Hi Caroline,
And adults and children just love "being creative" and "expressing themselves".
And, this is especially the case around the world when computers are introduced
with applications that allow people to make things.
So far so good.
To continue one of the themes of this thread, let's look at this process over
human presence on the planet. We find invention coupled with dogma. Many who
have studied this have likened it to an erosion model of memory, both
individually and culturally. (Once a little groove is randomly made by water it
becomes very efficient in helping more water to erode it further.)
So "creative acts" are resisted, but once accepted for one reason or another
will cling, and most often far beyond their merits. Most creativity is more
"News" than "New", that is it is extremely incremental to the erosion gully.
Science attempts to be completely different than this. We are dancing with a
universe of which we can only detect some of its shadows, and the universe
leads. We are not free to be creative to make up stories we like or draw
pictures we like unless they can be shown to fit to a high degree with the
dance. For many important reasons these maps we try to make cannot be true,
even if the maps themselves are internally perfect and beautiful.
So science goes *quite against* what anthropologists have determined are strong
built in human characteristics about explaining the world.
And even trained scientists often have real problems with this. Our brains want
to *believe* but science is not about belief.
This is one of the reasons that science almost requires a community of
scientists, some of whom are less invested in particular theories and
rationalizations of them than others. It is these more disinterested more
skeptical scientists who help the invested behave -- and vice versa. So science
is a kind of human system for deeply debugging human notions and
rationalizations (about everything).
It is this epistemology that has to be learned (really one trains oneself in
it) before one can deal with "written down science". There is nothing in any
science writing that can help anyone with the goodness of the mapping. Why?
Because once one gets to language, with or without the aid of mathematics, one
is using the same representation systems that are also used for religion. One
can say anything in language (for example all languages contain "not", which
means any claim can be restated as a counter claim!). This extends quite simply
to any representation on a computer.
So the basic process of learning science is about doing direct stuff and
imbibing its epistemological stances. However, so much successful science has
been done -- and science not only builds on itself but requires its findings to
be constantly intercorrelated -- that no scientist can recapitulate all this by
direct experiment. So the learning process is (a) get down the epistemology by
direct contact with the real processes (b) then you can deal with claims that
you won't be able to directly substantiate.
This amount of rigor is difficult for we humans generally. But it is just this
rigor that made the enormous differences in how well we can do the dance over
the last few hundred years.
Trying to do less loses both the dance and the art. So we can think of science
as the art form in which the greatest creativity ever must be used with the
greatest constraints and possibility for failure. It goes far beyond
mathematics and (say) composing something really beautiful in strict
counterpoint, though both of these have strong tinges of this style.
I think it is possible to do the real deal with children, and we've managed to
show this (for example, with the Galilean gravity investigation). The ability
of the computer to do simple incremental addition very quickly gives us a
differential mathematics that is completely understandable to the children that
is also fast enough to carry out the integrations over time directly in
real-time. For 10 year olds, this is really good science, and I would neither
advocate them being less nor more rigorous.
For children, we mainly want to find really good ways to help them with (a)
above.
Each age can match up to real science projects devised by us (it is *we* who
have to be really creative!).
And as important as is creativity, *we* simply must understand the real and
deep natures of the subjects we are trying to help children learn. Most
importantly, we have to understand what simplifications retain the underlying
epistemology of the content, and which simplifications completely undermine and
confuse the subject matter. (The latter is seen almost invariably in most K-8
classrooms in the US with or without computers - the teachers simply don't
understand the stuff, and the school district and state almost always water the
stuff down to lose it in futile attempts to get better test scores, regardless
of whether the testing is now just an empty gesture.)
So most of the small percentage of the children who do become fluent in real
science do so outside the regular classroom, and very often via contact through
some knowledgeable adult.
Best wishes,
Alan
________________________________
From: Caroline Meeks <carol...@solutiongrove.com>
To: iaep <iaep@lists.sugarlabs.org>
Sent: Sunday, August 16, 2009 6:27:50 AM
Subject: [IAEP] Physics Activity - Should we change the name
Sugar is blessed with a number of powerful activities that are platforms for
open ended creativity.
* Turtle Art
* eToys
* Tam Tam Suite
* Scratch
* FlipSticks
I notice they all have names that under promise and don't set up rigid
expectations. I think Physics could follow this naming pattern encouraging
people to explore with it without the expectation that somehow this is about
teaching "Physics" as described in their governmental curriculum.
--
Caroline Meeks
Solution Grove
carol...@solutiongrove.com
617-500-3488 - Office
505-213-3268 - Fax
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