[IAEP] Sugar Digest 2009-05-03

[Maria Droujkova]

On Sun, May 3, 2009 at 6:13 PM, Walter Bender <walter.bender at gmail.com> wrote:
> ===Sugar Digest===
>
> I encourage you to join two threads on the Education List this week:
> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2009-April/005382.html, which
> has boiled down to an instruction vs construction debate; and
> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2009-April/005342.html, which
> has boiled down to a debate of catering to local culture vs the
> Enlightenment. I encourage you to join these discussions.
>
> Rather than commenting here, I want to discuss a third, orthogonal
> topic: creativity. I hosted a visit to Cambridge this week from Diego
> Uribe, a Chilean researcher who is currently a Fulbright scholar at
> the International Center for Studies in Creativity in Buffalo, NY.
> Diego challenged me with two questions: Can we be more deliberate in
> developing children's creativity skills and how can we use Sugar to
> better disseminate creativity heuristics?

>
> Guidelines for divergent thinking
>
> * defer judgment
> * go for quantity
> * make connections
> * seek novelty
>
>
> Guidelines for convergent thinking
>
> * apply affirmative judgment
> * keep novelty alive
> * check your objectives
> * stay focused
>

Walter,

Thank you very much for this write-up. It is very, very interesting
and quite helpful! Coincidentally, I am working on a proposal part
about convergent and divergent actions, as applied to children's
authoring in mathematics. As an aside, I find that using "creativity"
or "creating" distracts people into a lot of tangents when I talk
about math, so unless I have a lot of time to explain contexts, I go
with "authoring."

Metaphors and example spaces are two relevant parts of my framework
here. A metaphor can start the divergent part of the cycle, allowing
kids to quickly generate a number of mathematical objects. Then
particular questions or goals help kids to sort through their objects,
noticing properties and observing patterns. These generalities
(properties and patterns) are convergent, and a pile of objects born
of a metaphor gets structured into an example space. Now objects
become examples OF something - namely, of observed generalities. At
which point kids are tempted to generate more and better examples,
which is the divergent part of the cycle at a new level, and so on.

In practice, kids need ways to make math objects within a common
metaphor and to collect, share and re-make those objects. With some
kids, it's as simple as providing a graffiti wall and a verbal prompt,
but typically you need heuristics and scaffolds to keep the thing
going. In software, the challenge is to find a balance between
providing enough scaffolds, yet leaving enough space for the divergent
part of the cycle, allowing kids to actually, here goes - create.

-- 
Cheers,
MariaD

Make math your own, to make your own math.

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