Powerful Ideas

Creative Learning - Week 4

Video Notes: Panelists Alan Kay and Brian Silverman. Discussing the nature and implication of powerful ideas. Trying to get at the so what. The idea isn't to assemble a list of powerful ideas, then we teach that. The idea is... we're not sure.  Bruner's advice on curriculum: if you don't know what to do, implement Piaget's stages. In other words, create an opportunity for tinkering. But tinkering is not inherenty valuable. When computers were first on the scene, teachers were happy to see students tinkering. But they weren't doing anything valuable because they weren't playing around with powerful ideas. Maybe tinkering should be "design process with materials in hand"( contrasted with engineering process of plan then assemble).They seemed to feel like there is some tension between story and tinkering, which was mystifying. On the whole, chock full of academic hemming, hawing, citation and, hence, not worth your time.

Reading: the star of the reading again was Papert. His article on the Pedagogy of Powerful Ideas. One paragraph: "Or consider the cognitivist who says: Michael will have a better relationship with fractions if he understands the concepts behind them. This might be so if he could really understand how the invention of fractions was as awesome as the invention of the mousetrap and how the intellectual methods that were used to invent fractions could be used to make new inventions of his own. But the cognitivists are not trying to recreate the intellectual situation in which fractions were invented—and (as far as I can see) could not do so in the context of an elementary school math class. They simply want Michael to see the connection between one set of ideas about which he does not care and another similar set." (There's a story in the article about a previously disengaged student recognizing the cool idea behind the Rat Pack. Er, a rat trap.) Close to the end, he notes: "What I am suggesting here is a program of idea work for educators. Of course it is harder to think about ideas than to bring a programming language into a classroom. You have to mess with actual ideas. But this is the kind of hard that will make teaching more interesting, just as idea work will do this for learning."

Assignment: Create a project with TurtleArt, and reflect on any “powerful ideas” you engaged with in the process. (Why TurtleArt instead of StarLogo?)

• Zeroeth powerful idea: I want a turtle script with some randomness and some pattern. So that in repetition you can see an abstraction of the pattern.

• First powerful idea is one that's missing: I want variables!  There's no way to save or store a randomly generated number, that I know yet. [Tinker, tinker] Oh... that's what the boxes are.

• Second powerful idea: progression. Hmm. Is the random too crazy? What if there was progression instead? Only two variables, though. Might have to do same fancy-schmancy manipulation of the numbers. Does it obey order of operations? [tinker, tinker] Seems like no. Parentheses to make up. (Might be stack based like RPN. Explore later.)
• Third powerful idea: undoing/inverse/solving. If I'm incrementing a value, how do I recover how many times it's been increased?
• Fourth idea: copy/paste is a very helpful function, but I don't know how to do it in this context.
• Fifth idea: repeatable blocks. Finally figured out how to make subroutines. The nicer neater structure appeals to me.

Other thoughts about TurtleArt: at first the limitations bothered me, but I do believe in general that restrictions help creativity. The help took me a while to try (I prefer documentation. Nerd.) But it was intuitive once I gave it a go. Never did figure out how to copy blocks or groups of blocks.  Somehow they get the code to save in the .png file when I thought I was just saving the canvas image. That is COOL.

I got my polygons basically working but thought they made for boring art. So rather than fine tune for aesthetics, I switched to spirals. Knowing what I needed to about the program I could make subtle shifts to get what I liked. I did put some randomness in, and made a rule for "finishing" - three runs of the program without adding to the screen meant it was done. Here's my favorite spiral TurtleArt.

Dave in the comments had the good idea of sharing the actual files: polygon progression and spirals. Once you've saved the files (which are .png), just open with TurtleArt instead of your default image editor. Thanks! His point about better social sharing would be a good thing. Scratch totally gets that right. Here's the code to read:

I do like the idea of discussing with students what they see as the big ideas, but it probably needs to be done in an inquiry/tinkering style culture.  I'll be trying that out for some workshop reflections in my classes. 



Image credits: He-Man is totally owned and operated by Mattel, I have no rights to the images.

Interest-based Learning & Constructionism

Creative Learning - Weeks 2 and 3
Huh? What? No - I didn't fall asleep in class. We took a family trip! (I.e. look for a vacation math post soon.)

