Assignment Week 5
Please pick one of the two questions below, and post your writing on the course web site:
1) Reflect on your own learning experience. Can you identify and describe “Powerful Ideas” that served as your own tools-to-think-with?
or
2) Critique the Constructionist approach to learning.
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1) In Chapter 8 of Images of the Learning Society, Papert discusses the future of children and the importance of communities of learners. As Papert emphasizes the process of the Samba School, it reminds me of the powerful ideas in making a short film. When making a short film with a group of other students, it is not “spontaneous”, but is planned beforehand (178). My teacher enforced certain rules such as having the script given to us, and four people in each group, in which we chose two actors (one male and one female). The teacher also gave us room for our own powerful ideas by letting us choose the location, personalities of the characters, and film angles and shots. While most in the class are novice, even few of the experts get to explore creativity and development. Everyone in the group brings something unique and as we participate we learn how to work in a team by allowing open conversation. After shooting, individually we edited the film clips on our own, choosing the order to shots, sound, and visuals we think works best. The best part of the project is sharing our short films in class. By watching each person’s short film, we saw different variations of the script, one on a bench with a old man and old woman, one featuring a homeless guy and student on a swing, and one with two students sitting by the trees. Each had different themes and shooting styles. During the sharing time the teacher and students all have the opportunity to say what they liked and what they think we can improve on. Through this process, each student gets encouraged and motivated to better their film skills in production and editing. Similar to the process of the Samba School, this film project allows students to experience structure, spontaneity, and opportunity to come up with powerful ideas.
Last weekend a friend and I were at a grocery store and we spotted a box of wheel-shaped pasta on a shelf. My first thought was a project in early elementary school where we had made faces out of pieces of pasta. (We rarely had pasta at home and we didn’t buy rotelles, so my strongest associations with that particular kind of food was that art project.) Later on, I took to planting landscapes in my rice at dinner, with broccoli trees and pebbled beaches of edamame.
This is not the story of how I become a master sculptor. Rather, I had in mind Resnick and Silverman’s construction kits, and Papert’s “powerful ideas.” The concept of representing one thing in a different form is such an idea, which Papert himself used to describe the relationship between Turtles and abstract math. As technology progresses, we aim to represent the same subject in different mediums; books become Kindles, movies become 3D. In forming an image out of something as basic as food, one makes choices in extracting the essence of the subject, be it color, shape, or texture, or some combination of qualities.
Papert stresses the importance of taking your own powerful ideas, and learning how to develop them into greater ones. In the example of samba schools in Brazil, there have been many times in my life that I have collaborated with teams of all skill levels, and we have had to share ideas for a bigger project. Film has been a huge part of my life. I have been making short films since I was in 4th grade. For these, I have had to work with small groups. For me, I understand the mechanics of what goes into a film. I have done everything from pre-production to post, and have experience in many different roles. Since I know the mechanical sides of it, I can easily determine what part is mechanical and what is creative. For example, writing a script can be very mechanical because it’s something that has to be done in a certain way and a certain style. However, the content of the script can be very creative. Since I have experience, I have learned to differentiate. I also agree that the educator must act as an anthropologist in a way. As a filmmaker, you must be able to understand what is going on in the world around you, or with your classmates at least. with the advancement of film and special effects I have had to learn how to do all of that in post production. In order to better educate people through my films, I have had to be alert with the advances in technology so that I can keep up and better inform. For example, I was making a movie in one of my film classes, and I had noticed that a lot of people were making cool introductions for their films and company names. So, I decided to do the same. I learned new software, called After Effects, and figured out how to use effects to make a production company sequence to go before my film. I think that Papert has it right when he presents the learning society, and I wouldn’t disagree.
While I agree with the idea of Constructivist learning for the most part, some of my experiences with this type of learning have been more frustrating than enlightening. This may be due to misuse of the Constructivist learning approach, due to constraints such as time, lack of creativity, and lack of resources, rather than flaws in the approach itself, but I still think it’s worthwhile to blog about my negative experiences with such learning approaches as a way to critique the idea.
