[IAEP] Physics

[K. K. Subramaniam]

On Friday 03 Jul 2009 6:16:07 pm Alan Kay wrote:
> Actually, I passed out several documents to OLPC at a "countries meeting" a
> few years ago (a book that we had written for teachers containing about a
> dozen of these activities, and a 50 page work in progress document that
> tried to say a little more).
Are these available over the web? I am in touch with over 600 teachers in my 
locality some of whom would be keenly interested in expanding on these ideas 
and taking them to the grassroots.

> A typical activity is in three parts, sometimes stretched over weeks.
> 1. Show the children how to do the "front part" of an idea
> 2. Challenge them to figure out some larger part of the idea from what
> they've been shown 3. Let them come up with and do their own projects based
> on what they've just done
The part that most parents/teachers miss out is the 'stretched over weeks' 
part. Real learning does not happen during a one-hour 'experiment' done in a 
lab.

> 1. Get them to draw a car and a road, talk about how you can make progress
> without having full information. Get them to close their eyes and fold
> their arms and follow the inside or outside of the classroom or a table
> just by bumping and going and turning away and back. Show them how to test
> a color on the car against the color of the road to make a simple feedback
> program that will get the car to follow the outside of the road in the very
> same way. No real discovery here, but the aim is to relate bodily thinking
> with in the computer thinkiing.
Again, this part is missing in many of the 'computer' classes. One learns 
about 'outside' world by turning 'inside' and building up a base of feel and 
experience that then gets modeled in a computer. Without that inner experience 
it is hard for children to direct a computer. They spend their time changing 
wallpapers, colors, playing games or creating colorful greetings. The level of 
engagement is very shallow.

> As I mentioned, science is the relationships between what we can do with
> our representation systems and "what's out there?". So the pedagogy here
> has to do with finding stuff in the real world of the child which can be
> explored in a deep scientfic way.
How true! My 12-year old daughter approached me a few days back for help in 
understanding the "density=mass/volume" equation. The textbook narration is 
incomprehensible to anyone who is not familiar with Latin or Greek. I got her 
to take a cup of water, drop a small piece of sequin in it. It sank. She then 
took the sequin out and dissolved some salt in it. The water level in the cup 
remained unchanged. But now when she gently dropped the sequin into the cup, 
it floated. She tried to push it in, it would bounce back. The look on that 
face at that moment is indescribable! My part was done. She went on to repeat 
the exercise with various amounts of salt, sugar etc over the next few days.

Later, we traced out the etymology of the words in the equation from a 
dictionary. The "equation" is a measure of the crowding ("densus" in latin) of 
matter in a unit space. "mass" is from French ("lump", dough) related to the 
Greek massein ("to knead"). volume is from French for "bulk" (as in bulk of a 
book. We still use volume to describe books from its original sense of "roll 
of parchment").

It is this sequence of discovery-rumination-connection that I miss in our 
schools today. It is too rushed, too finely divided and too parochial.

Subbu