Teach children about heat transfer using multi-sensory perception. Transform complex scientific concepts to simple and basic expressions
Friday, December 17, 2010
Friday, December 3, 2010
Module7 How do I love thee?
The game teaches students about radiation from the sun.
Students circle the sun and then run straight from the center of the sun with a string and try to reach the earth. These students represent the straight rays from the sun. Another student runs around the earth and protects it from the light.
The sun and the earth can both move and the students which represent the light can be fired from the sun at any given time.
Acting like a subject which cannot be visualized provides a different perspective of learning to the students. This game transforms invisible phenomena to kinesthetic movements. Student can learn by their own movements and experience “body thinking” and “analogizing” through “playing”.
Module7 What's the big idea?
“Play is simply for the fun of it, for the enjoyment of doing and making without responsibility. There is no success or failure in play, no holding to account, no mandatory achievement. Play breaks the rules of serious activity and establishes its own.”(p248) Even if the play has no inherent goal, its result can be put beyond the pure enjoyment. Our mental skills can be developed by practicing playing, symbolic playing, and game playing. All these are teaching us analogizing, modeling, empathizing and breaking rules with the joyful mind which the inventive activities and the invention start from.
There are many famous scientists, musicians, artists and writers who have child like sense of humor and playful attitude toward both life and art so that they finally invented amazing things that nobody ever thought of. Most productive plays have internal consistency while they are breaking the rules and new rules are invented to replace them. Thus, the power of play is that it reveals the nature of worlds that might be and sometimes are, testing the limits of conventional practice by inventing alternatives which play important role in creative thinking process. For example, word games, music games, pattern games, puzzles and toys all develop some skills and concept that can be turned to a good account. A young child can be encouraged to play with all materials with their own imagination and rules. They break the rules and explore the world by themselves. Conventions of the behavior, thought, and action should not be taken so seriously at this time so that the pure curiosity can be fostered naturally. Both seeing with the fresh perspective and learning without constraint start from the risk-free playing.
Trans forming is the synthesizing of several thinking tools. In real world, to be a creative person, one thinking tool is not enough. “Creative work requires the ability to define a problem using one set of tools, to investigate it using others, and to express the solution using yet a third set”. (p273) In the beginning, people may think with their own ways; but, in the last, the way in which a person thinks about things will require transformations on order to express his or her insights in communicable form. Insights transformed through analogizing, visualizing, modeling, playing, abstracting and dimensional thinking before its final translation into a finished piece. For example, an excellent translation of invisible theory into kinesthetic model that is accessible to many people. Also transformational thinking produces other benefits, too. The concepts and skills learned in a multimodal way are more likely to be used broadly than are idea learned in problem- specific contexts. Thus, transformational thinking is more likely to yield valuable insights than is domain-specific thinking.
Module7 Zoom-in
I sometimes play by drawing pictures on the sides of the page. It gives me a lot of fun, when I flip the pages and the pictures start to move. I enjoy the moments when the flat, fixed images transform into a moving feature and comes to life.
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