But these are just words. Now the children
can make dynamic models of animal behavior patterns to test Tinbergen's
concepts themselves.
Can nine and 10-year-old children actually capture and understand the
mentality of a complex organism, such as a fish? Teacher B. J. Allen-Conn
spent several summers learning about intricate ecological relations
in the oceans. She searched for ways to express how an individual's
behavior is altered by interactions with many other animals. At the
same time, Michael Travers, a graduate student from the Media Laboratory
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was working with us,
built several animal simulations, among them fish behaviors described
by Tinbergen. Then Scott Wallace and others in our group turned these
various ideas into Playground, a simulation construction kit for children.
Children are particularly enthralled by the clown fish, which exhibits
all expected fishlike behaviors (such as feeding, mating and fleeing
from predators) but also displays a fascinating way of protecting itself.
It chooses a single sea anemone and gradually acclimates to the anemone's
poison over a period of several days. When acclimation is complete,
the clown fish has a safe haven where it can hide if a predator comes
hunting. |
It is fairly easy to build a simple behavior
in Playground, and so the children produce simulations that reflect
how the fish acts when it gets hungry, seeks food, acclimates to an
anemone and escapes from predators. Later they can explore what happens
when scripts conflict. What happens if the animal is very hungry yet
there is a predator near the food? If the animal is hungry enough, will
it start eyeing the predator as possible food? Do the fish as a group
fare best when each animal is out for itself, or does a touch of altruism
help the species overall?
For an adult, the children's work would be called Artificial Intelligence
Programming Using a Rule-Based Expert Systems Language. We researchers
and the teachers and children see the dynamic simulations as a way of
finding out whether theories of animal behavior apply to the real world.
Computers in the Open School are not rescuing the school from a weak
curriculum, any more than putting pianos in every classroom would rescue
a flawed music program. Wonderful learning can occur without computers
or even paper. But once the teachers and children are enfranchised as
explorers, computers, like pianos, can serve as powerful amplifiers,
extending the reach and depth of the learners.
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Many educators have been slow
to recognize this concept of knowledge ownership and to realize that
children, like adults, have a psychological need for a personal franchise
in the culture's knowledge base. Most schools force students to learn
somebody else's knowledge. Yet, as John Holt, the teacher and philosopher
of education, once said, mathematics and science would probably be learned
better if they were made illegal. Children learn in the same way as
adults, in that they learn best when they can ask their own questions,
seek answers in many places, consider different perspectives, exchange
views with others and add their own findings to existing understandings.
The first benefit is great interactivity. Initially the computers will
be reactive, like a musical instrument, as they are today. Soon they
will take initiatives as well, behaving like a personal assistant. Computers
can be fitted to every sense. For instance, there can be displays for
vision; pointing devices and keyboards for responding to gesture; speakers,
piano-type keyboards and microphones for sound-even television cameras
to recognize and respond to the user's facial expressions. Some displays
will be worn as magic glasses and force-feedback gloves that together
create a virtual reality, putting the user inside the computer to see
and touch this new world. The surface of an enzyme can be felt as it
catalyzes a reaction between two amino acids; relativistic distortions
can be directly experienced by turning the user into an electron traveling
at close to the speed of light.
A second value is the ability of the computers to become any and all
existing media, including books and musical instruments. This feature
means people will be able (and now be required) to choose the kinds
of media through which they want to receive and communicate ideas. Constructions
such as texts, images, sounds and movies, which have been almost intractable
in conventional media, are now manipulatable by word processors, desktop
publishing, and illustrative and multimedia systems.
Third, and more important, information can be presented from many different
perspectives. Marvin L. Minsky of M.I.T. likes to say
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