Thank you so much for compiling this list. It's most instructive. The topic made me think about language development and its deep connections with cognitive development. A kid adopted at the age of 8-10 can forget his native language, but brain activity in languages learned after the age of seven or so is distinguishable on MRI scans from brain activity in native languages. There are also measurable differences in behavior. Those of you who know several languages fluently can easily experiment with mental arithmetic tasks, such as multiplying two-digit numbers. Even if you fluently think, read, write and talk in a non-native language, your arithmetic in it will be slower and much more prone to mistakes.
So, I think we have to work with kids under six if we want our proposed culture changes to become native to the next generation. The attention of too many researchers and developers to older kids exclusively, described in the articles below, is most unfortunate in that respect. Even though each individual piece of research and development is valuable, the trend of avoiding young kids makes culture change efforts sluggish. This trend parallels what happens in mathematics education with regards to Early Algebra. A few years ago, I worked on a prototype for an algebraic reasoning software suite that had qualitative parts accessible for preliterate kids, such as combinatorial grids vs. number operation grids, or picture transformation function machines vs. numeric function machines. The most frequently asked question about it was, "But where is algebra?" The amount of reverse engineering of each domain required to make it accessible to young children is prohibitive for a lot of practitioners and researchers. For example, grid tasks involve complex growth of understanding about co-variation, typically starting from noticing local grid patterns among neighbor cells, progressing to row and column ideas, branching into "jigsaw" tasks about taking grids apart and putting them together, and finally arriving at coordinating row and column variation and formalizing grid operation globally. Each step of the way, there are learning tasks supporting particular pieces of reasoning. Design of the tasks is informed by "grown-up" grid concepts - that's why it feels like reverse engineering - but it's based on what works with 3-6 yo. I suggest always enlisting parents, especially attachment parenting mothers of young kids, in the role of consultants. Pretty often, upon looking at research or design write-up, mothers raise their eyebrows and say: "Have these people even been around young kids? Here is what I would do..." -- Cheers, MariaD Make math your own, to make your own math. http://www.naturalmath.com social math site http://groups.google.com/group/naturalmath future math culture email group http://www.phenixsolutions.com empowering our innovations On Sun, Jun 14, 2009 at 8:42 AM, <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Radia Perlman in the 70s when at student at MIT did extensive experiments >> with preliterate children and the LOGO turtle and built a number of >> interfaces for them. She also spent some time at Xerox PARC where we >> duplicated her interfaces and did many similar experiments with chldren 3 >> years on up. > > thanks, found : > http://www.formatex.org/micte2006/virtual/pdf/582.pdf > see fig 3 with plastic cards showing visual images of turtle commands > > http://www.formatex.org/micte2006/virtual/ppt/582.ppt > similar image > > http://logothings.wikispaces.com/ > towards the end, photo of Radia Perlman's Button Box for Pre-Schoolers > > http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~mcnerney/personal-ubicomp.pdf > more discussion than the above > _______________________________________________ > IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) > [email protected] > http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep > _______________________________________________ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) [email protected] http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
