Technology use in the study of motion 08Apr08
I recently found 20 minutes to sit down and watch a TED Talk with Alan Kay, titled ‘A powerful idea about teaching ideas’. It is a talk given by Alan in March 2007, but just found its way online this March. I haven’t watched nearly enough content provided by TED, and plan to watch most of the talks in the ‘How we learn’ section. I started with the Alan Kay talk because the blurb indicated that he would be basing his discussion around science and math in the classroom. I should probably know who Alan Kay is, but alas, I do not. He seems to be a main player behind the OLPC program, and works with a group who has developed software for the program.
The entire talk was thought provoking, but the section I wanted to focus on was the use of computers in the teaching of math and science. The example used to demonstrate the Pythagorean Theorem could be done using low-tech cut out pieces of paper, so in that case technology would be used solely for technologies sake. However, his examples for examining motion (starts at about 14m20s) are extremely engaging and use technology in a useful manner. He uses a cross-platform program Squeak, which is an open source application that lets you create just about anything you like. He uses it to create a car that travels at a constant rate and drops a point every 1 second. He then applies a rate of acceleration to the car, and the students see that the dots get further apart as the car moves across the screen. That is all well and good, but I feel you can accomplish the same results by doing hands on experiments on the classroom floor. The benefit the computer simulation provides is the removal of experiment errors.
The aspect of the example that I really loved, and have wanted to recreate myself but did not have the tools available, was when he imported still frames of a ball being dropped from a roof, and then created a copy of that ball drop in Squeak, with the original still frames visible. Students were able to measure the distance between the ball at specific time intervals during the fall of the ball. This can be done by hand, with pencil and paper, but the computer gives students the opportunity to go and change variables and witness the result much faster than reseting a similar experiment by hand.
The use of Squeak in this presentation is an excellent example for the benefits of using computers in the classroom to enhance learning.
