[IAEP] Physics

[Alan Kay]

Hi Subbu,

Check out squeakland.org for most things that relate to Etoys.

Here is the unfinished document I did for the OLPC countries meeting a few years ago. http://www.vpri.org/pdf/rn2007006a_olpc.pdf

And here is the "writings page" of Viewpoints Research. There are a variety of education related writings in the first category of papers.
http://www.vpri.org/html/writings.php

Papert's writings are full of good ideas (especially the old NSF reports and proposals from the 70s). One would presume that OLPC has these somewhere on line. Cynthia Solomon carried out and devised many of the Papert experiments. She is both around and has written extensively herself. Check out Andy diSessa's work also. Mitchel Resnick has written a lot about this in the pre-Scratch days.

I should mention a few other notions and methods that made a big difference.

The work and experiments we report on was always done through a classroom teacher. This makes the results a little more real. However, it is very important for all to realize that it takes about 3 years to really get a particular powerful ideas curriculum topic that uses a computer for important assistance really working in a classroom (or to see it fail in a way that reveals the fault is in the pedagogical approach). Most educational "experiments" reported in the literature actually have too many artifacts of many kinds to allow success or failure to be assessed in a way that illuminates. There are just a lot of learning curves for all concerned, and these have to be heeded when people really want to make serious changes. (This is sobering, but also divides the "quick-fixers and hopers" from those who are trying to make progress.)

Children don't do a lot of reflecting, and they are also set up to try lots of things within a safe environment. It's important to realize that most powerful ideas were very difficult inventions by humanity, and most of them simply can't be learned by trial and error or quickly. Ways of getting them to reflect are critical. We learned a lot from the Open School's incredible first grade teacher -- Julia Nishijima -- about this. She would set up an activity that was guided by the goal and the materials and let the children use their own methods to complete it. Then she would have a separate phase (which usually had the guise of "making something to show your parents what you are doing") that slowed the children down, cleverly got them to think about what they had done in a different way and tempo, and often culminated in a show and tell that revealed generalizations. (This is some of the best stuff I've seen in a classroom by a teacher.) One of these is
 described in the OLPC countries doc.

I sometimes will try something out on the children (we don't report this as results because I'm not a classroom teacher). A technique I found useful is to have a piece of cardboard or a cloth that I would use to cover the screen or materials when I wanted the children to think something through. When they can see stuff, their drive is to tinker with it rather than to slow down and visualize and try different perspectives. This is particularly important when I want them to draw diagrams and other "gedankenbildung". Why not use the screen? When it is large enough and easy enough to draw on, this will happen (Mary Lou is very interested in the needs).

As you point out, many educators misunderstand what seems to be a huge drive in children to learn ideas. (Not enough space to go into this here). But there is a great Joseph Campbell quote which sums it up: "Most people don't want to know the meaning of life; they want to experience being alive!" This indeed makes the "level of engagement" (as you call it, good term!) "very shallow".

By the way, it is possible to use the particle system in Etoys to actually float an object in other objects. One of the great benefits of particle systems is that they allow a learner to get directly at what is likely to be going on rather than having to use abstractions (the notion of relative densities has no cause and effect explanation of any kind, so buoyancy is quite a mystery to most children and adults, even those who "believe in the equations"). But with a particle system one is actually exhanging momentum, and at some point it becomes shockingly clear that "the upward force" actually is caused by gravity and the walls (or limits) of the container! 

This is why I love the computer for such things. In many cases for physics one just can use Newton's Laws and a lot of computing to stay with first principles and strong cause and effect relationships. This obtains for many areas of chemistry also, and some important ones in biology. This whole approach starts to help children stop "thinking in words" and start to think in terms of relationships, causes and effects, and most importantly in terms of whole systems.

There are very few teachers in the US that understand any of this, even in HS.

Cheers,

Alan




________________________________
From: K. K. Subramaniam <subbukk at gmail.com>
To: Alan Kay <alan.nemo at yahoo.com>
Cc: iaep at lists.sugarlabs.org
Sent: Saturday, July 4, 2009 12:51:20 AM
Subject: Re: [IAEP] Physics

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



      
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