🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <mills.713121101@jisuzu.athena.lkg.dec.com> mills@athena.lkg.dec.com (George Mills) writes:

   thacher@unx.sas.com (Clarke Thacher) writes:
   >I would like her to be working independently as much as possible, but
   >it would be good to have an idea of where to nudge her.

   I find the best thing is to "challege" him/her. If you nuge then they
   think it's work. If you do nothing they do nothing. But if you say
   things like "I bet you can't draw a grid on the screen in less than 10
   lines" they go crazy. But they catch on after a while. Also acting dumb
   works, like saying "I wonder how this works" and let them help you figure it
   out.

I may have mentioned this before in my review of Ladybug, but this is
exactly what I did with my son's grade 3 class.  The school board had
purchased a computer for each class room, but gave them the most
uninteresting (and juvenile) software available.  Since it was a PC, I
dropped by (it is an 'alternative school' where parent's are eagerly
welcomed) and installed Ladybug, a "Dance of the Planets" demo, and the
shareware SkyGlobe program.  The teacher suggested I take three students
and show them how to start each program (I had 10 minutes) and then they
could show the others.

My logic goes like this:  (a) I learned more in my first year of owning a
computer than in 4 1/2 years of university-level Comp.Sci (to be fair,
that was 1975), and in those days, there was no such thing as 'help' or
any tutorials for anything on a PC.  (b) My son and his friends had  zero
trouble learning every game they encountered, even very tricky games
like Commander Keen; they all eventually beat the game.  (c) Kids love to
explore so long as there isn't someone standing over them to insist on
what is the 'right' way, and in an alternative school, this isn't
supposed to happen.

The only nudges needed were the technical details of installing Ladybug
in their menu system and my suggesting he pick up a book on LOGO on a
trip to the public library (the school library had none).  By the end of
the school year, they had only just discovered 'TO' and never invoked the
editor, but they sure understood 'REPEAT' and all the turtle-graphics
commands; I consider this fare progress for unsupervised
eight-year-olds.

The moral of my story:  children are learning-machines --- you don't
teach them so much as you provide raw materials.  At most, a few
examples is all they need, which is _amazing_ if you stop to think about
it!


--
Gary Lawrence Murphy - Gary.Murphy@software.mitel.COM - (613) 592-2122 x3709
 "Read not to contradict nor to believe, but to weigh and consider."
       (East wall inscription of Harper Library, U of Chicago)