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maxluscher · 10 years

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What do preschool children need to know about science?

Today I looked at my 3.5-years-old daughter’s Winter school curriculum. In addition to the usual Thanksgiving and Christmas/Hanukah preparations, I’ve noticed that this season, she will be learning about Amphibians. As a relatively new father, I quivered with the perspective of being unexpectedly quizzed on a crowded bus about the steps of the aquatic gill-breathing larval stage.. If you are also a parent of a preschooler, and similarly find science education on your child’s curriculum, you might join me in slight wonder as to why kids at this early age are asked to learn about Amphibians at all.

In the spirit of scientific inquiry, I looked at recent studies about the reasons for teaching science for preschoolers. One of the most interesting paper by Swedish researchers found that successful teachers did not try to drill the kids about the facts of cold-blooded vertebrates, instead they focused on empowering them to feel self-confident to explore any question of biology in the future. When teachers and parents engage children in complex topics as competent partners, encourage them to ask their questions and stimulate further investigations, they naturally raise the next generation of scientists, researchers and smart adults.

In the US, the American Association for the Advancement of Science published its Benchmarks for Science Literacy, and recommended for teachers in K-2 grades that

Students should be actively involved in exploring phenomena that interest them both in and out of class. These investigations should be fun and exciting, opening the door to even more things to explore. An important part of students’ exploration is telling others what they see, what they think, and what it makes them wonder about. Children should have lots of time to talk about what they observe and to compare their observations with those of others. A premium should be placed on careful expression, a necessity in science, but students at this level should not be expected to come up with scientifically accurate explanations for their observations. (AAAS 1993, 10).

After reading these and dozens of similar findings on science education for preschoolers, I feel less scared about losing my status of omniscience on a bus because I cannot answer my daughter’s question about a toad. Instead, I start to look at the calendar to pick a Sunday when the whole family will visit the nearby lake, and we can set up our very own laboratory experiment. And you guessed it right, the lead researcher will be a sweet little girl in her favorite pink princess boots.

#science-education #research #learning #preschool

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maxluscher · 10 years

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Why is Scrabble not (just) a word game

For the expert player, Edward De Guzman, whose current official game rating is 1888, Scrabble is not just about words. It is about community, competition and mathematics.

Ed has been playing since 2004, and within a mere 2 years, he got himself into Division 1, the highest rated circle of officially sanctioned tournaments. In 2010, he had set the record of highest game scored with his 771-315 victory at a Scrabble tournament in Reno, NV. So I was really excited to talk to him about the game and what he thinks it could teach to kids.

In each Scrabble game, the player has about 14 turns that can be thought of 14 decision points. Depending on the phase of the gameplay, you apply different strategies:

identify acceptable words by using accurate spelling (versus non-words, or "phonies" using apps like Zarf),

look for prefixes and suffixes to make your word even longer (e.g., OUT-, POST-, -ING, -S),

constantly re-calculate the points based on all the letter combinations that each permissible word would yield,

analyze the horizontal and vertical spatial orientations on the board, and the sequence in which they were played (this turns out to be one of the special skills that experts like Ed are really good at; see vertical fluency in Hargreaves et al., 2011).

In the beginning of the game, your rack should have roughly equal number of vowels and consonants (3:4 to be precise). In the endgame, which is usually the last 2-3 turns things get more interesting. This is where the outcome of most games are decided, and this is what most expert players stay long after they're done to reflect upon. This after-game reflection is often done as a conversation and it focuses on 'what-ifs': What if instead of playing LIFE from ADEFGILRU, you played LIFEGUARD? Or check if the word ZEN is acceptable or not? (Turns out that while TWL, the official Scrabble dictionary, doesn't have this word, the Words With Friends WWF4.10.1 dictionary lists it.)

Other expert strategies include mastering all the prefixes/suffixes as well as the rote learning of word lists. Anagrams, isograms or alphagrams might help ease the pain, but most of the times all you do is rote memorization. Ed learned in his first two years all the 2, 3, 4, and 5-letter words, and he's still working on the 6 and 7-letter lists. These hours of deliberate practice and mnemonics have been identified as the experts' specialized skill (Tuffiash et al., 2007).

