I’ve had a nice change of pace this past week, with week-long training sessions with teachers. Being in the teacher’s seat (read: role), no matter the type of student, is often rewarding. I was able to cover a topic very dear to my heart, constructionist learning using two common software tools: Alice and Scratch.
Both are programming tools that I think ought to be in the curriculum of every student, yet for teachers finding a place for these tools in their classes, they face challenges. Should the type of learning these tools offer be enough learning, in of itself, or should it be applied in such a way that folks are using them to teach their assigned content?
We may think, for instance, that something like Alice would lend itself well to high school mathematics. But the math often employed is simpler than what is covered in advanced algebra or calculus. Algebra is applied, for sure, but the level of logic required for interactive, 3D experiences is the far more complex entity, not the math.
What about science? There is physiology involved (if not art) in modeling animals and characters in three dimensions, but then again, the models are rarely accurate enough to stand-in for real human beings.
English? Good stories told with these programs can be written-out and planned using writing and one’s applied understanding of formal principles in the structure of stories, but far more time will ultimately be spent on costume changes, adding sounds, and perhaps adding interactive elements for the viewer.
And then we can ask — are these applications programming primers or multimedia creation tools? Is it wrong to delegate the art of programming to its own department, or if something less, its own class?
I’m almost inclined to say “Yes!,” but then again, seeing everyone so deeply engaged in the challenge of programming, I realized the training hadn’t been about how to write code, or even how to shoe-horn programming into secondary Spanish classes. It was about taking everything you know and applying it towards solving some fun problems.
We examined Csikszentmihalyi’s flow model, as he depicts it as a channel opposite frustration and boredom. Finding the channel of creative flow in the learning process is about finding that sweet spot of a challenge that’s hard enough to motivate us, but not too hard to repel us from taking it on. We saw it take shape as the little challenges my colleague and I posed to the group grew simpler or more complex.
Programming works well here, but we could have easily been creating art work, trying to communicate with a newfound friend in another language, or perhaps attempting to figure out the effect of a local change in our environment upon a river ecosystem.
The answer, however, for constructionist ideas to work in public schools, built upon an exciting foundation of creativity, is to have buy-in not at the teacher level for it to penetrate schools, but like so much of everything, from the bottom-up, the top-down, and every side, from your colleague the next classroom down to parents at home. Thankfully our week together was enough to see the process at work.
If nothing else, I can greedily say I had fun learning alongside my colleagues.