I’m currently taking a class on electronic circuit design, and our labs are structured in a way that I would consider to be somewhat Constructivist (see note at the bottom). Before doing the lab, we do a prelab, usually a written component, where we do some reading and hash out equations/theory related to what we’ll be doing in lab. When we get to lab, we take out our breadboards and follow a very vague set of instructions in order to create a certain electrical circuit using the parts we’re learning about for the week, such as an instrumental amplifier that is amplified using a strain gauge. What’s frustrating about lab, which is designed to be a hands-on learning approach, is that we get minimal instruction before doing the labs, and are often going in to the lab without any idea of what the parts are or what they do, and are expected to create something with them in three hours. As a result, the lab TAs are usually overwhelmed with questions from all over the classroom, and few pairs finish on time. Though, I will admit, labs are incredibly educational, the frustration of the time crunch and confusion are not worth the tiny bit of understanding we gain by the end of the ordeal.
Granted, this may just be a rant about the inefficiencies of a three-hour, 35 person lab with 2 TAs, and a professor who lectures on the subject two weeks after we’ve done the lab. However, in this situation, perhaps more instruction and a little less “learning by doing” would be helpful for our self-esteem, because I know I often leave lab feeling defeated rather than enlightened.
// Sidenote: Of course, my experiences in lab aren’t completely Constructivist. After all, there isn’t a ton of creativity involved, except perhaps in the various mishaps along the way to creating the “correct” circuit. But the ideas of “learning by doing,” “active learning,” “engaging and challenging tasks,” and “the instructor as a facilitator” are present in this scenario.
I am quite excited to read about a framework that talks about the child as epistemologist and It was interesting to read Papert’s original work and his emphasis on the enabling factors, both social and institutional that lead to technology adoption and the kind of learning he wished to encourage. One of the most recent and infamous outcomes of the constructionist theory and Papert’s legacy has been the One Laptop Per Child project. The technological determinism that reeks the OLPC project and many applications of constructivism seems misplaced given the more nuanced understanding that Papert suggests. Papert talks in reference to the adoption of BASIC about “a social process of myth construction that allows us to build a justification for primitivity into any system”. Last year, Morgan Ames presented at the I School where she spoke about her research on how the OLPC is adopted by children in developing countries and she found that only 2% of children used the OLPC in ways that the designers (most of whom were hackers and engineers themselves) intended – to hack and learn programming themselves. She referred to a similar process of myth construction that Papert talked about in the community. In this case, it was the myth of the hacker childhood which narrated how the child with just the presence of a computer was able to learn to program and hack by themselves. However, she pointed out that most of these narratives of the relationship with the computer left out critical details such as how at least one parent had a background in engineering, where there were computer magazines and resources around the home and the child had significant access to the computer and support from parents and other caregivers in their learning to program. This myth of the hacker childhood was projected onto the kids that the OLPC was supposed to help as well and a lot of research has found that the social and institutional enabling factors that Papert talks about influenced quite dramatically how children could and could not benefit from this project. Just like bcheng42 talked about the environment of the classroom and the structure of lessons, it seems like although constructivist learning is a powerful model for learning, it needs to be situated in an environment that is appropriate and enabling.
Upon first reading through Papert’s chapters, I was struck by a number of things, the first of which being the dated nature of the work. The changes that have come about in personal computers and the role of technology in the classroom since the 80’s and early 90’s have been dramatic at best, although Papert does make some remarkably accurate predictions (about the rise in personal computer use concurrent with the drop in price, potential consequences of what we now consider to be the digital divide, etc.). Some of his proposals about shifts in education brought about by computers, while hopeful, have of course not become manifest. Education has we know and have known it for generations continues and computers are *largely* still used to reinforce traditional learning.
Papert suggests that implementation of computers can counter a sluggish and conservative social system (re: education), which I appreciate, but there has not been a “renaissance of thinking about education.” Despite that, I think his notions of how computer use and programming can affect student cognitive development was interesting. He argues that developing linear mechanical thinking can be beneficial to students and that “[b]y deliberately learning to imitate mechanical thinking the learner becomes able to articulate what mechanical thinking is and what it is not. The exercise can lead to greater confidence about the ability to choose a cognitive style that suits the problem” (27). I have some questions about how much this is true, unless he is also including other modes of thinking (abstract, conceptual, etc) that students would learn outside the computerized environment.
Some points I took away that I thought were particularly salient were the importance of educators to act as anthropologists and to encourage students to develop as epistemologists. Educators need to adapt and evolve to meet student needs and by empowering students to learn about learning and think about thinking on metacognitive levels can and will lead to intellectual and creative growth. I do think that students programming computers can aid in this.
