Kent, Have you tried the library mailing list? (lists.laptop.org/listinfo/library) It tends to have more education-related discussion along with people with instructional design & education backgrounds that might be able to fill you in on what's been done so far with age-related categorizations. Copying your email to that list. (Library folks, please jump in!)
(Personally, I'm not a huge fan of age-targeting - what's more relevant is the "functionalities" that tend to develop with each age along the Piagetian (or other) continuums, such as... 7 years olds are typically capable of this level of abstract thinking, 5 year olds tend to understand conservation, and so forth. This isn't necessarily tied to a particular age, though; you could have a 6 year old who doesn't get conservation and a 4 year old who does. But that may be just me.) -mel On Feb 10, 2008 4:19 PM, Kent Loobey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I don't know where to post this. > > I have spent the last little while reading articles and papers on the web on > child development. I am interested in developing activities for early > childhood learning. If the OLPC XO-1s are aimed at 6 to 12 year olds then I > am interested in the 6-7-8 year end of the continuum. I started my search on > the web because I was uncertain what children in this age group are able to > grasp. I am also uncertain about the developmental readiness of the 9-12 age > group as well. In fact maybe the 6-8 age is too big of a span. Maybe I > should focus on 6 and 7 year olds. I just don't know at this point what the > jump in child development is between 6 and 8. > > In any event it must be true that if we are successful there will be a jump in > child development between 6 year olds and 8 year olds. > > So I am thinking that it would be helpful to me if there was a listserve set > up for age differentiated activity development. This listserve would focus > not on the technicalities of code development but instead on age appropriate > activity design. It could also facilitate activity collaboration. > > I can also see the benefit of activities that are set up to work together. > Specifically a drawing program that is developed to produce images that are > for the use of other activities. Or a word processing activity that is > developed to produce text for use by other activities. The same with audio, > video and photo clips. Then a scrapbook activity could pull easily from > these other activities, or a story creator, or a trip reporter or a history > recorder. So rather then create monolithic highly structured activities we > (also) develop a set of module (activities) that can be glued together on the > fly by the student. > > _______________________________________________ > Devel mailing list > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel > _______________________________________________ Library mailing list [email protected] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/library
