[OLPC-Games] [OLPC library] [sugar] Physics -- Newtonian mechanics.. for kids!

[Alan Kay]

Or, you could even try having multiple display screens side by side on the same computer (we used to call them "windows") ...

Cheers,

Alan


----- Original Message ----
From: Chris Leonard <cjlhomeaddress at gmail.com>
To: Alan Kay <alan.nemo at yahoo.com>
Cc: Games for the OLPC <games at lists.laptop.org>; library at lists.laptop.org; sugar at lists.laptop.org
Sent: Wednesday, July 16, 2008 11:44:59 AM
Subject: Re: [OLPC library] [OLPC-Games] [sugar] Physics -- Newtonian mechanics.. for kids!





On Wed, Jul 16, 2008 at 2:17 PM, Alan Kay <alan.nemo at yahoo.com> wrote:

I very much agree with this! Simulations are still "just math" and "real science" is about the relationships we can build between our representations (which are in the end "just stories", even if coherent and logically connected) and "what's out there". This "outlook" (or the more fancy phrase "epistemological stance") is the most important part of learning science (and is the least well taught or learned -- at least in the US).

Bad simulations can be edifying if a real effort is made to see what the real world seems to do, but most people, and especially most children, are all too willing to substitute the story for the mapping.

Cheers,

Alan
 
It is interesting to think about the educational possibilities of a scenario like one laptop running Measure (with sensors measuring some physical parameter, e.g. a pendulum breaking a light beam) and another laptop running thesimulation of the actual experiment in real-time right next to it.
 
"All models are wrong, some models are useful"  George S.S. Box
 
cjl


      
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