Hi Mark --At 05:01 AM 8/24/2007, Guzdial, Mark wrote:
Snip
Tyrone is eloquent
in his explanations--I believe he understands what he's doing.
Here's my concern: Does he really understand differential
equations? Let me break that down into two parts.
- When Tyrone is faced with another problem related to rates (maybe
disease propagation, rates of decay, etc.) in eToys, can he use those
tools to analyze the new situation?
I think most of the children after a few months of using "increase
by" in various ways, do recognize rates in many other
contexts.
Does he
recognize the situation as similar and that his same tools would
apply? That would convince me that he has developed an
understanding of the powerful idea of differential
equations.
I would doubt that his understanding of these kinds of DEs is total or
even "supremely comprehensive", but it is
"operational" very along the lines that any mathematician would
characterize as "mathematical thinking". Our goal was to make
an environment in which more than 90% of the children exhibited real
fluency in this kind of thinking. "Real fluency" implies a
degree of understanding above an important threshold.
- When Tyrone gets
to college and studies differential equations, will he recognize them as
the same thing? I doubt that. They won't look the
same.
A much more important question is "will Tyrone understand
mathematics by the time he gets to college?". If the answer is
"yes", then he will recognize them as the same thing. If
"no" then everything will be special cases of rules (which they
are to most college students).
His calculus
course may not even relate to differential equations to modeling
gravity. He will have too few cues to make that connection. A
reasonable response to this should be that the calculus course might be
taught with eToys, too, and that would help make the connection. I
would agree. It's just unlikely that many (any?) college calculus
courses will use eToys.
Again, the question is whether he is actually learning math or not. It
has nothing to do with Etoys.
What I do believe
is that the students in BJ's course have developed an understanding of
the power of computation (*programmable* computation) in problem-solving
and knowledge transformation. That's tremendous, and likely will
transfer to other situations using computers.
I'd like to argue with your claim from cognitive psychology,
though. "Length of exposure" is an ill-defined variable
which has since been better refined and tested. What does
"length of exposure" mean? One hour a day for two
years? One hour a week for two years? Here's a brief thought
experiment to address this point: I'll bet everyone on this list
remembers exactly where they were and what they were doing when they
first learned of the 9/11 attacks. That wasn't a very long
exposure, yet everyone remembers it. Why?
All I can say is that this was very thoroughly studied in the 60s (as was
deep habit formation). What they were testing were not memories of
isolated unusual incidents (nor of "movie recognition memory"
which is also from one trial). What they were doing was testing changes
of paradigms in outlook, and for most children these took immersion in an
environment for well over a year to be strongly detectable years
later.
The two new
variables that are more often studied are:
- Time on task. The more time you spend on an activity, the more
likely that you will remember the experience and lessons of that activity
later.
- Amount of reflection. The more often that you reuse an
association, the more often you think about and talk about an experience,
the more likely you will retain it. That's the best explanation I
know for the 9/11 effect (or the Challenger effect, or the JFK
assassination effect). You thought about that moment later that
day, and the next day, and you've discussed it with your friends.
That leads to longer term learning.
To me, these are not as interesting (nor are they parallels) to large
scale epistemological shifts.
Cheers,
Alan
With best
regards,
Mark
-----Original Message-----
From: squeakland-bounces@squeakland.org on behalf of Alan Kay
Sent: Thu 8/23/2007 6:49 PM
To: bradallenfuller@yahoo.com; squeakland@squeakland.org
Subject: Re: [Squeakland] the non universals
Of course, Mark didn't look carefully enough at either the Squeakers
DVD or the Kim Rose and BJ Conn book "Powerful Ideas in the
Classroom" and other materials which show what we actually do
with
the kids (actually in 5th grade for this example).
We don't teach any abstractions, but work our way out from various
kinds of animated movement in Etoys (constant velocity, random
velocities, steadily increasing velocity, etc.). From a number of
such examples the children gradually associate both a relationship
"increase by" and a history of the movements (shown by leaving
dots
behind on the screen). Later (about 3 and one half months later, in
the case of the first time we tried this) we got them to think about
and investigate falling bodies. One example on the Squeakers DVD
showed 11 year old Tyrone explaining just how he worked out and
derived the actual differential equations of motion (in
intellectually honest and mathematical version that computers make
very practical). He did this by recognizing accelerated motion in
the
pattern of pictures of the dropping ball, measured the differences
to
find out what kind of acceleration (constant) and made the script
for
vertical motion partly using the memory of how he had done the
horizontal motion in Etoys 3 months before. He explained how he did
this very well on the video. Also, by luck, I happened to be in the
classroom on the day he actually made his discoveries and
derivations. Most the children were able to do this.
The important things about this experience was that Tyrone and the
other children had learned a model of acceleration and velocity that
was quite meaningful to them. Months later they were able to
remember
these ideas and adapt them to observations of the real-world.
According to Lillian McDermott at the U of Wash, 70% of all college
students (including science majors) are unable to understand the
Galilean model of gravity (which uses a very different pedagogy in
college).
The most important piece of knowledge from cog psych is a study done
in the late 60s or early 70s that showed exposure to any enriched
environment for less than 2 years was not retained. But two or more
years of exposure tended to be retained. This also correlates to
habit formation and habit unlearning.
So, I would argue that Mark's three examples are very different and
don't really deserve to go together. And, in any case, all we know
about the 5th graders is that using this pedagogy and Etoys they are
generally able to be more successful in both the math and the
science
of accelerated change than most college students. This particular
way
of looking at differential equations has become more and more
standard as computers have become more and more the workhorses of
science (partly because they are in a form well set up for creating
a
simulation -- and for the kids, because they are much easier to
understand than the previous standards for DEs).
Cheers,
Alan
At 03:23 PM 8/23/2007, Brad Fuller wrote:
>though I'd pass this along for another viewpoint. Mark Guzdial's
latest
>perspective on powerful ideas, abstractions and design patterns:
>
>
http://www.amazon.com/gp/blog/post/PLNK13L1MC1Q3613J
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