On Sun, May 3, 2009 at 6:13 PM, Walter Bender <walter.ben...@gmail.com> wrote: > ===Sugar Digest=== > > I encourage you to join two threads on the Education List this week: > http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2009-April/005382.html, which > has boiled down to an instruction vs construction debate; and > http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2009-April/005342.html, which > has boiled down to a debate of catering to local culture vs the > Enlightenment. I encourage you to join these discussions. > > Rather than commenting here, I want to discuss a third, orthogonal > topic: creativity. I hosted a visit to Cambridge this week from Diego > Uribe, a Chilean researcher who is currently a Fulbright scholar at > the International Center for Studies in Creativity in Buffalo, NY. > Diego challenged me with two questions: Can we be more deliberate in > developing children's creativity skills and how can we use Sugar to > better disseminate creativity heuristics?
> > Guidelines for divergent thinking > > * defer judgment > * go for quantity > * make connections > * seek novelty > > > Guidelines for convergent thinking > > * apply affirmative judgment > * keep novelty alive > * check your objectives > * stay focused > Walter, Thank you very much for this write-up. It is very, very interesting and quite helpful! Coincidentally, I am working on a proposal part about convergent and divergent actions, as applied to children's authoring in mathematics. As an aside, I find that using "creativity" or "creating" distracts people into a lot of tangents when I talk about math, so unless I have a lot of time to explain contexts, I go with "authoring." Metaphors and example spaces are two relevant parts of my framework here. A metaphor can start the divergent part of the cycle, allowing kids to quickly generate a number of mathematical objects. Then particular questions or goals help kids to sort through their objects, noticing properties and observing patterns. These generalities (properties and patterns) are convergent, and a pile of objects born of a metaphor gets structured into an example space. Now objects become examples OF something - namely, of observed generalities. At which point kids are tempted to generate more and better examples, which is the divergent part of the cycle at a new level, and so on. In practice, kids need ways to make math objects within a common metaphor and to collect, share and re-make those objects. With some kids, it's as simple as providing a graffiti wall and a verbal prompt, but typically you need heuristics and scaffolds to keep the thing going. In software, the challenge is to find a balance between providing enough scaffolds, yet leaving enough space for the divergent part of the cycle, allowing kids to actually, here goes - create. -- Cheers, MariaD Make math your own, to make your own math. http://www.naturalmath.com social math site http://www.phenixsolutions.com empowering our innovations _______________________________________________ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep