Subject:
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Re: Lego MindStorm for 10 year-old?
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.robotics
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Date:
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Wed, 10 Mar 1999 03:07:53 GMT
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Viewed:
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1036 times
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Just this weekend got my 7 yr old daughter involved with Mindstorms
"programming". Her quotable response was, "Hey, Dad, programming is
fun!"
It's well documented that kids respond well to a progammable environment
where the results are tangibly available (like turtles, robots, et
alia). What's less well documented is the reliance in school programs
upon "user" training, and (worse yet) the competition for computer
resources.
Nearly all school programs that I've seen teach kids to "use" computers,
not program them. I've got to believe that most people reading this
list find this situation to be as heinous as I do; creating a population
where Microsoft Word experience is acknowledged as a computer skill.
We've got to teach them to program (and, IMHO, the greater skill,
debug).
And, we need more computers in the classroom. The Media Lab has
repeatedly pushed the gender results of classrooms where s < c (s =
students in a classroom and c=computers in a classroom). In this
instance, there is competition for keyboard time, and, guess what?
Girls don't play that game; the boys hog it all day long.
Sorry to rant, but put that IMHO, give one MindStorm to every kid in the
world, as a 6th birthday present!!!
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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: Lego MindStorm for 10 year-old?
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| I think you're right about the training of children in troubleshoot/debug. I think that Mindstorms causes people to put themselves in the place of the robot when trying to write a program. That's an excellent way to think about troubleshooting. And (...) (26 years ago, 10-Mar-99, to lugnet.robotics)
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