age appropriate development

[Mel Chua]

Kent,

Have you tried the library mailing list?
(lists.laptop.org/listinfo/library) It tends to have more
education-related discussion along with people with instructional
design & education backgrounds that might be able to fill you in on
what's been done so far with age-related categorizations. Copying your
email to that list. (Library folks, please jump in!)

(Personally, I'm not a huge fan of age-targeting - what's more
relevant is the "functionalities" that tend to develop with each age
along the Piagetian (or other) continuums, such as... 7 years olds are
typically capable of this level of abstract thinking, 5 year olds tend
to understand conservation, and so forth. This isn't necessarily tied
to a particular age, though; you could have a 6 year old who doesn't
get conservation and a 4 year old who does. But that may be just me.)

-mel

On Feb 10, 2008 4:19 PM, Kent Loobey <kent at uoregon.edu> wrote:
> I don't know where to post this.
>
> I have spent the last little while reading articles and papers on the web on
> child development.  I am interested in developing activities for early
> childhood learning.  If the OLPC XO-1s are aimed at 6 to 12 year olds then I
> am interested in the 6-7-8 year end of the continuum.  I started my search on
> the web because I was uncertain what children in this age group are able to
> grasp.  I am also uncertain about the developmental readiness of the 9-12 age
> group as well.  In fact maybe the 6-8 age is too big of a span.  Maybe I
> should focus on 6 and 7 year olds.  I just don't know at this point what the
> jump in child development is between 6 and 8.
>
> In any event it must be true that if we are successful there will be a jump in
> child development between 6 year olds and 8 year olds.
>
> So I am thinking that it would be helpful to me if there was a listserve set
> up for age differentiated activity development.  This listserve would focus
> not on the technicalities of code development but instead on age appropriate
> activity design.  It could also facilitate activity collaboration.
>
> I can also see the benefit of activities that are set up to work together.
> Specifically a drawing program that is developed to produce images that are
> for the use of other activities.  Or a word processing activity that is
> developed to produce text for use by other activities.  The same with audio,
> video and photo clips.  Then a scrapbook activity could pull easily from
> these other activities, or a story creator, or a trip reporter or a history
> recorder.  So rather then create monolithic highly structured activities we
> (also) develop a set of module (activities) that can be glued together on the
> fly by the student.
>
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