(by Dr. Alan Kay of Viewpoints Research Institute, from newsletter) Children are set up by nature to learn the world around them by watching adult activity and playing imitation games. Dewey pointed out that this is difficult in today's developed cultures because many important adult activities are opaque or not found in every home. Montessori thought that children's urge to learn the world by immersion and play could be powerfully used for twentieth-century learning if the children were placed into twentieth-century environments and given toys that embodied twentieth-century ideas. One of her special insights was that a main task of...
photos from haiti and st john pilots Sat, 1-Mar-2008 (teefal)
Just received some photos from the start of our Haitian pilot, along with some new photos from our St John pilot, which is in its sixth week. * Haiti photos * St John photos...
St John Day 14 Tue, 4-Mar-2008 (bill)
Laura teaches! Meet with her at Skinny's two hours before class and teach her how to use Holder animation. She practices it till she's comfortable with it. It is interesting in that almost always something invariably goes wrong the first time you try it, as there are host of things that can stop your animation dead in its tracks. (as we shall see...) Laura starts the class with a beautiful mermaid drawn on the Whiteboard. This immediately has the attention of the girls in the front row. Then she goes about the process of duplicating the mermaid, getting a holder,...
St John Day 15 Thu, 6-Mar-2008 (bill)
LaReesa teaches! I had worked with LaReesa earlier in the week on Holder animation, the same lesson as with Laura. I had originally thought we would only get through half of it on Tues - i.e. we would work on frames on Tues and scripting on Thurs. However because Laura had managed to teach the entire process on Tues, and because LaReesa had had problems when she was trying out the lesson on her own, I switched what she was teaching just before class to a tutorial/refresher of a few of the more helpful tools in Etoys. In it she...
XO donor comments Mon, 17-Mar-2008 (teefal)
Today I read some very nice comments from a few of the people who donated their XO laptops to children in our Haiti pilot. Last week I posted photos of the children that got their laptops as well as a new video. The first donor comment was from Emily Davidow, who also blogged: Thank you so much for the opportunity to participate in this wonderful program! Seeing the pictures and movie made me so happy. Looking forward to following the progress in Haiti and all your programs through the newsletter. The next was from author David Weinberger, who blogged as...
St John Pilot Finishes Sat, 29-Mar-2008 (bill)
(from newsletter) On Thursday March 27, an exciting chapter in Caribbean education history came to an end as we finished our Guy Benjamin Pilot here on St. John. As the kids did their final presentations of the digital storybooks they created, I could not help but be amazed by their journey of the past three months. At our very first Etoys class, I asked the kids how many computer programmers they knew. Between them they could name only three. I then told them they were all about to become computer programmers, and then we strapped them to their rocket sleds...
A'Feyah's Story Mon, 31-Mar-2008 (teefal)
(written by Linda Smutz, from newsletter) "I'm the worst kid in this class." These were the first words out of A'Feyah's mouth, after nodding shyly to grant me permission to watch her work on her XO. As a stranger from the mainland with zero credibility, there was no point in trying to persuade her otherwise, so I simply asked to hear about her story. That's how I found out about CeCe the dog, who was happy enough living under a table outside A'Feyah's trailer until another dog joined the family one day. The draft was a little rough, but it...
