The Storyboards continued
Classification Schemes
Questions for Thursday
An Example of "Playground" Software
After Spring Break
On Tuesday we'll see/hear the storyboards from the two projects at Vartan Gregorian Elementary School. For the purposes of discussing the programs proposed by these teams, and looking forward to Thursday's discussions of the goals of all of the projects this semester, it might be useful to think how/whether these projects address the "three assignments" of modern secular schools discussed by Gardner (p. 131-132):
So far we've seen number of schemes for classifying and evaluating educational software:
To what extent do any of these schemes capture non-technical aspects of educational software (e.g. pedagogical goals, learning theories, social value)? How are such things "built" into software?
On Thursday we'll try to summarize some of the questions raised and lessons learned in the first part of the semester, and prepare for the (final) weeks after Spring break. Here are some questions for starters:
Finally, for those of you interested in Gardner, you might want to read an interesting piece of his on "Intelligence" that appeared in the February issue of The Atlantic, on-line at: http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/99feb/intel.htm.
Some typologies of educational software include the kind of programs sometimes called "playgrounds" or "exploratoria", and we'll look at Edmark's Thinkin' Things (Collection 3) as an example.
In the weeks immediately following Spring Break we'll be reading articles that try to synthesize some of the ideas we've encountered in readings from cognitive psychology, the study of computers in school, and interface design. In the second week we'll approach these ideas from both a historical and "futurist" perspective, and this will take us into the final weeks of the team presentations concerning efforts to test and assess the design of their programs.