Paper and Pencils
In the External Developers page is the following comment.
Expect that the kids have no paper, pens, pencils, books or trained teachers. Many OLPCs will be deployed into just such an environment.
This page is started in the hope that a sponsor can be found for paper and pencil packs to be provided to the children.
- Doesn't it seem rather wasteful to spend money on disposable resource like pencils and paper when you could be spending it on more OLPCs? It is possible to design educational content that does not require expensive support materials.
History of Writing
Long, Long Ago
Long, long ago people did not know how to write. But they liked to draw pictures. They had no computers and no paper so how did they draw?
Sand Pictures
First, they used sticks and drew pictures in the sand. Can you draw pictures in the sand? Does the wind blow your pictures away?
Next, they used their sticks to draw pictures in mud. When the mud dried, the wind couldn't blow their pictures away. The dry mud would crack and they could carefully pick up a picture and show it to a friend. Can you draw pictures in the mud? What happens when the rain comes?
Then, somebody made a fire to cook some food right on top of the mud pictures. The next day it rained and rained and rained. After the rain stopped, the people saw that the mud picture was still there. People tried different kinds of mud and learned that clay mud made the best pictures. Can you bake your mud pictures? What happens if you pour water on it after it is cold? Can you find mus that makes the best pictures?
Bark Pictures
- You get the idea?
- charcoal for writing
- mix grease and charcoal and colored dirts (research life of George Washington Carver for ideas)
- paints and pigments
- glues
Woven Grasses
- mats of tightly-woven grass or other fibres
- paint several coats of gesso to provide a smooth flat canvas
- use your paints
Pictographs and Ideographs
- Ancient Sumerian clay tokens
- Ancient Chinese oracle bones
- Harrapa clay tokens
- American Indian pictographs and sign language
- Standardized symbol sets
Rebus and Alphabets
- Rebus principle
- Simplified pictographs
- Phoenician alphabet
- Japanese Hiragana evolution from Chinese
- Innuit syllabics
To be done
Obviously a lot more needs to be done but you see how a curriculum can lead kids towards writing through guided experiences in art that parallels the evolution of writing. At the same time the kids learn many different drawing materials that they can use to write with and which they can acquire themselves in their local area.
And the OLPC itself is the ultimate writing material. You can write or draw on the wide touchpad or you can type on the keys.
Mindstorms
However, we might want to use the laptops as a disruptive element in the traditional mindset of teaching and learning that glorifies the use of pen and paper. Papert says:
In Mindstorms (Papert, 1980), I asked (choosing one out of a vast number of possible examples) why the quadratic equation of the parabola is included in the mathematical knowledge every educated citizen is expected to know. Saying that it is "good math" is not enough reason: The curriculum includes only a minute sliver of the total body of good mathematics. The real reason is that it matches the technology of pencil and paper: It is easy for a student to draw the curve on squared paper and for a teacher to verify that the assignment has been done correctly. I have noted elsewhere (Papert, 1996b), that School's math can be characterized by the fact that its typical act is making marks on paper. Explorations in the Space of Mathematics Education develops this idea by imagining an alternative mathematical education in which the typical activity begins with and consists of creating, modifying, or controlling dynamic computational objects. In this context the parabola may be first encountered by a child creating a videogame as the trajectory of an animal's leap or a missile's flight; here, the natural first formalism for the parabola is an expression in a child-appropriate computational language of something like "the path followed when horizontal speed and vertical acceleration are both constant." Many readers will say that is too abstract for children. This is because they have in mind children who grew up using the static medium of pencil and paper as the primary medium for representing mathematical ideas. Attempts to inject this treatment of the parabola as an isolated innovation into an otherwise unchanged School will confirm their negative view. For children who have acquired true computational fluency by growing up with the dynamic medium as a primary representation for mathematical thinking, I argue that it would plausibly be more concrete, more intuitive, and far more motivating than quadratic equations. My experiments support this expectation by showing that the dynamic definition is indeed accessible even to elementary school children who are given the opportunity to acquire a degree of computational fluency that is still very limited though considerably more than a few students develop in what are misleadingly called computer labs in contemporary schools.