[IAEP] Comments on David Kokorowski, David Pritchard and "Mastering" Educational SW

[Maria Droujkova]

On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 11:33 PM, Alan Kay<alan.nemo at yahoo.com> wrote:
> When I get together with other scientists, at some point I ask them how
they
> got started. For most, it wasn't because of school, but because of direct
> contact with adults, often a relative who was a scientist, and some of the
> older generation got into it from reading the classic science fiction
> stories of the 40s and 50s. (This is not a scientific survey, heh heh, but
> it would be interesting to see the results of one.)

I have seen results of more formal studies about the subject in several
different areas. One of most notable areas is "survival": success stories of
people who grew up with serious adversity, such as parental abuse or extreme
poverty. Almost universally, people who were able to make it name
"significant adults" as the key difference in their life.

I conducted some interviews at two summer camps, one for keeping girls on
the fast math track, and another for underrepresented minorities. I asked
kids about their decisions for college, future career, and current math and
science activities. Personal adult friends or relatives came up as the main
factor in these interviews.

My daughter is working on a parent-child-professional coop called "My young
apprentice" for helping kids meet adults for micro-apprenticeships and
possibly longer-term contact. It's crucial for, well, everything pretty
much.

> ________________________________
> From: K. K. Subramaniam <subbukk at gmail.com>
>
> On Tuesday 30 Jun 2009 11:23:24 pm Alan Kay wrote:
>> what is more interesting is how well certain ways of thinking work
>> in finding strong models of phenomena compared to others.
> This is the part that interests me too ...
>> So, if we get
>> pneumonia, there are lots of paradigms to choose from, but I'm betting
>> that
>> most will choose the one that knows how to find out about bacteria and
how
>> to make antibiotics.
> ... and this is where I get stuck ;-), particularly in the context of
school
> education (first 12 years). Unlike the 3Rs, thinking processes have no
> external
> manifestation that parents/teachers can monitor, assess or assist. The
> economic value of deep thinking is not realized until many years later.
The
> latency between 'input' and 'output' can be as large as 12 years and
> 'evaluation' of output may stretch into decades!

I beg to differ here, Subbu. Any time you do any sort of meaningful project
with a person of any age, deep thinking manifests itself most strikingly.
Here are some household examples:

- Deep idea: random events. A toddler pushes a pet bunny off a high place.
The mother says that unlike kittens, rabbits can break their legs this way,
but the toddler thinks since it did not happen this once, it won't ever
happen. The mother takes a glass outside and rolls it down the stairs,
several times. It breaks at fourth roll. Toddler experiments with breakable
objects more to explore the idea of "sometimes." They keep discussing this
big idea of "sometimes" and experimenting. A few years down the road, the
mother relates to the kid how this guy was saying, "I smoked all my life and
I am fine" - and they laugh at it, together. Probability and statistics
comes in later still. Meanwhile, the bunny's safe, and a whole host of
dangers that happens "sometimes" are easy to communicate to the toddler.

- Deep tool: graphs. Several kids play with graphs qualitatively (a-la
http://thisisindexed.com/). What comes of it? When the 5yo math club members
yell too loud, the leader makes a "yelling graph" kids follow up and down in
volume, as it's being drawn, thereby obtaining control. When a 10yo
experiences a strange math anxiety, she draws a graph of her mood vs.
problem solving events, and analyzes it for possible patterns. When a tween
and teen group discusses game design, they compare learning curves for apps
and games they know and make design decisions correspondingly.

- Deep collective reasoning: kites. A 3-5 Reggio Emilia group decides to
make kites together. Adults provide books and supplies, kids work on
patterns and sketch and photograph their ideas. It takes listening and
coordinating; their peacekeepers of the day resolve conflicts. Kites change
from day to day, becoming increasingly complex.


Cheers,
Maria Droujkova

Make math your own, to make your own math.

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