In my architecture program here at Berkeley, we build a lot of models. The reason for this is so that we could explore and understand space. I used to build models as a child – such as Gundam and airplane models. These models I built as a child most certainly geared me more towards my current interest in spatial detail, or three dimensional design. This response is similar to my last week’s response with me having the toy tanker; the objects I have are spatially interesting. They have all provoked me to think about a new imaginary visual world where I would synthesis and create new objects and situations. I would play with the models in sometimes their own context, but most of the time I would imagine the objects in my hand in situations that would never exist in real life. I still do this. I imagine things in my mind that could be applied differently to other objects or situations in my environment. But in returning back to my example of architectural modeling, architects “learn by doing” according to my studio professors, which translates to “manipulate this object enough, through creating enough iterations, and you’ll get more ideas about what to do with object.” Although they never exactly say that, that’s essentially what they mean. The tricky part is manipulating the object, which is generally a building, in a number of different areas such as program, form, sustainable technology, in context, size of space, materiality, structure and practicality (by that I mean, does it work). However, these general categories encompass and inter-relate with each other and an infinite amount of sub-categories (for instance, within sustainable technology where to place solar panels). There are always things that I probably have never thought of before. As an architect, one must attempt (as no human being is ever completely successful) resolve and shape his or her building/project into the most cohesive combination of these general categories and their sub-categories, as humanly possible. This takes a long time, effort, failure and research which is the reason architecture majors live in their studio. But without their models, architects are limited in their reasoning.
(The Lack of) Online Rehearsal Space
Seymour Papert is a technological utopian. That does not mean, however, that he is a technological determinist. He is willing to imagine a positive future of learning based on the computer, but he admits that the technology of the computer itself is not sufficient for this future to come about. Instead, the history of the computer itself “will be inseparable from the story of the people who will make it” (189)–inseparable, that is, from the historically and culturally contingent practices of those who use computers. Papert’s goal is not merely to muse upon the computer’s potential as a tool of constructivist learning but to imagine a better computer culture that would facilitate such learning, since “if the problem is cultural the remedy must be cultural” (183).
To this end, he turns to the Brazilian samba school as a model for a certain type of constructivist learning. These non-traditional schools have a few key features: 1) they are social environments that allows non-experts and experts to engage in “deep interactions,” 2) the activity that goes on in them is real activity, preparation for an actual performance, and 3) this activity is also part of popular culture. Papert concedes that it is on this third point that samba schools are least like his LOGO education programs: computer programming is simply not part of popular culture in the way that dance is in Rio. To teach programming is thus an “artificial” intervention into culture itself (181). His hope is that somehow programming will itself become more enmeshed in culture, though he admits that reprogramming culture norms, so to speak, is no easy task.
Papert’s Mindstorms debuted in 1993. He could not have foreseen the changes that have occurred in computer culture since then, especially those brought about by the rise of social network media. Has this been a blessing or a curse for Papert’s cause? There are no doubt places online that approximate the “samba school.” Perhaps he has been heartened by the proliferation of forums and tutorials for learning programming languages. Indeed, there is an advantage with these new media. Samba schools are geographically fixed and in some sense culturally fixed: to learn from one, you must be in Rio, and you probably need to be from Rio. Online learning communities could be much more “cosmopolitan.”
But the revolution has not arrived. There are many reasons for this, but I would like to point at one. To elaborate upon Papert’s metaphor, a samba school is a highly social but still somewhat hidden or closed space. The rehearsals that go on there are not themselves performances. They are private preparation in anticipation of the big event, the spectacle. In a private rehearsal, members of a group can risk failure, experiment, and take the time to engage in the “deep interactions” that lead to learning. Privacy has its pedagogical affordances. Contemporary internet culture, however, offers very little room for group privacy. The allure of Facebook, for instance, is the elimination of privacy, the joy of participating in and coming under the scrutiny of networked peer observation. In these social networks, the utterance (a tweet, a post) is always already for an audience; indeed, the success of a witty comment is immediately quantified by how many likes or retweets. Guy Debord wrote that one condition of modernity is that “all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles.” To a large extent, contemporary online culture is a matter of sophisticated self-conscious presentation of oneself as spectacle. In online space, there is an overabundance of stage, a dearth of rehearsal room. Attempts to use the internet for constructivist learning in the style of the samba school are the exceptions that prove the rule of the contemporary regime.
Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Tr. Donand Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone, 1995.
Pagert states “when a child learns to program, the process of learning is transformed. It becomes more active and self-directed” (21). This transformation is described in blog above by @ignatius2012 who captures his architecture experience and modeling tools that afford him new ways to think about things. The act of building or construction requires real-word limitations like gravity to interact with an architecture model. The model becomes a tool and thinking object allows for student-centered learning.
I use to help volunteer with a middle school program called TechGryls with the YWCA. As a project, we entered a competition where the girls were to build architecture models out of business cards, toothpicks and glue. This learning tool and project did create objects-to-think with, because there was not the binary “right” or “wrong” answers but an evolution. The girls had split into several teams. One group discovered covering a balloon in glue, letting the glue dry, and popping the balloon to make transparent for windows. At this point we had the chance to all gather and learn the glue technique from the group. Questions were brought up “what else can we do with spreading glue?” Soon the other groups of girls were becoming more active and self-directed in trying to get different textures on their glue sheets. Questions and answers were being tested and built, resulting in tensile-like glue constructions .
Perhaps it’s not about information knowing but rather information sharing. Where information sharing encourages research, questioning and conversations that helps for synthesis and deep understandings. The hypothetical conversation between the two children in the Mindstorm readings of 1) a plan 2) finding resources 3) trying something 4) working through bugs 5)abstracting to building blocks — seems noble when guided through this process and natural excitement for using tools as a way to think helps to guide this dialogue. But it can feel forced when expected draw conclusions without cognitive apprenticeship notion of what should be thought of next as @bcheng42 alludes to.
I was a Turtle girl.
I was not, literally, a turtle-girl (see: http://loyalkng.com/2009/04/16/top-10-teenage-mutant-ninja-turtle-cosplays-its-pizza-time-cowabunga-dude/), but I was inducted into the world of computers in the first grade by way of this specific programming tool.* Whilst reading through Papert’s book, I was struck by how vividly I can recall these computer sessions… I remember sitting before the large machine – staring at the blank, dark, screen, save the greenish, highly pixilated form. At that time, the turtle didn’t look like a turtle, but more like a triangle. I actually had no idea that it was supposed to be a turtle or that this was “Turtle programming” until I read this book.
Now considering myself a test case for Papert’s theorizations, I’m left to wonder how this early exposure to computers, programming language and geometrical concepts affected my cognitive development and fostered more complex mathematical thinking. Papert claimed that although one could quite easily draw a square or a circle using a paper and pencil, “doing geometry” in Turtle language facilitates the development of “powerful intellectual skills” because children are given the “building blocks” to create these independently (p.60).
I am not entirely convinced by this strand of Papert’s argument. I don’t believe that my propensity towards geometry was any more or less informed by my early exposure to Turtle programming any more so than many early art courses, in which we practiced similar exercises with geometric shapes in order to represent objects in a drawing.
What I find more compelling is the idea that Turtle programming can be and should be conducted in group settings, for within these interactions they are helped to “think more dynamically” (p. 92). Indeed in his later chapter, “Images of a Learning Society”, Papert maintains that a significant flaw in our current school structure is that learning is not “significantly participatory” (p. 179). In Papert’s view, learning environments should be more like Brazilin samba classes – places where knowledge and culture intercede. Hence, I wonder whether a more salient feature of Papert’s work was the idea that the computer, and indeed the “computer culture,” must be consciously integrated into educational environments in such a way that these places of learning foster centers of dialogue where people from diverse backgrounds and with multifarious skillsets come together and share information.
Perhaps then the lasting impact of this early exposure to Turtle programming was less about the program itself, but rather the enculturation into a computer comradeship that made it easy to feel comfortable and confident moving forward in an age of technology.
*I realize now how unique this program was, this being 1983, and was only afforded by the large endowment of the private school I attended. As Papert predicted, the type of learning he predicted could only happen if all children are given “free contact” to computers (p. 16).
