mathpunk.net

I love watching babies. They are tiny scientists, experimenting in a complex world with a new user interface (hands, eyes, language).

The ‘citizen science’ signal showing up (from the TYF ‘09 results; their research RSS feed here) suggests we should take that concept more seriously. I have two possible opportunities for superstructing young scientists*, and I’d love feedback on some possible directions.

Firstly: This afternoon, I will be tutoring a very clever kid in math. We’ll be doing some basic homework/worksheet stuff, but I’m planning on asking him if he would like to partner with me in a research capacity; i.e., I’m going to ask him for a job. My idea is that we might be able to learn from each other about superstructing, and maybe work together on something for Digital Open.

Secondly: In about a week, I’m going to be giving a talk at a local, non-accredited religious school. I have pretty free reign over what I’m going to talk about, and so I thought that it might be interesting to talk around the concept of ‘knowing’: how do we know things, how do we confirm or challenge our beliefs, etc. I’ll have an hour with the kids, and I’d like to come up with some sort of exercises that will allow us to learn from each other. (And I’d love to hook them up with Digital Open as well!)

This is pretty handwavey, isn’t it? Hence the call for help finding readings or really good questions that I can process into something fun and cohesive and useful over the next several days. Oh, the joys of improvising everything…

* – ‘young’ means ‘middle-school/high-school’ at this time, though I am definitely going to return to the concept of Baby Scientists in the future. (Did you know babies can learn sign as young as four months!?)**

** – technical note: I have no idea how to intelligently footnote a blog post in Wordpress!

Tags: digitalopen, kids, science, teaching

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 23rd, 2009 at 12:13 pm and is filed under superstructing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.