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Brian C. Smith

Computer Science Should Supplement, not Supplant Science Education - 0 views

  • In the integrated STEM classroom, using the principles of NGSS, educators are working to seek out real-world, relevant, authentic problems that would be of interest to students and ask them to apply computational thinking to solve the problem using data analysis, visualization, seeking patterns, and computation.
  • And as everyone knows, time in the school schedule is VERY limited and providing computer science as on a separate track cuts the instructional time pie even more, and sets up another silo in high schools.
Martin Leicht

Is Design Thinking the New Liberal Arts? - CIO Journal. - WSJ - 0 views

  • The first is feasibility
  • Next comes viability
  • The final dimension is desirability
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  • Design thinking is now being applied to abstract entities, such as systems and services, as well as to devise strategies, manage change and solve complex problems.
  • d.school, was launched in 2004 as a graduate program that integrates business, the social sciences, the humanities and other disciplines into more traditional engineering and product design
  • take on the world’s messy problems together.
    • Martin Leicht
       
      human values & continuing evolution
  • deliberate mash-up of industry, academia and the big world beyond campus is a key
  • rigorous engineering education; entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial thinking; and the arts, which broadly encompasses creativity, innovation and design
  • students needed to learn how to think critically and creatively every bit as much as they needed to learn finance or accounting.
    • Martin Leicht
       
      approach from different perspectives & even combine approaches to find innovative solutions
  • has design thinking now become the new liberal arts? After pondering the question, I believe the answer is: No
  • Design Thinking is frequently identified as an engaging process and methodical framework for approaching complex, multidisciplinary problems in ways that consistently result in solutions that are successful and often creative in unpredictable way
    • Martin Leicht
       
      DT - it's a framework for thinking about complex, multidisciplinary problems to be applied to anything
    • Martin Leicht
       
      successful design solutions are found at the intersection of "feasibility", "viability," and "desirability.'
  • How is design thinking human-centered,
  • Do disciplines, in order to evolve and advance, need some place in which to play and from which to be provoked?… Research-as-questioning is a much freer and more playful approach to discovery. It keeps us in closer contact with our natural disposition to curiosity and wonder.”
  • concluded that their action-oriented approach to problem solving did not pay proper attention to past knowledge. “A truly human-centered design, if it takes culture at all seriously, would have to take pastness seriously
    • Martin Leicht
       
      study of the past sets us up to live well in future
    • Martin Leicht
       
      Design Thinking does not really focus much on the past beyond the definition of the problem/challenge were liberal arts does.
  • But for them to really shape the future of university learning, they will have to do a better job of engaging with precisely what the university was designed to promote, and what design thinking, with its emphasis on innovation, has thus far completely ignored: the past.”
  • The difference between science and engineering is often described by the nature of the questions that are asked: scientists ask why as they attempt to understand the world, while engineers ask why not as they attempt to change it and create what has never been
    • Martin Leicht
       
      You need both Science, the why, and Engineering, the why not, to fully leverage/use/benefit from design thinking. As do Liberal Arts and Design Thinking. Both are a symbiotic twin.
Brian C. Smith

How Silicon Valley Pushed Coding Into American Classrooms - The New York Times - 0 views

  • “It is essential that efforts to increase computer science instruction, kindergarten through career, be driven by the needs of industry and be developed in partnership with industry.”
    • Brian C. Smith
       
      The danger in this statement is that it says computer science instruction. It has little regard for how students learn or their interests. It is all about industry and jobs. If corporate and industry partners want to help, they must take a backseat to qualified educators, not the other way around. We CAN and MUST do better than industries seeking self-serving initiatives.
  • “They are collaborative partners.”
    • Brian C. Smith
       
      Another slippery statement. What knowledge and understanding to industry partners have regarding how children learn? Industry perspective seems to always be that they see training as learning. Most coding platforms being promoted are designed to program the child. The difference between programming the computer and programming the child is a powerful idea that we must discuss in depth and know well. Otherwise, we lose out on the most meaningful and powerful learning experiences we could provide.
  • “We have a lot of debate in this country about how to teach,” he said, “and not enough debate about what to teach.”
    • Brian C. Smith
       
