[OLPC-Games] Fwd: Interactive Learning Patterns (or your better term for it)

[Edward Cherlin]

On Thu, Jun 16, 2011 at 15:14, Samuel Klein <meta.sj at gmail.com> wrote:
> A great discussion from the tinygames mailing list (which gregdek
> started a while back).
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Ed Jones <ed.jones at gmail.com>
> Date: Thu, Jun 16, 2011 at 11:01 AM
> Subject: Interactive Learning Patterns (or your better term for it)
> To: tinygames <tinygames at googlegroups.com>
>
> Whatever you call them, is there, or can we put here, a good list of
> the basic patterns of digital learning activity?

They are the same as the patterns of all learning. What has been
lacking in past software is powerful computers for all children, and
imagination.

To see the true nature of the question, turn your attention away from
what has passed for educational software in the commercial market for
decades, and consider what happens when you give children sharp tools
such as programming languages, word processing, spreadsheets, art,
music, and science, together with access to the entire Internet. With,
of course, the appropriate introductions. Oh, and access to each other
as well.

We know that children with somebody to talk to in another language can
become fluent (at child level) within two months.

We know how to teach programming languages starting in third grade.
That's settled in numerous experiments with a variety of languages.
Here is some new research that relates to that

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/330726/title/A_year_adds_up_to_big_changes_in_brain

describing the development of a brain area for working memory.

I can provide references on Smalltalk, Logo, LISP, Basic, Pascal,
Python, and APL. APL is the only language I know of that has been
successfully taught in first grade, but as an arithmetic language, not
a programming language. I am currently working on a wordless version
of Turtle Art, using iconic names on the programming blocks, with the
intention of breaking that record.

Seymour Papert asked, in Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful
Ideas, what would happen if we had an environment in which learning
math was as automatic as learning ordinary spoken language. We're
working on how to do that.

> That is, however fancy the game appears, in the end there are a
> relative few modes of interaction between the learner and the
> knowledge to be gained. True/false is the simplest (Binary choice,
> binary feedback). Multiple choice with 3 incorrect and one correct is
> the most common.

Back in 1981, I was on a conference panel where someone in the
audience asked about 16-bit computing, "What can you use more than
640K of RAM for?" This is the same lack of imagination, best expressed
by the proverb, "If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything
starts to look like a nail," and my converse, "If all you do all day
is pound nails, everything starts to look like a hammer." Then you get
people pounding nails with the butt of a nailgun and complaining that
its balance is all wrong.

The answer then was music, graphics, videos, multi-megabyte documents,
and all the rest that is familiar today. Now we can do all of that in
schools, with every child having the same tools and the same access.

So the short answer to your supposition is, "No." Children can _do_
math, science, music, art, history, geography, languages, and gym on
computers, not just be quizzed on them. Yes, gym. Everybody in serious
competitive sports keeps records of training, or hires someone to do
it, and takes endless videos of their performance, looking for points
to improve. And of the competition, also, looking for weak spots to
take advantage of.

> Is there a name for the pattern underlying Greg's multiples of 3 and 5
> quest? Kind of a multiple choice with multiple correct answer
> components?
>
> WidgEd's second example of drad-drop matching certainly seems a unique
> entry.  From the first example, the inline dropdown is surely a new
> variant of multiple choice?

See Peter Hewitt's Spirolaterals and Walter Bender's Turtle Confusion
for an entirely different view of the matter.

http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4331
http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4450

It will take you a minute or two to work out what Hewitt's UI does,
but that's part of the point. Click everything until it starts to make
sense.

> And now you begin to see the forking nature of the beast...

There is much, much more.

> I wrote some more about this here, but I haven't found the definitive
> research:
> http://blog.openhistoryproject.org/2010/10/interactive-learning-patterns-google.html
> http://blog.openhistoryproject.org/2010/10/interactive-learning-patterns-ii.html

I don't believe the definitive research has been done. I don't know
anybody even asking the right questions.

> Thanks,
> Ed
>
>
> --
> Samuel Klein          identi.ca:sj           w:user:sj          +1 617 529 4266
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-- 
Edward Mokurai (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) Cherlin
Silent Thunder is my name, and Children are my nation.
The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination.
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Replacing_Textbooks