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