Constructionism: Difference between revisions

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Prof. Howard Peelle of the Education School at the University of Massachusetts has written about his experiments with APL in elementary school. The idea is to let children play a game, then learn to make simple adjustments to game play, and progress to full programming. IBM once sponsored a program to support APL for a whole elementary school.
Prof. Howard Peelle of the Education School at the University of Massachusetts has written about his experiments with APL in elementary school. The idea is to let children play a game, then learn to make simple adjustments to game play, and progress to full programming. IBM once sponsored a program to support APL for a whole elementary school.


There does not appear to be a single Best Computer Language for elementary school students, but most people agree that Basic doesn't come too close. (Among software developers, the proverb is "Basic isn't.") [[Python]], [[APL]], [[LISP]], [[LOGO]], [[Squeak|Smalltalk]], and several others have been proposed and tried. It would be useful to bring the resulting knowledge together. It is clearly impossible to settle the question based only on the stated preferences of adults who don't know all of the languages concerned, that is through [http://mindprod.com/jgloss/rwar.html rwars]. In any case, Python has been chosen by the OLPC to be the base language of the laptop. For an overview of various ways in which people have applied Python to education, check this link http://www.python.org/community/sigs/current/edu-sig/
There does not appear to be a single Best Computer Language for elementary school students, though [[BASIC]] is popular. [[Python]], [[APL]], [[LISP]], [[LOGO]], [[Squeak|Smalltalk]], and many many others have also been used. It would be useful to bring the resulting knowledge together. It is clearly impossible to settle the question based only on the stated preferences of adults who don't know all of the languages concerned, that is through [http://mindprod.com/jgloss/rwar.html rwars]. In any case, Python has been chosen by the OLPC to be the base language of the laptop. For an overview of various ways in which people have applied Python to education, check this link http://www.python.org/community/sigs/current/edu-sig/


== See also ==
== See also ==

Revision as of 08:26, 15 November 2007

  english | français | español | 日本語 | 한국어 HowTo [ID# 77644]  +/-  

Constructionism is a philosophy of education in which children learn by doing and making. They explore and discover instead of being force fed information. More on this topic can be found by exploring Google using keywords such as "constructionism", "education", "philosophy". See for instance openworldlearning, Seymour Papert's website, http://www.papert.org , and the wikipedia article on constructionist learning.

History and Examples

Books and notes +/-

Alan Kay and his Squeak project have done a lot to make tools available to teachers who want to develop constructionist educational materials. Alan recently gave a keynote at EuroPython demonstrating how kids can learn constructively.

One of the great pioneers of the practice, long before the term, was University of Pittsburgh's sociologist Omar Khayyam Moore, who built his "Edison Talking Typewriter" to teach two-year olds to read and write simply by reinforcing aspects of their spontaneous behavior.

Prof. Howard Peelle of the Education School at the University of Massachusetts has written about his experiments with APL in elementary school. The idea is to let children play a game, then learn to make simple adjustments to game play, and progress to full programming. IBM once sponsored a program to support APL for a whole elementary school.

There does not appear to be a single Best Computer Language for elementary school students, though BASIC is popular. Python, APL, LISP, LOGO, Smalltalk, and many many others have also been used. It would be useful to bring the resulting knowledge together. It is clearly impossible to settle the question based only on the stated preferences of adults who don't know all of the languages concerned, that is through rwars. In any case, Python has been chosen by the OLPC to be the base language of the laptop. For an overview of various ways in which people have applied Python to education, check this link http://www.python.org/community/sigs/current/edu-sig/

See also

Edutainment? No Thanks. I Prefer Playful Learning