Authors: Greeno, Resnick, ?
[insert section on behaviorism]
We begin with the schools under the Cognitivist / Rationalist approaches to learning, teaching, and knowing. Rationalism states simply that humans are best understood as a rational being. Humans seek to fit the world into their own internal models of objects, relations, forces, and constraints. They adjust and build upon these models as their understanding grows. Learning in this model is motivated by innate curiosity – if a student notices her conception is incorrect, she will seek to correct it. As Greeno states “when their experience is inconsistent with their current understanding or when they experience regularities in information that are not yet represented by their schemata.” (p25) This curiosity can be designed into the learning activity of course, since the structure and order of the activities can present these irregularities in high relief, so students may quickly percieve them. Note also that the Cognitivist / Rationalist models of learning have learner meta-cognition as an important aspect. That is to say learners are aware of how they’re learning, and can think about their thinking (and can learn strategies for doing so more effectively, that is to say learning how to learn.)
To a greater or lesser extent, Cognitivist / Rationalist approaches would agree with our design decisions in CompuTuring. We detail their approaches below and note differences and how we might change our activities to be closer in line to the models presented by different resarch groups.
First, however, we want to introduce the second educational philosophy, that of Situative/Socio-historic approaches to learning. Situative or Socio-historic conceptions of learning are those that view the learning environment as inherently social, inherently co-created (between learners and teachers), and where each object in the environment, whether a person or a physical object, posesses (or embodies) knowledge about the domain. Our CompuTuring activities are not purely situative in their design. CompuTuring activies are done in groups, but the small groups of students working together are not communities in and of themselves. Further, our activity does not require a re-configuration and re-conceptualization of the classroom environment into a socially-constructed space where students are in charge of the learning goals (and motivation grows from this conception of identy). It does not, for example, attempt to turn the classroom into a scientific laboratory. Also though the CompuTuring exercises are explicitly modeled on the Turing Machine and might therefore be seen as a part of the historical development of computer science , “standing on the shoulders of giants” if you will, CompuTuring does not stress these connections. Students do not need to understand the fundamental and powerful contributions Alan Turing and John Von Neuman made to the science of computation with their universal turing machine to take advantage of the learning. We don’t use these developments as the primary motivator for the students. We don’t seek to change students identities with our activity, which is an admittedly hard goal. The primary motivation for students really derives from an internal curiosity among students and their understaning and solving of the puzzles we pose to them (this is closest to the cognitive / rationalist approach described above).