My experience with a ‘Samba School’ type of learning has come in the form of jam sessions. Usually the jam sessions I was a part of consisted of a random group of musicians coming together to create some kind of music, whether it was jazz, funk, ballads, pop, hip-hop, rock, classical, etc. It’s something that anyone who wanted to get better and/or have fun can come into. Sometimes there were 1-3 persons kind of leading the group in terms of feel and chords, letting everyone know what kind of progression we were in and perhaps leaving others to find out for themselves by listening to the chords. These jams sessions have taught many people how to be cohesive as a group, how to listen to others for both the tempo and chord progressions, and how to make creative and melodic lines over the various styles that are played based on one’s own improvisation or that of another. Afterwards, we would often comment on what we liked in terms of each other’s playing and what a person might be able to do better.
Reflecting on my own learning experience, I remember a time in my high school economics class when “powerful ideas” served as my own tools-to-think-with. In my economics class, our teacher assigned a final group project, which entailed making a four-minute educational video demonstrating economic concepts learned in the course. This project gave my five group members and me the opportunity to use our own powerful ideas to put together a video. We had the freedom to be creative with the content, the presentation, and the entertainment value of the video. Given so much freedom to be creative with the assignment, my group members and I were placed in a position where we were empowered to make decisions, explore powerful ideas, and express what we wanted to. As we worked on the project, I remember feeling creative and intellectually powerful because of the opportunity to come up with powerful ideas. My team members and I would meet up to share ideas until we decided on a final script that we all liked, and then we filmed the scenes. After all the filming, we got together to edit the film clips by making group decisions on sound, visuals, and scenes. On the day that the project was due, the entire class got to watch each other’s educational economics videos. I really enjoyed watching other teams’ videos and seeing the different powerful ideas that they used to present the content that they wanted to. After all the videos, we had a class discussion about each of the videos so that each group could get feedback and encouragement about what aspects of their project were good and what could have been done better. The video project along with the sharing time and discussion ultimately allowed me to think at a much deeper level about what I was learning in my economics class. It gave me the chance to explore economic concepts outside of the classroom in a new and personally meaningful way.
When I first read Papert’s paper I was along for the ride. I agree that computers can be learned to teach powerful ideas and that constructivist learning can help a child organize and make sense of the work around them. This faith in constructionist learning was put to the test last Friday while I was working around a table with a number of computer scientists. I had a slide open from the presentation I was working on for the lecture. The slide talked about LOGO programming. One of the programmers sitting next to me saw what I was writing about and couldn’t help to comment, “Turtle programming! Do they still do that?” I explained about the class and how we’re talking about constructionist learning. More people joined in the discussion, another programmer came in from the other room. Each one had something to say about constructionist learning. While all of them had advanced degrees in computer science and research graphics applications, none of them credited Turtle with helping them learn. One said he used it in school and found that the way turtle walked to be counter to his intuition. To draw a rectangle, he didn’t think of it as someone walking straight, then right over and over again. Rather, he thought in terms of shapes: a rectangle as two sets of perpendicular lines that intersect. The other two guys learned programming from their fathers. They watched as their fathers programmed and learned though a relationship that more closely resembled apprenticeship. At that point, they said they were more interested in building text based games from the back of hobby magazines than making drawings. One person didn’t know what LOGO programming was and another described it as proto-Processing, a popular graphics application. The conversation then ended with a discussion of Scratch and, strangely enough, they all agreed that it was a better system then turtle.
This experience made me reconsider Papert’s arguments about what made turtle successful but it also occurred to me that the structure LOGO programming doesn’t quite fit Resnick and Silverman’s design principle of “support all learning styles.” While body synoptic learning is great for some, it holds others back. There are people who prefer experiences constructing and there are others who genuinely love abstract problem solving. Should a system really strive to meet all those styles or should it be optimized to appeal to the learning styles of a particular group.
In comparing LOGO to Processing, I realized that both of these languages gave programmers a quick way to “see” what their code was doing. Processing’s appeal to new programmers and ability to attract a new audiences to computers is often credited to the fact that one has the ability to see the code that is written. While Papert doesn’t credit this input/output style as one of the primary features that make turtle a successful learning system, I believe that it is equally as important.
