outline_slash_notes.md

Link to slides

1. I’ve been a student all my life. When I was growing up I loved building things with legos. My friends and I spent countless hours building everything from towns to robots.
2. We weren’t just tinkering around with toys... we were playing.
3. Play is the child’s first exposure to real-world problem solving.
4. When playing, children must figure out how to use all of the tools available to accomplish a goal, such as building a house out of legos, or creating a sandcastle in a sandbox.
5. John Holt, American author and pioneer in youth rights theory, wrote in How Children Learn “The child is curious. He wants to make sense out of things, find out how things work, gain competence and control over himself and his environment, and do what he can see other people doing. He is open, perceptive, and experimental. He does not merely observe the world around him. He does not shut himself off from the strange, complicated world around him, but tastes it, touches it, hefts it, bends it, breaks it. To find out how reality works, he works on it. He is bold. He is not afraid of making mistakes. And he is patient. He can tolerate an extraordinary amount of uncertainty, confusion, ignorance, and suspense. - John Holt
6. Children are natural learners, creatures with intrinsic curiosity that must be nurtured.
7. Unfortunately, the traditional public schooling system does nearly the opposite.
8. Instead of fostering their curiosity, we hammer our children with test after test.
9. The introduction of testing changes the motivation for learning from fun and pleasure to a number that may not even have meaning 10 years from now.
10. It’s really quite interesting. We introduce grades and standardized testing around the 3rd grade. Right around this same time is when students start disliking school and concept of learning.
11. So how do we made students like learning again? How do we reignite their curiously and creativity? There is no easy solution to this.
12. One approach is an educational philosophy called constructivism. Constructivism focuses on uncovering and nurturing the natural learner in students.
13. The role of the instructor in a constructivist classroom is not to teach the students. Rather, it is to facilitate the learning process. Instead of telling the students information, the instructor helps the students discover the information.
14. Let’s take a look at an example of this. — for loop example —
15. Notice how I never actually said what i does. Or what’s specifically happening in the for loop. I provided some very abstract information - it repeats code - and gave just enough examples for the students to apply the concept. As they use it in future lessons and application, they’ll figure out the rest on their own.
16. Constructivism and similar philosophies aren’t likely
17. To cultivate curiosity and to spark curiosity, we as teachers must do three main things.

• Design our lessons around letting the student figure things out.
• Make the student ask questions, not necessarily to the instructor, but to themselves.
• Remember that we’re just here to guide the learning process, not force it.