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From: edwards@dogie.edu ( Mark Edwards)
Newsgroups: comp.ai,comp.edu,comp.cog-eng
Subject: Re: Becoming CAI literate
Message-ID: <27@dogie.edu>
Date: 17 Feb 88 18:27:54 GMT
References: <776@zippy.eecs.umich.edu> <3316@killer.UUCP> <26@dogie.edu> <8369@g.ms.uky.edu>
Reply-To: edwards@dogie.macc.wisc.edu ( Mark Edwards)
Organization: UW-Madison Academic Computer Center
Lines: 36

In article <8369@g.ms.uky.edu> nasa@ms.uky.edu (Eric T. Freeman) writes:
>I think you are missing the point here...Nicholas Negroponte says what I
>am thinking far better than I ever could...
>
>   Take a six-year-old from anywhere in the world and plunk him down in
>   Paris to live for a year and they'll learn French - why not create a 
>   fictitious country called Mathland (in a computer) in which you could
>   drop a child into and the child would learn math.
>
>This idea was originally Seymour Papert's.  I think this type of
>application would enable a child to come away knowing far more and
>more importantly having a deeper understanding for math than simple drills.


  Perhaps I was. Mathland is an intriguing concept. However a year in
France does not a Frenchmen make. The problem the six year old will have
in learning math is that it is not relevant to anything he he finds of 
value. He can't eat it. It doesn't protect him. It can't resolve any of
his bodily needs, or psychological needs.

  At the period of time in life that those math drills are being taught
(or administered) the child has not progressed enough in development that
he would understand any of the reasoning behind it anyways. It may quite 
possibly only be that the methodology that is currently in use limits this
learning behavior. 

  I think the breakthroughs are going to come when the computer is truly 
more intelligent than the child is. The computer will have to process speach,
and be able to converse with the child. The current state of the art in 
Educational programming is quite primative. A humanlike robot probably will 
be a better teacher than a simple computer and keyboard. 

mark
-- 
    edwards@vms.macc.wisc.edu
    UW-Madison, 1210 West Dayton St., Madison WI 53706