Luis, my three-year old son, is at an age where he transforms everything into a robot. Captain America becomes Robot Captain America and attacks the other action figures with a menacing “Ohm, Ohm, Ohm.” I’m in constant anticipation of being turned into a robot “Daddy, you’re a robot . . . Ohm, Ohm, Ohm.” At times a wake up in the morning to a Luis Robot starting at me with arms outstretched “Ohm, Ohm, Ohm.”
I recently visited Vero Beach Elementary School in Florida as part of some work I was doing with The Learning Alliance. When I went into a room designated a Maker Space, given my full immersion in robots, I gravitated towards a group of students programming tiny robots moving across a piece of paper. The principal of the school, Cindy Emerson, shared a student’s enthusiasm for Ozobots in a tweet:
I believe that deep learning in the classroom is linked directly to deep engagement. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi explains that when we are engaged in a complex task we enter a state of "self-forgetfulness" or "flow." Programming a robot, and coding in general is not easy. It requires having the end in mind before the task is begun. It requires thinking forward step by step to arrive at a future that is only imagined. And yet even with the youngest of students we see them fully involved in this complex cognitive task.
Watching the students at Vero Beach Elementary reminded me of Reggio Emilia schools. The city of Reggio Emilia has some of the most innovative preschools in the world. Loris Malaguzzi, one of the founders of the Reggio schools, explains a core concept of the Reggio education philosophy:
What children learn does not follow as an automatic result from what is taught. Rather, it is in large part due to the children’s own doing, as a consequence of their activities and resources.
When I’m playing with my own children I listen to their interests and then build the imaginative world of play with them from these original impulses. We apply the same principle at our own school, Habla in Mexico. Every year I meet with our teachers and ask what they are planning to teach this year in their classrooms. One of our teachers, Tommaso Iskra De Silvestri, once told me, before the school-year started, “I don’t know what we're going to do yet. I need to meet the students. I want to know what they are interested in and we'll build the experiences from there.”
Loris Malaguzzi describes the approach in Reggio schools:
. . . our schools have not had, nor do they have, a planned curriculum with units and subunits (lesson plans) . . . These would push our schools toward teaching without learning: we would humiliate the schools and the children by entrusting them to forms, dittos, and handbooks
The Reggio schools build experience from the interests of the students, “every year each school delineate a series of related projects, some short-range and some long. These themes serve as the main structural supports, but then it is up to the children, the course of events, and the teachers.”
Similar to my last post, where we looked at curriculums based on Imaginary Friends, next we'll look at ways to build interdisciplinary classroom experiences centered on robots combining imagination, literature, and technology.
For further reading about Reggio schools:
Ozobots
