Collaborative Discovery
The OLPC XO is designed around collaboration and discovery, two essential elements of Constructionism.
Collaboration
Most of the activities on the XO are collaborative. Users can play music together, draw pictures together, write documents together, browse the Web together, and so on. The Sugar User Interface emphasizes opportunities for collaboration everywhere. Within activities, users can invite others to join in, sending offers to individuals or to anybody on the local system. The wireless environment display shows active sharing and collaboration by grouping user icons around activity icons.
Collaboration is the essence of human activity. We work together in families, groups of friends, school, work, social organizations, political parties, and so on. All progress is a collaboration with the past, "standing on the shoulders of giants".
Discovery
The newborn child is built for the task of discovering the world. Discovering Mommy; discovering its toes and such; discovering crawling, walking, running, jumping, skipping, and so on; discovering language, including singing; discovering foods; discovering plants, animals, and inanimate objects; discovering other people; discovering, in short, everything that comes in range of any of the senses, and then discovering ideas that don't exist in the sensory world.
None of this is education, as commonly understood. In fact, we call it "play" and tend to look down on it. Formal schooling throws away everything that the child can do naturally, and insists on the most unnatural methods of instruction. Sit still. Color inside the lines. Only learn what the teacher teaches, whether it makes sense or not.
Constructionism in general, and the XO in particular, encourage discovery of reading, writing, math, programming, scientific measurement and analysis, and much more. Discovering mastery and understanding. Alan Kay has written about children discovering concepts of calculus and other supposedly advanced ideas.
