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

[Alan Kay]

In theory, teachers are supposed to be a critical pool of significant adults, especially for the fields -- such as math and science -- in which most parents are not adept or interested. In the US, this is unfortunately also the case for most elementary school teachers, and (way too) many middle and high school teachers.

Serious "juvenile" science fiction stories and novels -- not TV or movies -- in the 40s and 50s were a great alternative. For example, those by Heinlein, Asimov, Clark, etc.

Cheers,

Alan




________________________________
From: Maria Droujkova <droujkova at gmail.com>
To: Alan Kay <alan.nemo at yahoo.com>
Cc: K. K. Subramaniam <subbukk at gmail.com>; iaep at lists.sugarlabs.org
Sent: Wednesday, July 1, 2009 8:18:34 AM
Subject: Re: [IAEP] Comments on David Kokorowski, David Pritchard and  "Mastering" Educational SW

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

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