      Not enough talk about how to learn and how to learn it. Some will say they are one in the same, that's simply not true. Teaching implies something teachers do to students (who may or may not yet be learners). While teaching requires students, learning does not require a teacher or teaching. Learning is the consequence of experience and any teaching designed should reflect this powerful idea. When we leave the decisions about how and what to teach to those outside of education, because they are the area "experts", it becomes about the topic and not the child. We will always fail with that approach.
Martin Leicht

Learning to Think Like a Computer - The New York Times - 0 views

  • all-important concept in computer science — abstraction — in terms of milkshakes
  • The idea of abstraction,” he said, “is to hide the details.” It requires recognizing patterns and distilling complexity into a precise, clear summary
  • Concealing layers of information makes it possible to get at the intersections of things
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  • In particular, “computational thinking” is captivating educators, from kindergarten teachers to college professors, offering a new language and orientation to tackle problems in other areas of life.
    • Martin Leicht
       
      a computer follow a logical flow, so by breaking down the steps and working through the process you learn a "logic" if you will. This process can then be applied to other non computing challenges as a problem solving exercise.
  • Computer Science Principles, focused not on learning to code but on using code to solve problems.
  • computational thinking — its broad usefulness as well as what fits in the circle. Skills typically include recognizing patterns and sequences, creating algorithms, devising tests for finding and fixing errors, reducing the general to the precise and expanding the precise to the general.
Brian C. Smith

technology - Practical Theory - 0 views

  • We need to understand that until we stop fetishizing technology by making it the focal point of the work every time we pull it out of the closet, we will never move past the notion of “technology integration” to a place of “modern learning.”
  • The idea that technology must be invisible in school is simply this: Using technology to inquire, to create, to share, to research, to learn is not and should not be notable anymore. It should simply be a matter of course.Using technology in school is not the point – learning is.
  • There are still moments when we learn about the technology itself, and that’s a good thing. Whether it is in a computer science class where students are learning to program, or it is in a technology infusion workshop where we help students to learn how to fully integrate the technology into their sense of themselves as a student and citizen, there are moments where we — student and teachers — make the invisible visible.
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  • both students and teachers should have moments of reflection of how the tools affect the learning. But there’s a big leap between understanding how the tool both is vital to and transformative to the work and making the work always about the tool.
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    Lehmann offers an important context for thinking about learning in a technology-rich world.
Martin Leicht

What It Takes to Become an All Project-Based School | PROJECT BASED LEARNING | MindShif... - 0 views

  • New Tech schools are entirely project-based and cross-disciplinary.
  • Students take courses like Bio-literacy, which mesh subjects together, emphasizing that disciplines are not stand-alone endeavors. Technology is woven throughout the school day and at home seamlessly.
  • only 60 percent of assessment is based on content. The other 40 percent is based on what he called “school-wide learning outcomes,” things like written and oral proficiency, work ethic, presentation skills and the ability to give and take feedback. Students can see the project rubric and know where they need to improve their skills.
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  • “Students are working on authentic projects and problems.” He gave an example of a cross curricular physics and environmental science class that studied the physics of power and electricity. “Our students learned those skills and then rewired houses that were destroyed in New Orleans’ 9th Ward.
  • Each school is given a coach who visits throughout the school year, checks on lesson plans, suggests changes and helps troubleshoot problems. And New Tech focuses on nurturing the leadership capacity of principals so they can continue to innovate with teachers.
  • decisions by consensus
  • When kids enter his seventh grade they are so used to the traditional school system, they don’t know how to work collaboratively on projects. “At first their grades go down just because it’s projects. It’s actually kind of harder because you have to be a self-learner.” In traditional schools, kids are constantly being directed, so they don’t have to think for themselves as much
Martin Leicht

Jennifer Mueller's Creative Change: Most people are secretly threatened by creativity -... - 0 views

  • But research shows that many teachers define creativity as a skill that’s mainly associated with the art
  • Study after study shows that new ideas are chronically rejected at many companies, even businesses that say they want more innovation.
  • To cope with all this complexity, we strive for simplicity.
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  • So how do we unleash this potential for innovation? The first step is to face up to our (quite understandable) desire for clear-cut answers that affirm ideas with which we’re familiar.
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