Please keep in mind that the "young kids" of 12 that you refer to are the oldest kids targetted by OLPC. (Purportedly ages 6-12).  Many of the discussions on these lists use as examples science and math activities for kids age 9 and older.  Note that Bryan Berry's E-paath activities include literacy and language learning activities for young kids in the OLPC sense. As to lesson plans, these are important especially for the beginning, when a teacher is inexperienced overall or is trying out an approach or particular lesson for the first time.  It gives the teacher confidence and ensures that there is enough material to fill the time alloted and not too much, and ensures that the lesson includes all the material the teacher means to introduce.  Of course after the teacher has done the lesson or similar/parallel lessons before, it is less important to have a written plan.  A lesson is not the same thing as a lecture, by the way. But the whole idea here is to introduce a new set of tools and techniques to teachers who aren't familiar with them, and who are products of very hierarchical and didactic educational systems.  (See the recently circulated link to the Ethiopian report as well as to a lesser extent some of the descriptions on the Nepal blog). <div class="gmail_quote">On Sun, Jul 6, 2008 at 6:55 PM, Tony Forster <<a href="mailto:forster@ozonline.com.au">forster@ozonline.com.au</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> Bryan wrote: the consistent feedback they came back w/ was 1) The teachers want lesson plans integrated w/ the activities 2) The parents don't see the learning activities as anything more than games. Edward wrote: Writing lesson plans needs to be a whole program in itself, integrated with rethinking textbooks to make use of the available software and to implement Constructionism, or possibly just creating textbooks within available software. This is Alan Kay's domain, among others. I haven't heard of anybody seriously taking up this vital part of the program, and I haven't even gotten answers to my queries about previous work in this vein..Has anybody taught any of the programming language tutorials to the children? Underlying these comments is the question of how does constructivism/ionism work in classrooms. The call for lesson plans and tutorials by teachers can often indicate a difference in teaching style with a preference for a more didactic or instructionist style. The activities in Sugar, of themselves, have no particular merit, their power is in their potential for deep thinking and problem solving. So, much of their power is lost if they are "taught" in the sense of "follow me, today we are going to learn Etoys". The call for lesson plans and tutorials often indicates this teaching approach. The power of the Sugar activities is in the opportunities they give for self-directed problem-based learning. Achieving this is much more about how teachers "set up" their classes and not about following a preset plan. Self-directed problem-based learning does not always follow a preset plan, the teacher, the "guide on the side" gives things a nudge from time to time, more recognising when learning is working well than following a preset plan. Students, teachers, administrators and parents all have expectations of what school is about and these are usually more didactic than the learning offered by Sugar activities. Experienced teachers (not me) put a lot of effort into "setting up" classes at the beginning of the year creating an environment where collaboration, discovery and risk taking are the norm. It is probably better to look at how successful constructivist teachers set up expectations and use activities rather than to lock down to lesson plans. See Bill Kerr's blog. He talks of creating an environment where students know they can demand the whiteboard markers from him at any time and work things out at the front of the class and how this took weeks. He quotes Konrad Glogowski who gets students to select music tracks to go with their literature study, Bill says "Can this be duplicated at another School site, through an education plan or an assessment rubric? No" Another teacher, Roland Gesthuizen, gives students broken programs, games, and gets them to debug them. He uses this as "scaffolding", a bridge to more self-directed creation where students program their own games. Another, Margaret Meijers, selects topical issues from the newspapers, for example traffic accidents, and gets kids to hypothesise the underlying mechanisms and then program a simulation. Alan Kay has linked to resources for teacher guided discovery learning which are maybe a bit more choreographed than my personal style but still demonstrate the importance of the teacher being the "guide on the side" rather than the "sage on the stage". He has a sequence of activities where students can discover acceleration for themselves. The beauty of this sequence is that it is not about following a narrow path but guided discovery which will work well with a teacher who understands this learning method and who will provide guidance sparingly. So in summary I don't think lesson plans and textbooks are needed so much as case studies of teachers who understand the art of teaching well. PS I have never had any resistance from the parents of the young kids (grades 5&6) that I teach to program computer games, they have always given 100% support once they see firsthand the engagement and learning. I have had resistance from teachers who don't see past the activity itself, which has no great merits, to the underlying learning of problem solving, organisational skills, mathematics and kinematics. Tony _______________________________________________ Its.an.education.project mailing list <a href="mailto:Its.an.education.project@lists.lo-res.org" target="_blank">Its.an.education.project@lists.lo-res.org</a> <a href="http://lists.lo-res.org/mailman/listinfo/its.an.education.project" target="_blank">http://lists.lo-res.org/mailman/listinfo/its.an.education.project</a> </blockquote></div> -- Frisbeetarianism is the belief that when you die, your soul goes up on the roof and gets stuck -- George Carlin