I’m really glad that Brittany (bcheng42 is Brittany, right? Sorry if I didn’t spell your name right!) brought up her negative experience with a constructionist approach to learning. Her story made me think of qualms that I have with the constructionist model when it is improperly employed in classrooms, first and foremost the possible deflation that kids might feel when given a confusing and alien task. Papert doesn’t report situations in which his students give up, likely because his instructors have put excellent scaffolding structures in place. “Transmitting” knowledge into students via drill and kill exercises, worksheets, etc. is efficient and easy, if not desirable or inherently motivating, and can elicit a sense of confidence in children who master such tasks. Constructionist activities, or learning about learning through creation, must be difficult to lead effectively, and can unleash the sense of failure that Brittany referenced. If Papert is touting this theory as an effective pedagogical mindset, he must also have ideas about how to implement constructionism in classrooms. I’d love to read more about this and see examples.
My other critique aligns with Jen’s comment that her Turtle experience didn’t magically make her a master mathematician (like my alliteration?) – essentially, I feel like Papert’s claims of transfer are a bit wishful. While I was swayed by Papert’s argument that constructionist learning activities like programming can reinforce “heuristics,” or methods for engaging in problem-solving and learning (p. 64), I was less convinced that it opens the door to understanding differential calculus, the concept of variables, and recursion (p. 66, 69, 71). Without direct instruction of these concepts, I doubt many people could simply happen upon them and begin using them in an authentic way. What happens after the constructionist groundwork is laid? Does Papert envision a learning situation in which programming is paused when a “teachable moment” arises, and instructors directly address methods of geometric proofs and theorems and calculus? How then do you differentiate for students who still haven’t built the frameworks needed to understand such concepts in their programming, who have yet to figure out how to craft a square?
Papert really argues for a reconceptualization of the very fields of mathematics and physics, one that is better able to take advantage of the computer’s affordances (p. 184). A complete reimagination of reading, writing, historical analysis, mathematics, physics, etc. to better fit the computer’s constructionist components is a fascinating idea, but one that unfortunately does not yet have the cultural backing that Papert advocates. Maybe one day children will be able to learn physics entirely through computer programming, but until our assessments are radically changed, the textbook industry dismantled, and curricular mandates overturned, I would love to hear a more practical version of Papert’s theory, one in which there are intermediary steps between the computer as “teaching machine” and the complete overhaul of our current school system and intellectual fields.
When reading Papert’s description of how gears helped him concretize so many abstract mathematical concepts, I tried to think of and object to think with that could have represented for me what gears represented for him. None came to mind.
Later, flashes of times at which I had powerful ideas, came to mind. I thought about 9th grade in particular, when I was introduced to physics, chemistry and in mathematics to Pitagora’s theorem. I soon realized that I had experience the inverse process to what Papert describes, i.e. given an abstract concept, I would look up in the library of “concrete stuff” I had in my head for something that could help me understand/explore/expand the concept. I remember vividly when I was being taught about molecules, I thought hard until I found the perfect object I could think with to better understand molecules, how to build them, how the changed, etc.: puzzles! I remember trying to build a certain molecule and thinking of it as puzzle and how much easier it was to answer questions like would this element work? would that order make sense?, and so on.
In contrast to Papert’s approach though, I did not have any personal/emotional connection with puzzles! I do not have memories of doing puzzles before 9th grade, no one in my family or circle of friends was a puzzle enthusiast, there weren’t part of the toys I had or the gifts I received. I just knew how they worked and for some reason associated them with some science concepts.
However, a few years later, I became a puzzle enthusiast…
Reading about the constructionist ideas of learning reminded me of all the learning theory I had studied in the past few years. The Mindscapes and Construction Kits readings distilled ideas that were thrummed into my head from previous professors: play and exploration is a foundation of learning and expressing ideas in concrete forms is a way to think through those ideas, rather than a final product. I agree with Papert (the same way Resnick and Silverman agree with Papert), that the best learning experiences come when we are actively engaged in designing and creating things that are meaningful to us.
How easy would it be to use the design principles presented in these readings to guide standard classroom lessons? These readings made me reflect back to the interpretation of constructionist learning activities in a regular classroom, and how difficult it is to create a space for the spirit of design and creativity. In classrooms, the meaningfulness of a project might be a student’s interest in getting an A, or avoiding embarresment of a bad product in front of their peers. With that meaning, however unconscious, motivating a learning experience, students are apt to produce what they think is the right product to address their interest in getting a right answer. What would it take to design a lesson in which the learner was truly transported into a creative space?
I would be interested in using the design principles from the Resnick and Silverman reading as a frame for a lesson on vocabulary, for example. In what way could a project be designed which would lead students to construct meaning from a text despite a lack of vocabulary knowledge?