Today we did a lot of drawing with Turtle Roy. The key thing that was learnt was that turning right is turning clockwise and vice versa. The directions left and right were pretty well learnt already but when the turtle is facing downwards, it's not trivial to say whether you should turn left or right to get to the direction you want to go. (not even for me)
So we placed a pen on the computer screen and turned it to the direction we wanted to go. Then, if it appeared to be the direction the clock always turns, it's Right.
What we actually tried to draw with Turtle Roy this time is her name. We go this far. We'll continue with that on the next lesson. It's amazing that she doesn't really care whether we should write from left to right or the other way. She chose to write the arabic way because there was "more room to the left".
She also knew exactly when we should lift the pen up and when to put it down. You have to lift the pen up to move it without drawing on the screen, you know.
This lesson was a fun and rewarding one, thanks to not having it just before bedtime. She remembered the space between the function name and the argument very well. That's because I've given her a cookie every time she remembers it.
Bribery works. We've run out of cookies now, but we don't need them anymore either.
Papert's original "metasolution concept" for learning right and left was to have the children walk the paths they wanted to draw. They would go into the center of the room, and the question is, "how would _you_ move if you were to make a square trail?" They would do that, and, doing so, try to remember what kind of moves and turns they did. This is enormously easier that to try this thing on paper.
ReplyDeleteAnother interesting metasolution from Papert is the rule that a full turn is 360 degrees. Children who can do multiplication/division can calculate all kinds of things on this, such as the turning angle you need in the tips of a pentagram. The turtle goes two full rounds and turns five times, so the right angle is 2*360/5 = 144.