January 7, 2016

Beyond Bits and Atoms – Lecture – Week 1 – Notes

Professor:

In class exercise:

My Learning and Teaching Story

When I was a kid a was fortunate enough to have many Lego kits and a father who is an architect. I was always fascinated at how he was able to think of a space in his head, draw it on paper, and the build it. Legos offered me that experience – especially when I moved to their Technique series. I was never interested in playing with Lego as a storytelling arena or a fantasy world environment. I was interested in building the models offered in the instructions in able to learn what specialty pieces I had and then repurpose them into new formats and functions. This thought me enormously about spatial thinking, mechanics, gears, electric motors, and reverse engineering. I clearly remember my mother going nut when I disassembled the TV set just to look at how it was built inside. Without my experience with Legos, I am sure I would never have been able to put the TV back together.

Moving ahead in time, I found myself teaching Lego robotics as an extra curricular activity in high schools. Lego Techniques had advanced into Lego Mindstorm, where you could finally program behavior, use sensors, and outputs. It increased the learning curve for the kids who had to first learn about structure, reinforcement, and forces that acted upon what they were building. Then they had to understand about inputs, outputs, thresholds, activation and deactivation. Finally they had to put it all together into a ‘robot’ and program its behavior. What I learned from this experience was that teaching is the best way to learn. I quickly realized this and suggested to the kids who were further along or finished their own project, to help their neighbor. The class came alive and the projects rapidly moved from frustrations to energetic show and tell.

Notes:

Equity – it is not only about making materials available, it is also about training the teachers well, and most importantly, promote a growth mindset on the students.

Example of 2 day cares in Brazil – both rated equally, funded equally, and with good teachers. The difference was in the socio-economic level of the students. The higher income students were more demanding of the teachers. Lower income students would remain quiet and felt it was not their place to demand for attention or to say that they did not know how to do something.

In class Reading:

Papert, S., & Solomon, C. (1971). “Twenty things to do with a computer.”

Papert invented Logo , which then evolved to Scratch

“Only inertia and prejudice, not economics or the lack of good educational ideas, stand in the way of providing every child in the wolrd with the kind of expereince of which we have tried to give you some glimpses”, p.40

My ‘new’ ideas:

Use the LOGO turtle to demonstrate Newtonian physics of mass, speed, friction, and acceleration.
Use the LOGO turtle along with 2 light sensors to look at a white strip on the floor and have the turtle follow the line on its own.

Discussion:

Should everyone learn how to code or should everyone learn how to use the computer?

Does a product’s ubiquity be a necessity for people to learn what is going on ‘under-the-hood’?

At the time of the paper, there was no internet and the integration of these simulations with learning goals were not explicitly stated.

At the time – the challenge was to teach the teachers on how to use this technology within their curriculum. The eternal problem of Teacher PD (Professional Development).

“Nothing could be more absurd than an experiment where computers are placed in a classroom and nothing else changed.” – Seymour Papert

Painting elephants: guided by their trainer through the elephant’s ear they produce great paintings. But this is similar to our educational system… the students produce results but are they really aware of what they are making?

Categories of technology

Cost cutting: iPod did it for the music industry
Making the impossible, possible: Computer graphics, a technology that made it possible to create new movies such as Avatar or the Matrix.

This is going to be a fun class 🙂

Post-It activity: What are learning technologies? How would you categorize them?

Fabrication Lab – looked at laser cutter and rapid prototyping techniques with cardboard, foam core, hot glue and tape.

January 7, 2016

Core Mechanics – Week 1 – Reading Notes

Reading

Brown, A. L., & Kane, M. J. (1988). Preschool children can learn to transfer: Learning to learn and learning from example. Cognitive Psychology,20(4), 493-523.

Summary

Studies on how learning can happen through only one or few examples, both for children and machine learning. Explaining the one example leads to greater transfer, vs just looking at the example. Learn by teaching.

“In this series of studies we examined whether young children can abstract a general rule from examples and, if so, whether their learning is influenced by their ability to explain why the concept is an instance of the rule.”

Mental Notes

Video Games must be an effective way nowadays to test transfer in children.
Learn by teaching, by explaining – create a schema in your head prodcues learning.

Citations

“Transfer is not automatic but depends upon insight into general principles.”, p.495

“Telling children that problems are the same, without specifying how, is one of the methods that has promoted successful transfer in young children (CrisatI, 1986; Crisafi & Brown, 1986). Therefore, this obvious mention of the common action and of problem similarity should promote transfer if anything would; thus, the hint condition was regarded as a yardstick against which the other manipulations could be measured.”, p.500

“This means that the 3-year-olds show a reliable learning to learn effect only if they are encouraged to reflect on their solutions, either through discussions, instructing Kermit, or explicit prompts to problem similarity.”, p. 501

“Taken together the results of Studies 4 and 5 suggestthat examples are more useful in promoting transfer than the provision of an explicit statement of the general rule.”, p.512

“Taken together, Studies 5, 6, and 7 demonstrate the efficacy of having learners generate explanations of why an example is an instance of a concept.”, p.516

“Exposing children to a variety of transfer experiences teaches them to search for underlying commonalities.”, p.516

“If children spontaneously recall, or elaborate on why an example is an instance of a deeper relational mechanism, or if they are led to such elaborations by probing questions, they transfer readily. Elaborations and explanations provided by the subjects themselvesare more effective in promoting transfer than those provided by the experimenter, an effect reminiscent of the use of self-produced elaborations in adult learning (Reder et al., 1986).”, p.517

“Efficient learners prepare for transfer by engaging in reasoning processes aimed at elaborating knowledge. With experience, efficient learners develop a mind set to regard new problems, not as isolated examples, but as instances of a general class. Efficient learners come to expect what they learn to be relevant elsewhere. Efftcient learners perform thought experiments in which they actively seek out appropriate analogies. In short, efftcient learners understand some of the principles involved in learning and reasoning; they have a greater metaconceptual grasp of the domain ‘ ‘learning. ’ ’”, p.520

January 7, 2016

Beyond Bits and Atoms – Week 1 – Reading Notes

Papert, S. & Solomon, C. (1971). 20 Things to do with a computer.

“Some think of using the computer to program the kid; others think of using the kid to program the computer. But most of them have at least this in common: the transaction between the computer and the kid will be some kind of ‘conversation’ or ‘questions and answers’ in words or numbers.” (Papert, Solomon, 1971, p.1)

Make a Turtle (LOGO)
Program the Turtle to draw a man
Turtle biology
Make a display turtle
Play spacebar
Differential geometry
Draw spirals
Have a heart (and learn to debug)
Grow flowers
Make a movie
Make a music box and program a tune
Play with semi-random musical effects and then try serious composing
Computerize an erector set crane and build a tower of blocks
Make a super light show
Write concrete poetry
Try C.A.I. and psychology
Physics in the finger-tips
Explain yourself
Puppets
Recursion line (think of 20 more)