One of the many things to catch up on is the Creative Learning Class. (See Week 1.) Phil Aldridge has been a better student - maybe you should copy his notes, instead.

Week 2 was a video session with Joi and Mimi Ito on interest based learning, main reading the Foreword to Papert's Mindstorms, and the Macarthur Foundation Connected Learning report. More resources linked from the course syllabus.

Video Notes: The Itos talk about informal education. Interestingly a lot of former physics majors who lost interest when teachers couldn't explain things intuitively and relied on formalism and symbolic manipulation. They want education to be motivated, and recognize that learning can be motivated by interest and relevance, but attention to diversity is important. Don't feel like they addressed well the questions about how do you deal with less productive interests and time scale (can't learn-on-demand the night before a recital). Important point: have to have a broad range of acceptable work and kinds of recognition. Broader mission, learning, social networking, traditional rewards. (Again the gamer types.) Joi:"The whole idea of higher ed... is that you need a standardized degree ... so it's all about individual standardized skills." Beware curricularization of all of student interests. Mimi cited Katie Salen's schools that have boss levels after the standards required units. Since academia is geared to formal, structured thinking, those are the learners that flourish. It just doesn't motivate a lot of kids.

Assignment: Read Seymour Papert’s essay on the “Gears of My Childhood” and write about an object from your childhood that interested and influenced you (and share with your group). Also try the Marshmallow Challenge. (Done that, never wrote it up. Dave has a nice piece on it, though.)

Haven't seen too much activity from my group yet.

It was a straight line kind of building and play.

 I was really fortunate to have so many building tools/toys. I'm old enough that video games weren't dominating, but a curiosity. Mattel handheld football was the star, unbelievably. Sometime later Intellivision, but that was more my younger brother's speed. Erector set, Lincoln logs, and, ultimately, LEGO.

Really any robot, really,
though Zeroids and Robot were my faves.

Thinking about it, though, my play was always story motivated: the things I was building were for Micronauts, early action figures and any kind of robot. To some extent it's the same now, where teaching becomes the story that lets me build the things that are fun to build and play with. (Games, GeoGebra, cool math ideas and relationships, etc.) Looking back at these things was suprisingly emotional and I still have strong connections to them.

Recommendation: read Papert.

Week 3 video chat with Leah Buechley, Dale Dougherty (Maker movement) on Constructionism (not -ivism but -ionism), read Papert Mindstorms chapter 1 and The Children's Machine chapter 7 (on instructionism vs constructionism). Also of note: Maker-Education Initiative.

Papert quote from Mindstorms, Chapter 1: "But 'teaching without curriculum' does not mean spontaneous free-form classrooms or simply 'leaving the child alone.' It means supporting children as they build their own intellectual structures with materials drawn from the local culture. In this model, educational intervention means changing the culture, planting new constructive elements and eliminating noxious ones." There was a quote in The Children's Machine I had to posterize.

Video: They discussed the value beyond just making, and that 'just making' misses the point. That is human culture. The difference between learning by doing and learning by making, or why making is not just an activity. "School is famous for being overly structured... do all 9 steps and everyone gets the same result. (Barbie, anyone?) Blend maker cultures to appeal to a wider variety of learners; computation, electronics and textiles or paper, for example. Maker movement won't be equitable and diverse until its part of school. Concern for efficiency is a problem, as is emphasis on content that will make money. The old game design saw came up again, too: too often making is designed to hit a content objective rather than the content being involved in the making the learners are doing.

Part of what they said reminded me of a Star Trek exhibit at the science museum that had a section for what toys the engineers on the Apollo program played with as children.  Lots of construction.

Assignment: For this week's activity, create an Scratch project about things you like to do, then share it. (See 180ish projects in a Scratch forum.

This assignment reminded me of the Discovery Channel theme song.  I love my family and spending time with them, playing games and also making some. I love mathematics and I love teaching, too. Good writing - in book or film or tube.  I love music and any form of art, time in my faith life, that should have a part. Not much here that I can leave out, I guess learning is what it's all about. Boom-de-yada...



Press the green flag to play. Fun to make, once I figured out to do the image changes as costume changes for a sprite. I think I'd like to have Terry Gilliam's old job, if anybody wants to pay me to do it.