Papert's Gears

Week two of Learning Creative Learning is all about formal vs. informal learning. We started with a reading of Seymour Papert's essay, "Gears of my Childhood". It focused on his fascination with gears that started very early in his life (when he was two) with gears and how this fascination played out through his formal education. We were tasked with writing about on object from our own childhood that interested us.

I really struggled with this. I don't know that I had a similar object/experience when I was very young. In fact I find it very difficult to remember much from that time. This probably points to the fact that I didn't have any really powerful experiences like Papert's when I was very young.

The closest experience I have with an object from my childhood was the Franklin Ace 1000 computer we got in 1982, when I was 11. The Franklin Ace was a clone of the Apple II+. My brothers and I had been begging for a computer. When ever we went to K-Mart we would immediately go to the computer section of the store. Yes, K-Mart really did sell personal computers. We would play with them and write simple programs to fill the screen with things like, "Steve is COOL" or "My Brother SUCKS!" on infinite loops and then walk away. I later learned that my parents made a decision not to take the family to Florida that summer and instead to buy us a computer. From that point on I've always had a computer in my house and computers (or similar devices) have been at the center of how I work and play.

This was an incredible thing to own. We could run cool games, but more importantly I could use it to write computer programs. Now, I never really ever wrote any really complicated programs on this computer. I think I never had the sort of persistence required to do that. Maybe if I'd had badges ;). Just having it there being able to type in programs from computer magazines and see them run really gave me a sense of accomplishment. I wrote, or copied, a program and I cause something to happen on the screen. It really was kind of awesome.

It was obvious, even in the 80s that computers were going to be very important in the future. In retrospect I'm very glad that my parents chose the computer over the vacation. They were really investing in the futures of their three children. Today my older brother is an engineer, my younger brother is the Director of Technology at a high school, and I'm a physics teacher who relies on computers and the Internet as an integral part of my teaching and learning.

Learning with Technology?

So, my blog is ostensibly about Teaching with Technology, but I think I will depart from that a little and use this as I document my participation in a MOOC I'm taking being offered by the MIT Media Lab on Creative Learning.

Right now I'm watching the lecture for the first week being delivered by Mitchel Resnik. He's offering the background and justification for what he calls "Lifelong Kindergarten". In kindergarten students get to play and explore as the primary way to learn. He contends we should do this at all levels and get away from the model of education that is focused on knowledge delivery.

With new technologies that are being developed all the time we can move closer and closer to lifelong kindergarten. The main thing Resnik is talking about seems to be focused on the design and building of devices or computer programs. This reminds me to some degree of a workshop Gary Abud ran for the DMAPT on Design Thinking. It will get the students to think creatively and do some good problem solving, but unless the design challenges are very carefully crafted I'm not sure how much content a student could learn with this model.

While content is only one of the things I try to teach to my students, it is an important thing. Without the content you wouldn't be able to call my class Physics. I'm hoping this course will give me more insights on how to allow students to play and explore while still teaching the content.

I try to get my students playing and exploring quite often. One of the ways I do with is with building projects. We just finished our marshmallow catapults. I gave students a list of allowable materials and told them to build a catapult that would hurl a marshmallow into a bucket 5 meters away (Thanks @mr_pata for the idea). They had to play, discover, and build. I know they learned some important things along the way. However, they probably didn't need to rely on the physics concepts we've been learning in class nor did they develop new concepts we haven't covered yet. How do I do projects like this that teach not only the critical thinking and experimentation, but also teach physics?

I'm hoping that Learning Creative Learning will give me some insights to help answer that question.