Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which has gathered the largest number of intelligent technology brains, has a very special laboratory. The education plan that has lasted for many years has a lovely name: MIT Media Lab-"Lifelong Kindergarten".
The host of this project is Mitchel Resnick, an information engineering professor with curly hair and a gray beard. On the day of the interview, resnick wore a dark blue knitted polo shirt and suit pants, with a warm smile like a scholar, reflecting the colorful Lego bricks everywhere in the laboratory. He could feel the introverted engineer, and the universe in his mind was full of endless creativity. The plan of "lifelong kindergarten" is to hope that everyone can keep the fun created by children while playing, and constantly try to break the framework and make ideas come true through computer programs.
Resnick is most famous for launching Scratch children's programming software ten years ago, which makes programming no longer a field that exclusive engineers can set foot in. Pupils can learn programming languages through graphical interfaces and game design. Resnick didn't enter the academic field immediately after receiving his doctorate. Instead, he worked as a science and technology reporter for Businessweek for five years. During this period, he dabbled extensively in science and technology and education, and used his mentor Seymour? Seymour papert, the founder of MIT's first artificial intelligence laboratory, and seymour papert and jean piaget, great educators, shared their research experience and integrated education into science and technology step by step.
After fifteen years of experience in Scratch, resnick decided to start "learning creative learning" to teach others how to make good use of their creative teaching experience. Boston reporter Lin is also a student of this course. She hopes that more people can learn from resnick's vision and experience through this overseas interview.
Kindergarten is the most creative and daring time in your study career.
At this stage, you will see children happily creating new things and actively seeking cooperation. A group of children on the left hold building blocks and build towers, while a group of children on the right draw with their fingers and cover the canvas with fingerprints. Here, seeing that people's innate "creativity" is constantly emerging, as long as they have a flash of ideas, they will pick up the materials at hand and start creating. If they find it unsuccessful, they will change their methods.
Now is the fastest changing world in history. What you learn today may be out of date tomorrow.
So the ability that needs to be cultivated most now is the ability to think and act quickly. However, it is a pity that most schools do not have proper mechanisms to train children to become "creative thinkers" who think and act. After leaving kindergarten, children will become people who will only sit in chairs and listen to lectures, fill out study lists and accept teachers' information in one direction, because schools used to be places to "pass information". But today's children need to keep the environment of being brave in creation, trial and error and exploration as in kindergarten, so we call this project "lifelong kindergarten".
The "Lifelong Kindergarten" project in MIT Media Lab is filled with Lego bricks. Photo courtesy/forest
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In kindergarten, building blocks and crayons are components created by children. In the real world, building blocks are not enough to create usable things, but through "technology", we can create new components. With these new components, we can create tools that can also be used in the real world. For example, Lego cooperated with us to develop Lego programming language and install sensors on building blocks. After finishing Lego cars, children can write programs to tell Lego cars to stop when they feel the black line on the ground, when to turn, and even communicate with each other.
Because we have developed a set of Lego "programming language", children can also use it to make building blocks come alive.
The team of lifelong kindergarten at MIT created Scratch, a simple and easy-to-use free programming language, with similar concepts. Many functions are written into building block-like programs, such as "n seconds to start", "turn right" and "play music/movies", which can be strung together to make a cat map, disappear behind the scenes after turning right for three seconds, and play a happy birthday movie. Now there is more than one every month in the world. Create a learning environment to cultivate "creativity" through the Scratch platform.
I think learning "programming language" will become as popular as learning "Chinese" in the future. Everyone must be able to read and write. "Reading" is like using an app, and "writing" means creating your own app. Learning to write programs allows people to show their "creativity" and turn ideas into usable objects. In addition, learning programming languages can make people think clearly.
Just because everyone learns programming doesn't mean everyone is a computer engineer, just as not every child who learns writing has to be a writer. But learning to write enables people to express their ideas, learn programming languages and know how to form a basic programming framework, which enables children to turn their ideas into realizable programs, and he will generally know how to communicate with engineers.
"Creativity" depends on "cultivation", which takes a period of time and is slowly cultivated in a creative environment. Writing programs is a way to realize creative thinking. Many people think that "creativity" refers to art, but in fact, "creativity" covers a wide range, including designing what to eat for dinner at home, how to eat healthier, and designing a shopping list of fruits and vegetables at home. What factors should be considered in these plans are all creative.
From the experience of maintaining the Scratch community, I summed up the "4P methodology" to cultivate creativity: Project, Passion, Peer and Play.
Give the student a project he is interested in and let him cooperate with his partner in the same game. I understand that in some cases, it is meaningful to follow the guiding steps, but if you want to cultivate a "creative thinker", you can't give the guiding steps for students to experiment and test the boundaries.
Project, Passion, Peer and Play are the four elements that can make people enter "creative thinking".
First of all, doing a "project" is not doing a "project". The questions given by school teachers usually have standard answers, but in real life, our "question" is not a topic, but a "project" without standard answers. For example, how to help a friend have a birthday party? You will plan a plan to do it. If it is not feasible, you will change your method and make repeated adjustments to get a satisfactory one. In the process of doing a project, there will always be challenges different from expectations, so you can practice "solving problems" constantly.
Second, we should have "real enthusiasm" and let students do topics that he is really curious and interested in. It is difficult for ordinary people to devote themselves wholeheartedly to projects that they are not interested in, especially those that others ask them to do, but whenever they encounter challenges, they will devote more time and stick to them with enthusiasm.
Third, most creative products are not finished by one person sitting there, but by a group of people working together on the basis of each other. Therefore, it is necessary to cultivate children's habit of cooperation and sharing, and apply some finished products already made by others to their own finished products. It is better for these companions to be people of different ages and backgrounds, so that everyone can provide different experiences and practices.
Finally, about "playing", it refers to the mentality of "having the courage to try and enjoy it". I feel that every new attempt is a game. I am not afraid of making mistakes, and I dare to break the rules, so that I can adjust myself to a better state regardless of the good or bad results.
Encourage children to do interesting projects. If you want to learn Scratch's own games and animations, there are free teaching videos on the Scratch website to teach children to learn Scratch language step by step (Editor: Taiwan Province Province has a Chinese version of Scratch teaching guide).
The biggest headache for teachers is that everyone is interested in different topics. But all the themes must have something in common, so the teacher should play a series of roles and tell Alice that Brian is also making a movie. Do you want to study it together? Tell Brain that Catherine has studied the problem of global warming, and you can ask him how to do it. Third, we need to deal with "frustration", "depression" and other emotions. When a child is immersed in creation, he can be advised to look at other people's works to inspire him, or go out for a walk and come back to create.
Use after-school time, or during winter and summer vacations. It is best to cultivate creativity as much as possible when you are young, because the most important thing in "learning" is to learn to be a "good learner". An educator once said: "Educators should (help students) explore what they really want to teach in the course, instead of teaching all the courses. Instead of covering the course, we might as well uncover it. )
In the end, you only need to specialize in a few fields. Therefore, the most valuable place for educators is not to complete teaching in a carpet way, but to help students screen out what knowledge is most valuable and worth learning. It is not appropriate for children to judge what is valuable. For example, "learn to read" should not be left to children to decide, and you can't tell them that you chose not to learn to read. The responsibility of educators is to find out these "important things" and teach them to children.
Image courtesy of//Mitchell resnick
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