A few of us just visited the Aus Maths and Science school in Adelaide; an open plan, highly connected / immersive, ICT rich environment, that we seem to be heading for. Even there, though, integrating maths and science is proving difficult; and i'm not sure IT is fully harnessed, yet, for maths.
I also read a book recently, what “Video Games have to teach us about Learning and Literacy”. It takes a reflective view - a player’s view - on the challenges of learning video games; why do people pay good money for long, difficult learning experiences? how do game designers scaffold the levels so the experience is hard but learnable? what might schools learn from this? I like his thoughts on role and identity – you get to “be” something cool from day one; similar to when schools allow you to work as a scientist, rather than learning 10,000 things “about science” for the “future”. David Perkins of Project Zero had similar ideas of letting students “play the whole game” in school, albeit in a cut down form, not just endless “learning about”. Traditional technology offers the same role based learning, you get to be the cook, or the metal worker. Anyway, I wonder if we can do the same with maths; maybe using computers for modelling.
(warning - long post!)
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