Summer Camp Questions

[Edwin Pilobello]

Ken contributed a very nice chapter in "Your Wish Is My Command :
Programming by Example" edited by Henry Liebermann.  I'm currently
trying to figure out how to teach his "Toon Talk" to those who cannot
yet keyboard.  The book also inspired a CAD/CAM course using MLCAD,
Pov-Ray rendering and Lego Mindstorms which I will offer in the Fall.

Cheers,
:-)  Edwin

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-squeakland at squeakland.org
[mailto:owner-squeakland at squeakland.org] On Behalf Of John Steinmetz
Sent: Tuesday, June 11, 2002 1:19 PM
To: squeakland at squeakland.org
Subject: Re: Summer Camp Questions


The great, abiding, hard questions are coming up here. Bravo!

>The
>question is how to teach. I used to think the answer was to teach the 
>fundamentals and give a sense of how many different things can be 
>built. But I find that only a few kids do well and most seem lost and 
>confused. So lately I've tried to provide much more focused material 
>and it seems to work much better. But focused material runs counter to 
>the notion of having the kids pursue their own personal interests.

This is a fundamental problem, maybe a paradox: people don't want to 
learn skills if they don't have a purpose for them, but without 
skills they may not be able to conceive a purpose. Also, people eager 
to work toward their purpose may be impatient with acquiring the 
skills needed to get there.

These are more reasons why teaching is an art.

Standard education approach is to teach people things that they might 
need later. (I call this "Preventive Learning.") Doreen Nelson has 
developed curricula that work the other way around, starting with a 
rich, interesting, creative project that has no single right 
solution, and in the course of doing the project people learn the 
skills and information they need to complete the project. Much art is 
required in this kind of teaching. You can imagine how easy it would 
be to make a project that was too daunting, not engaging enough, too 
boring, too disconnected from real life, etc.

Everybody's different, but I know I learned most of my computer and 
programming skills by struggling to make something I wanted to make, 
even though I was completely unequipped to make it. Luckily (1)no one 
was making me, (2)I had no deadline, (3)I could keep changing both my 
skills and my goals as I learned more, (4)I got to define success, 
(5)in those days I had lots of free time to throw at the project--it 
was my hobby. Lots of learning happened, much of it very 
inefficiently, almost all of it great fun.

And I know that other people would have been miserable doing it that
way!

	John

P.S. Did you ever notice how often classes are taught by people who 
didn't learn that subject in a class?



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