On 2011-06-14, at 9:36 PM, Julian Leviston wrote: > The thing that irritates me about this attitude of "don't consider kids as > equal" is that we DO consider them as equal in other frames... we expect so > much of them in terms of linguistic and cognitive development... and actually > the abstractions (zero-th order abstraction) capable of and exhibited by a 5 > year old are used when in the activity called "programming" all the time... > so much so we as adult programmers rarely think about them.
Not equal. Children are very different cognitively from adults and it is important to resist the temptation to treat them as little adults. On the other hand, we shouldn't condescend to them, they are like learning sponges and can absorb ideas far beyond what we generally give them credit for. One problem is immersion. They learn language amazingly fast (in large part) because they are immersed in it constantly. Seymour Papert's book, Mindstorms is one of the best reads I've ever had about software, and he discusses creating "worlds" for math, physics, and other subjects on the computer so that children can be as immersed in those worlds as they are naturally in the world of language. That was one of the guiding ideas behind the creation of Logo. > Some of the structural patterns that a small child already has at least some > mastership of are connection, fitting, representation, indirection, context, > mood, physical relationship. These are all used in simple programming. > Perhaps they don't have the meta-words, but that's okay - that can come later > at about 12 when they begin their next level of abstract cognitive > development (ie proper abstract thought). > > My flatmate's 7 year old daughter is in the process of mastering addition, > subtraction, multiplication and division. These things are quite abstract. My > flatmate's THREE year old (!!) understands in a non-verbal way the idea of a > pointer and mouse connection. Do you realise how advanced that idea is? > Consider that he's only really begun to talk in sentences properly in the > last 6 to 8 weeks. It's very simple in terms of our usage of computers, but > it's an incredibly complex structural pattern, really... it's representation > and indirection... you move this thing, and it represents this other thing, > and we can use it to manipulate yet more things... of course the child > doesn't realise that the things on the screen aren't real that they're simply > further representations... but you get the gist... the capacity is there... > and the ENERGY that is there is amazing... There are some pretty subversive tools out there. Reader Rabbit's math software was teaching my kids algabraic abstraction before they started school. It just used boxes where you fill in a value instead of "variables" like "x". Very concrete and they got it right away. --Dethe _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list [email protected] http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
