Subject:
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Legos and Philosophy
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.edu
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Date:
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Wed, 19 Jul 2000 22:47:07 GMT
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Howdy all,
...I had an exchange of emails with a professor in Mississippi
concerning teaching statistics
and philosophy with Legos. I thought this might be of some interest to
some of you out there.
Enjoy
Richard
rwright@pcsedu.com
www.weirdrichard.com
***SNIP***
"i use lego to teach probability and statistics (quantative methods)
classes
and beyond simple probability we generate samples that can be analysed
by
ordianland ration measures of association - any ideas and comments
welcome.
Perhaps more interesting, i also teach philosophy of social science and
epistemology using lego and the models of world these knowledge systems
can
construct have been beautifully rendered physically by my studnets
through lego
structures -great stuff!"
"What [ students ] do is create structures that are symbolic of
particular
frameworks, elements represent linguistic signs and their relation to
one another or
to the world, for example, a neo-positivist structure was built
eschewing
all unobservables, so there was a model of a mind refusing the intake of
mathematical formulae as abstracts, similarly with empiricism, students
built an agricultural scene with the evolution of seed to harvest and
the
repetition of these phases so that al learning is aboserved, etc.
Phenomenology was
quite brilliant, the student constructed a four walled foundation with
stepwise elemetns gradually moving up the four side of the walls, the
stratigraphy
of the walls were coloured so that the 'essence' of the noematic
experience
was a step by step coming to elemental and foundational structures -
similar
to kantian a prioris, number, space, time etc - and as oneturned a
corner
or moved up a brick level one was getting closer to seeing the whole
object, and the inside of the foundation as well as a previously
expereincing the
outside, the perimeter thus is delineating the sapce inside - this was
an
excellent metaphor....hermeneutics had the god hermes delivering a
message to a
greek temple and so on, deconstruction had an escher loike tower of
babel -
these are all students ideas gleaned from the way I taught the material
in teh
first place, great class..."
"As far as the more technical work goes, a mixed bag of basic elemtns is
sorted along variables such as colour, number, and form, and tehse are
assumed
to be interdependent, but one can run the one-weay Pearson R as an
exercise
to see how far each bag departs from a random model, it is usally the
case of
course that colour approaches symmetry, becasue traditionally at least,
you
will have noticed that tehre are more red bricks than any other,
although of
late i have noticed blue and yellow being very strongly represented, and
of
course the introductin of green basics has left black and rey a litttle
out in
the cold.
I am hoping to expand widely the use of lego in university arts courses,
please lfeel free to keep up this dialogue, and one logistical question
where is the best places (web or otherwise) to get large numbers of used
lego.....?"
"one thing i can recall about the neo-positivist strcuture is that it
represented mathematical equations as being tenuously attached to a
foundation
and then gradually being broken off into fragments by being attahced in
less
and less strcuturllty sound manners.I think the limitations of many of
the
models you refer to is that they are takn far too literally, with too
much
assumed ellipses, that is, too much already recognizable about the
structures
- lego can be used as signs, and infact a lego element, as a 'thing' in
theworld is already a sign, and more than a sign in that its meaning
overflows
its object status - i cant look a certain bricks now ithout calling up
childhood mempories of what theyrepresentd in our many thought worlds
and
fantasies."
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