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Peter Kronfeld

Go Ahead, Mess With Texas Instruments - Phil Nichols - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...278899

education edtech learning programming

shared by Peter Kronfeld on 02 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • If you had asked them, most of my high school teachers would have called me an unmotivated student or said that I lacked discipline and didn't take learning seriously. And yet, that abandoned storage bin told another story: with the aid of my calculator, I'd crafted narratives, drawn storyboards, visualized foreign and familiar environments and coded them into existence. I'd learned two programming languages and developed an online network of support from experienced programmers. I'd honed heuristics for research and discovered workarounds when I ran into obstacles. I'd found outlets to share my creations and used feedback from others to revise and refine my work. The TI-83 Plus had helped me cultivate many of the overt and discrete habits of mind necessary for autonomous, self-directed learning. And even more, it did this without resorting to grades, rewards, or other extrinsic motivators that schools often use to coerce student engagement.
  • I've now begun to see Texas Instruments graphing calculators as unique among educational technologies in that they enable learning that is couched in discovery more than formal teaching.
  • take the notion of "correctness." School typically assumes that answers fall neatly into categories of "right" and "wrong." As a conventional tool for computing "right" answers, calculators often legitimize this idea; the calculator solves problems, gives answers. But once an endorsed, conventional calculator becomes a subversive, programmable computer it destabilizes this polarity. Programming undermines the distinction between "right" and "wrong" by emphasizing the fluidity between the two. In programming, there is no "right" answer. Sure, a program might not compile or run, but making it offers multiple pathways to success, many of which are only discovered through a series of generative failures. Programming does not reify "rightness;" instead, it orients the programmer toward intentional reading, debugging, and refining of language to ensure clarity. This is a form of learning that privileges the process of discovery over the interventions of formal teaching. It can fuel an intrinsic desire to pursue similar learning experiences, but even more, it gradually transforms the outlook of the student
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Subversion encourages students to take an imaginative stance toward learning, to embrace failure as an integral part of success, to see the world for what it is and consider what it might look like under a different set of conditions.
  • The iPad is among the recent panaceas being peddled to schools, but like those that came before, its ostensibly subversive shell houses a fairly conventional approach to learning. Where Texas Instruments graphing calculators include a programming framework accessible even to amateurs, writing code for an iPad is restricted to those who purchase an Apple developer account, create programs that align with Apple standards, and submit their finished products for Apple's approval prior to distribution. As such, for the average student, imaginative activities on an iPad are always mediated by pre-existing apps and therefore, are limited to virtual worlds created by others, not by students themselves. Pair this with the fact that most teachers and administrators only allow classroom use of a few endorsed apps and it becomes clear that these devices are doing more to centralize the school's authority over the learning process than to encourage self-directed creative activity.
  • learning to program taught habits of mind that persist to this day in small yet vital ways. In my work as a teacher, I often hear colleagues lamenting the widespread use of calculator games among students. They consider such forms of "play" an abuse of educational technology and a threat to student learning. But this assumption ignores the tacit learning that arises from repurposing conventional learning apparatuses. My TI-83 Plus awoke a curiosity that exerted a subtle but powerful push toward autonomy and self-direction.
  • Peter Kronfeld on 02 Sep 13
     
    Learning to program a graphing calculator gave the author a deeper education. Results: intrinsic motivation and an ability to "embrace failure as an integral part of success", as well as developing creativity, problem-solving skills, and persistence. Interesting critique of the iPad as a more conventional tool of learning vs. subversive.
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