Thanks for this.
In an after school environment, this strategy should work very well. It
means that someone must be the firestarter, perhaps at a pre-school
training session.
I am not sure about how this could be accomplished where after-school
programs are not feasible. At some of the schools I support, the
teachers and students live too far from the school to stay after the
normal day is over. These schools start later to enable students to have
time to reach it in daylight and close early to give the students time
to return home. In Lesotho, we observed students who walked three hours
to and three hours back from school every day.
I am trying to develop some introductory 'lessons' to act as the
firestarter in Python, but it is very difficult to do effectively.
Tony
On 03/05/2015 08:18 PM, [email protected] wrote:
Message: 2
Date: Thu, 5 Mar 2015 12:13:46 +0000 (UTC)
From: Alan Kay<[email protected]>
To: Sora Edwards-Thro<[email protected]>, Gonzalo Odiard
<[email protected]>
Cc: IAEP SugarLabs<[email protected]>, Tim Falconer
<[email protected]>, "[email protected]"
<[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [IAEP] Future Direction
Message-ID:
<[email protected]>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Hi
I agree with your first paragraph (although I don't know of really discoverable
programming systems -- even Scratch has lots of conventions that are hard to
discover). But I do agree that 5-10% of an population is better matched up to a
given topic, and that the rest need more help of different kinds.
But there are good materials for learning Etoys, especially in Spanish, and
especially for teachers.
The last part I don't agree with because it contains a misconception about how
to teach Etoys, and especially programming, to children and adults.
We found -- via many attempts -- that 1 on 1 -- then branching out -- works much much better than
trying to teach a group. The "Drive a Car" project was invented to be the introduction,
and it can be taught 1 on 1 in about 20 minutes. Now we have two teachers of "Drive a
Car". Then 4 etc. It is worth taking the 100 minutes to carry this out. The reason for this
approach is found in your first paragraph, and the key is the 1 on 1 which allows the time needed
for specific learnings and questions about the project.
Once a class has gotten going, then should eventually be the "first teachers" for the
next class, and now the whole new class can be handled in ~30 minutes for the first exercise. This
use of "peer teaching" works in other areas also, but it is particularly effective in
technique learning. It is not used nearly enough (many pro teachers feel a loss of authority, and
that is more important to them that in how well the children are learning).
Cheers
Alan
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