Drill and test software
Software to drill and test is often considered anathema under the constructivist paradigm which guides this wiki. It fundamentally encourages a focus on rote knowledge, which constructivists rightly point out is subsidiary to real-world skills and attitudes. However, that does not mean that rote knowledge does not exist, or that it is not sometimes important and even interesting. I expect that most people reading this have at some point in their lives studied for a test using flash cards - do you think that that is fundamentally a waste of time?
Testing software
Moreover, if this laptop will be used in hundreds of thousands of classrooms, many existing teachers WILL try to use it for drills and tests, for good reasons or bad. OLPC and friends, constructivist as we may be, should consider what should best happen in this case.
Possible results:
- Makeshift testing solutions are difficult for teachers to create and use, and easy for students to cheat on. Teachers either:
- Use the broken tools, so that students cheat (on the one hand learning dishonesty; on the other, perhaps improving their learning process of the material by engaging with it through cheating, or perhaps just wasting their time cutting-and-pasting)
- Give up and accept the constructivist doctrine.
- Or give standard paper-based tests, banning the laptops from the classroom and wasting their time grading.
- An "official" OLPC testing app exists which allows for restrictions, but also provides infrastructure for "open-book" and/or "group" testing, as well as constructivist counsel on how to keep rote tests to an appropriate minimum. Teachers either:
- Ignore the constructivist prosyletism and just teach as they would anyway, but at least have some of the grunt-work of grading lifted from their shoulders.
- Adapt their teaching methods to be more constructivist.
Drill software
A well-designed memorization drill software would be able to create an adaptive, individualized learning schedule; offer support and advice for mnemonic tricks; offer individual or socially-based motivation (eg. quiz show format, etc.) and otherwise improve on old-fasioned flash cards.
What makes this constructivist? If the laptop is always a tool, not a taskmaster. This means that the primary motivation for learning will ALWAYS be from outside this activity - "I want to study X because it will help me do Y, ok computer, help me study." How do you design this outlook into the software? Not sure, here's some ideas: keep the connection to Y salient, even if just with the scores - instead of just "86%" it should respond "86%, you're ready to do intermediate Y-ing" or something; somehow simulate a real-world Y-ing task; ask "how did you do the last time you tried to Y" and track that along with in-program scores... ???
