Subject: Innovation

Posted by Niall Palfreyman on 11/18/2010
In Reply To:Innovation Posted by Richard Turnock on 11/18/2010

Message:

Am 23.11.2010 22:02, schrieb Richard Turnock:
> Short video on TED.com supports the idea of using computer modeling to teach kids what they need to know in the real world.
> http://www.ted.com/talks/conrad_wolfram_teaching_kids_real_math_with_c
> omputers.html
Hm. I'm finding it difficult to think what to say here. I _love_ the idea of using computers to learn, in particular because I believe that intelligent learning consists in abstracting narratives of action from the concrete experience of interacting with the world, and then refining those narratives by applying them to new situations. By using computers in education we can offer students ways of interacting with complex, real-life situations, and this empowers them to build more powerful abstractions than is possible using simply hand-calculations.

However abstraction, and 'building up' complex structures is only the first part of learning; the second half involves refining the narratives, and that in turn involves picking them to pieces to see what parts of them do or do not work. Wolfram says, quite rightly in my view, that a good way of doing this is by programming: I try reconstructing the narrative from available building blocks (programming functions, co-flows, or whatever), then I 'debug' my first attempt until I have constructed something that works. The teacher can speed up the discovery process by offering tips on the kinds of building-blocks which might work well.

But a problem arises here. Programming tools are either very general or very specific. A general tool such as Java enables the student to try out almost anything, however it has a steep learning curve; a specific tool such as Stella is super-user-friendly for certain problems, and downright impossible for others. An example came for me when I had used Stella with students for looking at chemical interaction systems, then wanted to discuss the role of diffusion in the cell. This meant building topological relationships between stocks to model the flow of chemicals from one site to another. Stella just wasn't designed for this, and suddenly we had to switch to a more appropriate language (which itself was impossible in the time available to us).

So I think my point is this. Using computers to experiment and construct ideas is an exciting new possibility in education, however in practice I've found that the realities of software tools mean that they are seldom adequate for the things I want to teach without occasionally prohibitive amounts of prior work on using the tool. In such situations I am sometimes thankful to resort to simple paper-and-pen constructions.

Best wishes,
Niall Palfreyman.

Follow Ups:

Innovation - Warren Farr 11/24/2010 
Pay more attention AnyLogic - Pedro D. Almaguer Prado 11/24/2010
Pay more attention AnyLogic - Alex Leus 11/24/2010
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