So why is Scrabble not just a word game? Because Ed confessed to me that he probably knows less than half (50%) of the meanings of the words he plays. Maybe up to 60% of higher domain level meanings (e.g., is SHEKEL an animal or a currency?). And sometimes he looks up weird or interesting sounding words in Merriam-Webster, which is his primary source. For example, Ed was proudly reciting to me the correct spelling of TEIGLACH, an obscure Jewish delicacy.

However, semantics get in the way of rote memorization (Halpern & Wai, 2007; Fatsis, 2002; Hargreaves et al., 2011). The letters for Ed are incidental. They are only pieces that he strings together into recognizable patterns. Mathematics, as opposed to language, becomes the meta-language of Scrabble and as such, the mechanisms that an expert player will develop are:

calculation of risk (e.g., keeping or trading a tile; accepting randomness),

probability (e.g., "What am I going to get from the bag? Is it going to be a vowel or a consonant?" or towards the endgame "Am I getting a T?"),

mathematical modeling, decision-making and problem-solving (i.e., the process of taking all your data points and weighing in on how to use that during gameplay)

Towards the end of our conversation, Ed tells me that he hopes that future Scrabble players will embrace and learn both the language (spelling) and the mathematical (strategy/modeling) aspects of the game.

#scrabble #learning #games #strategy #expert

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maxluscher · 15 years

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Life-logging

Scientific studies on memory are usually focusing on how people remember things. Applied technologies are using these models to increase how much or how well we can recall about the information that surrounds us. As both theory and technology develop at an increasing speed, we see how the human mind becomes extended and embodied into its environment (Clark, 2008).

My PhD supervisor, Itiel Dror and Steven Harnad (2008) explained this process as a natural continuation of how all cognizing agents -let them be biological or artificial- are offloading their cognition into different cognitive technologies. The boundaries between the memories in my head and the ones on this blog have become fuzzy. Please, don't think of me as a cyborg with microchips on my temporal lobe, but rather someone, who searches unfamiliar things in Wikipedia and keeps a good amount of his data in the Cloud.

A new book with the cheesy title of Total Recall, written by Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell, two senior researchers at Microsoft, show how far this offloading can push the limits of our imagination. They present their MyLifeBits project that digitized all documents, photos, external memories of Bell so that he could truly become paperless and uncluttered 'both in his head and on his desk'. But they went further and since 2001, Bell has also attached a SenseCam and a GPS on his body to record and log all life events, meetings, trips, emails and telephone conversations that he faces. This is his personal life's chronicle, which he calls 'life-logging'. Here's a long interview video with the authors.

Memory reconstruction gives me integrity and a sense of who I am. I think the source of my uneasiness about Total Recall comes from a lack of trust in the SenseCam, in contrast to a self-deceitful comfort that my limited mind's distorted camera has provided to me in the past almost thirty years.Lastly, the anecdotal evidence which suggests that those who survived a near-death moment experienced a video of their life flickering in front of their eyes makes me suspicious that our mind is in fact not as much limited in its capacity as we thought. It may actually record everything that we encounter, but perhaps what makes us human is that we're not capable (yet) to do a Total Recall. The real question is still : why?

#life-logging #microsoft #mylifebits #memory #research #book

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maxluscher · 15 years

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Kurzokurtic development

Ray Kurzweil knows the future. He's the oracle of technological development or as he likes to call it technological singularity. The New Oxford American Dictionary defines singularity as "a point in the future (often set at or around 2030 A.D.) beyond which overwhelming technical changes (especially the development of superhuman artificial intelligence) make reliable predictions impossible." But what exactly those reliable predictions?Since only Kurzweil knows how to look forward in time, everyone else is left with one option: look back to the past. Take for example February 2005, when Kurzweil gave an inspiring talk at Monterey, CA as part of TedTalk.

