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About Discovery

It is generally agreed within the OLPC movement that we need less rote learning, less teaching lessons out of a book, and less homework drudgery such as paper-and-pencil arithmetic drill, on one hand; and on the other hand more understanding, more flexibility of thinking, more creativity, and so on. It is also widely agreed that among the ways to achieve these kinds of education are through having students make something and through having students tackle questions themselves. What students experience for themselves and what they discover for themselves are far more likely to remain in their memories, and far more likely to be useful for further work, than what they hear about in a classroom or read about in a textbook.

There are more particular uses of discovery in the classroom. For example, students can be assigned to read a section of a textbook, and then assigned to go out onto the Internet and find out whatever else there is to know about it. Some care is required to make sure that students do not too often mistake misinformation for information, at least no more often than their teachers or others who know something about the matter. We can teach students how to detect misinformation, also, in a variety of ways.

• One can compare sources to find various views. This is clearly not enough, since there are reasons for people to put forward views that they do not believe in themselves, and numerous sources of error.

• One can examine the reasons given in support of a view for logical consistency, and for agreement with known facts. This is better, but still by no means foolproof.

• One can understand the necessity for constant vigilance concerting truth, and accept one's own responsibilities in that line, while recognizing that we cannot get at perfect truth about most things. And most of the time, we don't need perfect truth in order to get on with our lives and our livelihoods. We know, for example, that Quantum Mechanics is in a fundamental way wrong, yet that fundamental issue does not affect the everyday applications of QM to semiconductors or any of its other practical applications. We know that our theories of government and economics are seriously flawed, but we also know that we can make a great many more improvements within the limits of what we know, and that there is no reason therefore to abandon our provisional understanding.

Learning with Discovery

Coming back to Sugar and XOs, there is much that students and even younger children can discover rather accurately for themselves, by attending to the names of things, the icons used to represent them, and most of all what things do when you click them. For most activities, there are only a few things that they need hints or outright explanations for. The major exceptions are programming languages, in which the names of things are highly arbitrary, and what those things do is purely a matter of definition, not any sort of necessity.

Even there, however, it is possible to arrange examples in an order that allows students to work out what each part of most programs does, and to consult documentation only for fiddly details. This is because correct code runs, and its workings and output can be examined, while radically incorrect code fails, and presents error messages that can usually be interpreted. The big problem is with code that runs but gives wrong answers. This, too, can be discovered if one can tell what the answers should be.

The workings of the real world, such as physics, and of real people, such as politics, are harder to discover, but it has turned out that educating people in these areas is possible through a judicious choice of questions for them to explore, rather than the lecture method of telling them what they are supposed to know, with the implication that they are not to try to learn anything else. A historical example is The Querist, a political tract on the situation of Ireland in the 17th century, by Bishop George Berkeley, consisting entirely of questions.

Most of what cannot be discovered about Sugar and XOs is documented in the Sugar Labs Wiki, on the page The Undiscoverable. Suggestions for hints and explanations are provided there, too. Contributions of further confusions are most welcome.