Subject:
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Re: lego Technic "class"
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.edu
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Date:
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Mon, 8 Nov 1999 15:34:50 GMT
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Reply-To:
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tking@together.net*spamless*
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Viewed:
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8267 times
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John, I really agree. The challenge is to effectively
combine the inquiry of kids with enough information and
structure so that they keep advancing in their skills and
perspective. I can tell you that in the last 10 years I
have slowly moved to less and less "direct instruction" and
more and more "inquiry" with some "guidance". As an example,
I used to start out drawing pictures of Switches on the
blackboard (they USED to be Black...), and talking about AND
and OR. Now, I start out dumping a box of various and different
switches on the table, and saying, What IS this stuff??
Ben Erwin from Tufts University has done a lot with Middle School
kids. See:
http://www.ceeo.tufts.edu/graphics/index.html
He has an interesting Philosophy on this subject, which I'll steal
and insert Here:
-------------------( copy of Ben Erwin's material)-----------------------
Philosophy
For me, the bottom-line in any line of educational work is to have students
be able to think on their own. Being an engineer, I also want students to
be able to solve problems. When at all possible, I want these problems to
come from self-motivated inquiry into the way something works or how
something could be designed. Also having an interest in the "purest
essence" of thought ("zen education", if you will), I also want to make
sure there is an opportunity in class for me to blow the student's minds.
Let me give you an example:
Even as early as the sixth grade students have been bombarded with the
conventions and symbols of our technological world, and this can often
hinder rather than free-up their thinking. When a student was making a
complicated shape with funny angles for the sides of the tone-box, for
example, she was upset that she was going to have to use a protractor to
figure out what angle to draw the line on the board at, and what angle to
tilt the band saw. By making a scale-drawing of the tone-box and holding the
piece of wood up to the drawing one can make the marks on the wood,
however, and then one can tilt the band saw table until the blade matches
the marks that they have made - no protractor is really necessary. To me it
is more important to know what to do without a protractor than to know what
to do when you have one. (A scientist - an astronomer - once told me that
an engineer slaved at a computer doing a finite element model of the floor
of an airplane to determine if the plane would suffer structurally when the
floor was taken out to put a telescope in. I solved the same problem in an
hour for homework one night in college with paper and pencil. The point is
that in engineering and design it is important to know what kind of tools
to use to get a job done. It is not always the easiest thing to just grab
the best technology available and run with it... whether that technology be
a computer or a protractor.)
I haven't given a lesson on how to use protractors yet, but this is what I
did do: I asked "Why is a right angle 90 degrees?" and got some answers
like "because a straight line is 180" and "because a circle is 360". But
then I asked "why is a circle 360?" The conversation goes on. Eventually I
try to bring the students to the point of realization that these numbers
were just associated with these angles because someone decided it to be
that way. It is also historically interesting that 360 is the number of
days in the Roman calendar because that is that is how many days the earth
goes around the sun (and then the five days of partying for New Years). But
you get the idea.
To me, the process and epistemology of the student's engineering creations
is more important to me than the content. The content is what holds my
interest and provides my motivation, and hopefully theirs too! By process I
am primarily speaking of the engineering process of systems engineering.
Systems engineering is the interdisciplinary, cooperative design process
used today for real-life engineering systems. In architecture class, the
class culminates with such a class-project where all students are "experts"
in a given area of programmatic, structural, or architectural design, and
must work together to produce a final working system.
By epistemology I mean that way that students think about problem solving
and engineering. A recent study concluded that most people in the country
see scientists as the ones that invent and design things, and the prestige
of engineers falls below scientists. I would like my students to be able to
understand what engineering is all about, and to become "engineering
literate". Engineering is the second most popular job in the country, yet
it doesn't get full representation in our public school systems. John Dewey
talked about the school system mirroring the society at large... what is
wrong with this picture?
-----------------------( end copy )-------------------------------
Ok, Ben, you have US thinking....
Now, if I could just pronounce Episto-whatever....
--
Regards,
Terry King ...In The Woods In Vermont
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: lego Technic "class"
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| Thanks, Terry, for the intro to "eduspeak" and the NASA Curriculum. One thing I would like to see a Technic curriculum do is balance teaching of "learning objectives" with time to just explore and "tinker." Learning some basic mechanical, (...) (25 years ago, 8-Nov-99, to lugnet.edu)
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