On Sat, Aug 22, 2009 at 04:49:53PM -0700, Alan Kay wrote:
Four months earlier they did some play with this with the cars on
their screen and are able to see that this should be the same model,
but vertically not horizontally. They write a script with the two
increase bys and then find a way to see if their simulated ball
moves the same way as the dropped ball on the video. And it does.
This was real science in every particular. It's wonderful to watch
them do it.
Now they have a pretty good mathematical model of what they could
observe in what's out there?. (Or as Newton liked to say pretty
nearly.) The model isn't the same as what's out there. It doesn't
depict what's out there?.
To me, this evidence suggests that the children are culturally prepared
to do science at this level of description. Discovering a basic model of
gravity is within their proximal zone of development. However, I don't
think this suggests anything intrinsic about the level of description
kids are working with. That is:
Everything in a language describes something in a story space. That
is all language can do. There is nothing instrinsically about the form
of any story that makes it relate to what's out there? in any
necessary way. Math tries to be consistent and to chain reasoning
together but this is not enough to reveal anything about the universe.
It's still a story.
To repeat, it is the child's cultural training that makes this level of
description special at this age, not anything intrinsically special
about the level of description. For example, thinking about acceleration
in terms of repeated addition is still quite high level. To really
understand how this works, you need to understand binary arthimetic and
how this is implemented at the hardware level. Or to go even more low
level, you need to understand the physical properties of transisters to
understand the opereation of logic gates. A priori, there is no reason
to pick one level of description or another except that we want to pick
a level of description that happens to be in the kid's zone of proximal
development.
The examples I just cited are lower level, but I don't see any reason
not to pick higher level examples, like the Physics activity. I agree
the Physics activity hides the math involved in solving differential
equations, but Etoys similar hides the low level assembly language that
is actually how CPU accomplish computation.
So to me, it all comes down to:
Science is the process of trying to put what we can investigate and
think about what's out there in as close a relation as possible with
what we can represent in symbols. In practise this is a kind of
coevolution.
And I don't see why you don't do that with the Physics activity. For
example, recently somebody posted a Physics screenshot that showed how
to simulate an earthquake. Now do earthquakes really work like that? No,
of course not, but it is a reasonable model that can lead to predictions
and actual experiments.
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