Messing About with Computers: Making Transdisciplinary Learning Personal

“What an individual can learn, and how he learns it, depends on what models he has available.” – Seymour Papert

I still fondly remember receiving rolly-polly bugs as pets in an elementary science class, even though I can’t recall why we were examining them in the first place. I also remember creating home movies in middle school (on film!) about tectonic plate shifts. But, by the time I reached high school, the subject I had actually enjoyed transformed into segmented periods to which I could no longer relate. While biology was still a point of interest, I really struggled to comprehend chemistry and physics. Since these memories clearly remain pretty fresh and negative, reading about Seymour Papert’s goal to make scientific inquiry personal read like a breath of positive, fresh air.

That his inspiring article, “Computer as Material: Messing About with Time,” was written in 1988, however, proves disconcerting. In the reading, he describes a series of sessions where junior high students with different interests and skill strengths came together to experiment with programming clocks. While some naturally took to the computer programming language, LOGO, he brought into the classroom, others built the ramps where motorized cars would run on, or contributed ideas as to how to make the clocks’ timing more efficient. In essence, it seems like the ideal setting for discovery and performing learned math/science terms (such as variables) in a practical, tangible way.  Furthermore, the assignment required a multitude of talents to achieve the group’s collective goal.

Would more classes in other disciplines prove this fruitful if students were allowed to experiment freely? I believe so, and this hypothesis is in part supported by MIT’s Scratch software. The LOGO programming language was expanded into Scratch by Seymour Papert’s student Mitchel Resnick, and having just put it to use myself by animating my name, I can say that it turns programming into a fairly painless act. (As evidenced by my animation, I am by no means an expert.) That this application is located on a website even allows people of all ages around the world to create animated 2-D stories, and I think if this were around when I was a kid it would have been something I could relate to as a more language arts-minded student.  

Compare Scratch technology with Papert’s explanation of how computers were used in the late 20^th century:

“An examination of computer use in schools today reveals that students' interactions with computers are largely teacher-directed, workbook-oriented, for limited periods of time, and confined to learning about the machines themselves or about programming languages. Further, computers are located in separate labs and are not integrated into the standard curriculum. ‘Doing computer’ in school is thought of as an exciting activity in and of itself.”

We’ve come a long way from the clunky desktop computers Papert describes from the 1980s, with laptops, tablets, mobile technology, and last but not least, the INTERNET making devices and the activities performed on them more transportable and user-friendly. Yet, aren’t computers still often treated as a separate, slightly scary, and serious entity that must be “done” and utilized? Do you feel the use of technology remains teacher-directed and scientific? How can we still improve school computer usage to help coursework become more transdisciplinary, as Scratch aims to achieve?