaching science, it's just teaching a story and claiming something about it). 
>
>You are very right that if a person doesn't have firmly in mind just what science is really about, they can confuse a representation of ideas gotten by scientific means with science itself. 
>
>The simplest way to understand this is that anyone can add to or change the scripts in the Lunar Lander game and it's still a story, but less like what they children found by observation. This is because there is nothing in math or the computer or humans that knows anything about how "what's out there?" is, and most humans have been fooling themselves for 100,000 years about most of this. 
>
>Stories are arbitrary, and the universe seems less arbitrary.
>
>So the epistemology (the "outlook") of science is one of the greatest human inventions. It helps us realize just how poorly our normal
> thinking activities work. 
>
>The process of science is also one of the greatest human inventions; it helps groups of people police each other's tendencies towards myriad ways of bad thinking to generally result in clearer perspectives on "what's out there?". In computer metaphor it is like error correcting codes and error correcting processes. Lots of work has to be done to clear away as much noise as possible from our senses and bad thinking.
>
>This is why every human on the planet should learn "real science". It's not to get a job, or because science is "interesting and powerful". It's because we are all really bad thinkers and we just can't afford to continue with both powerful technologies, population growth, and bad thinking at the same time.
>
>That is a good place to end this reply, but there is one further thing I think needs to be pointed out.
>
>And this is that using math (with our without computers) is a really good way to
> create "possible worlds" that might be like the real world in important and interesting ways. For example, if we have some reason to think that animals might be able to smell well enough to follow gradients of odor (we can certainly do it well enough to head for cooking food when we are hungry) then it makes great sense to try to see what kinds of behaviors could be evoked just from simple following of artificial gradients. This isn't science, but it strongly suggests experiments that could be done.
>
>In much more extreme terms, Newton liked to separate completely the math from the science. For example, in the first part of Principia he only does math, and comes up with many relationships that he proves obtain geometrically. Then in the last part of the book he starts to take the predictions of the math from the premises he started with and to relate them to various kinds of observations on the earth and in the heavens. This book is a breathtaking
> tour de force of the highest possible art and sensibilities of what science is all about, how it is different from math, and how the two very different systems can work incredibly fruitfully together.
>
>By the way, Bertrand Russell once remarked that "Newton was not a strict Newtonian", and this is quite true. For example, he didn't think that the inverse square "law" could possibly be the whole story (because it contains instantaneous action at a distance). However, many who came after him confused his "best story right now" with the kinds of stories in the the Bible that they believed in, and this in certain areas of science (e.g. dealing with Maxwells's equations) held them severely back. Newton understood the epistemology of science and they didn't.
>
>Best wishes,
>
>Alan
>
>
________________________________
From: Bill Kerr <billkerr at gmail.com>
>To: Alan Kay <alan.nemo at yahoo.com>
>Cc: Gary C Martin <gary at garycmartin.com>; iaep SugarLabs <iaep at lists.sugarlabs.org>; Brian Jordan <bcjordan at gmail.com>; Asaf Paris Mandoki <asafpm at gmail.com>
>Sent: Saturday, August 22, 2009 2:44:15 PM
>
>Subject: Re: [IAEP] Physics - Lesson plans ideas?
>
>
>>hi alan,
>
>
>still thinking about the broader issue you raise about the importance of real science and its connection to computer based work and how to attempt to implement this in school settings (complex issue)
>
>
>however, I do notice that many of the standard etoy simulations are simulations of real world scientific type events, and not just maths related
>- salmon sniff
>- fish and plankton
>- particles dye in water
>- particles gas model
>
>
>I just checked the etoys gallery. It even says in the gallery, "Frame-based animation can be used for physics analysis"
>
>
>I'm also unclear about whether an etoys car or lunar landing simulation could be misunderstand in the same way that you are suggesting that a gravity or pendulum simulation could be misunderstood in physics, (which would be better renamed as "toy physics")
>
>
>
>
>On Sun, Aug 16, 2009 at 12:29 PM, Alan Kay <alan.nemo at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>>I'm not sure how your argument here would not apply also to etoys?
>>
>>It does if you try to teach how the real world works by making computer simulations without doing experiments. 
>>
>>But if you'll check out our materials carefully, we never do that. We always keep clear the distinction between "real math" (and the fact that you can do a lot of neat things with real math that are not seen in our physical universe (and can easily be at odds with what is seen) and thus are special kinds of usually consistent stories) and that of "real science" which is done by making careful observations of the real world the final arbiter of all stories (no matter how pretty and consistent they might be) we might make up.
>>
>>This is why when teaching children we separate the math of
>> speed and acceleration (using the cars on the screen and "increase by") from investigations into the science of how things fall by about 4 months. This technique is as old as real science, was used by Newton (it's one of the many charms of the Principia), and both used and advocated by Einstein.
>>
>>And the other distinction with the use of Etoys is that the actual real math of the phenomena (whether just math on the screen of the computer or as a mapping relationship between observation and mathematical modeling) is actually derived and done directly by the children. (And in earlier grades this is done without computers, etc.)
>>
>>This is completely different than giving children software which may or may not work like the real world but at its best it is as mysterious as the real world was before science, and at its worst (where it is not like the real world) it is even more misleading.
>>
>>This is missing what science is actually about. And
>> sadly, though we can do real math on the computer, we also find a myriad of approaches that bypass "real math" for various kinds of "math appreciation" or "math flybys" or "math grazings". Both of these are nicely covered by a gentle but firm ancient reprimand by teacher Euclid to student Ptolemy "Sire, there is no Royal Road to Geometry".
>>
>>I'm happy to answer questions about this vital issue.
>>
>>
>>Best wishes,
>>
>>Alan
>>
>>
________________________________
From: Bill Kerr <billkerr at gmail.com>
>>To: Alan Kay <alan.nemo at yahoo.com>
>>Cc: Gary C Martin <gary at garycmartin.com>; iaep SugarLabs
>> <iaep at lists.sugarlabs.org>; Brian Jordan <bcjordan at gmail.com>; Asaf Paris Mandoki <asafpm at gmail.com>
>>Sent: Saturday, August 15, 2009 7:38:06 PM
>>Subject: Re: [IAEP] Physics - Lesson plans ideas?
>>
>>
>>>>hi alan,
>>
>>
>>I'm not sure how your argument here would not apply also to etoys?
>>
>>
>>Is your objection mainly to the name of the program - physics?
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>>>
>>
>>On Sun, Aug 16, 2009 at 12:00 PM, Alan Kay <alan.nemo at yahoo.com> wrote:
>>
>>Hi Folks
>>>
>>>
>>>I've previously written a fair amount on this list about what real science is actually about and it would be tiresome to repeat it.
>>>
>>>And I'm sure you have reasons for what you've been suggesting in this thread about ways to use a simulation software package in Sugar. 
>>>
>>>But are you sure that these reasons have anything to do with real science and how to go about teaching it to children?
>>>
>>>Best wishes,
>>>
>>>Alan
>>>
>>>
> 
>


      
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