We have almost reached the end of Moore's law, and surely by 2022 the prediction of the famous founding father of Intel will be outdated. Microchips will soon stop halving in size and doubling in their processing performance. Lucky for us, however, the end of Moore's law doesn't mean the end of exponential (or as these days we often refer to kurzokurtic) technological development. A paradigm shift is knocking on our door in the form of nano-biotechnology, whereby not only our bloodstream will be populated with tiny robots that make us swim much faster than today, but biochips will change motherboard architecture - probably until 202* (TBA date).

Computers have definitely disappeared from our lives. To be precise, they didn't disappear, they shrunk, got embedded into our clothing, or we don't really perceive them as we're by now fully immersed in virtual realities. I'm actually typing this on a keyboard in SecondLife that only exists for me since it's projected directly onto my retina and the only thing that reminds me of the physical city of San Francisco is an augmented image of the Golden Gate bridge - part real, part virtual.

Naturally, we know that this is only the beginnings. The latest deadline for a "full maturity of these predictions" is 2029. By that date, we'll have finished the full merge of human-computer technologies. Our brain will be fully reverse engineered, recreated and entangled. Once and for all Hofstadter will be proven wrong: our brain is smart enough to understand its complexity.P.S.: If your reality in 2010 is not as described above, adjust your own reality to a more kurzokurtic one... Send me an email and I reply how... Maybe in 2029.

#kurzweil #ted talks

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maxluscher · 15 years

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GPS truth to be revealed

Unlike most of the blogsphere today, I'm not going to come up with another witty joke about how poor Apple's name choice was for the iPad. Instead, let's focus on a recent news about a research initiative to investigate the "the impacts of sat navs on spatial attention and memory while undertaking a complex task such as driving" (Agarwal quoted by The Press Association).

These researchers in the UK look into one of my favourite topics of human navigation: the dynamic balance between learning about and acting upon our spatial environment. When visiting a new city or driving on unfamiliar roads, our brain takes up information in a distinctively different fashion than when we travel the same well-known route to our parents' house as we have done thousands of times since our childhood (literally, different neural formations and pathways are activated in our brain, see Hartley et al., 2003).

Exploring new side streets versus steering towards familiar neighbourhoods, either consciously or not, is a choice that we make every time we travel. The analysis of the patterns in which human explorers make these choices show that in addition to the obvious constraints of the environment (e.g., availability of alternative roads), people also have a personal preference of how they like to get to their destinations (Makany, 2009). Some of us prefer the shortest routes, while others are more adventurous types. This diversity of individual navigation choices creates beautiful complexity for social mobility patterns (Gonzales et al., 2008).

What is it have to do with GPS and sat navs? Most of these technologies eliminate this 'personal touch' from our travels. It offers the most optimal routes, shortest time, distance, avoiding traffic, toll-ways, etc. So far, however, I have not seen an optimization algorithm that implements the real human factor in spatial navigation. Such system should analyze route choices previously taken by the driver and determine what kind of route plan will be not only the most economic but also the most satisfactory. I keep my fingers crossed that Agarwal and her colleagues will have this previously ignored human perspective included in their new research initiative.

#spatial cognition #research #navigation #gps #maps

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maxluscher · 15 years

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Now also on Academia.edu

Other than being another great social networking resource for academics, Academia.edu did a wonderful job with interest lists. If you are like me, and have multiple research interests, sometimes it can be difficult to put yourself under a single category.Their site provides a nice (I assume, user-generated) list of a growing number of academic interests linked to other researchers in that field.

Here is a sample of my list - slightly reorganised - under 3 main categories:

1. Cognitive Psychology

Spatial Cognition

Learning & Memory

Applied Psychology

Cognitive Neuroscience

Evaluation Research

Forensic Psychology

2. Behavioural Architecture

Architecture and learning spaces

Linking Pedagogy and Space

Space Syntax

3. Technology

Academic Technology

Learning Spaces

Human Computer Interaction

Serious Gaming

Virtual Worlds

Web 2.0

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maxluscher · 15 years

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Public library spatial design

"A very exciting new spatial research project is on the horizon. I've got connected to an open-minded and research oriented architect at a firm in South San Francisco, who are just about to begin a public library redesigning project in early 2010. After initial talks, we agreed that I will assist in their assessment of the existing and desired spatial layout and research into identifying user ('patron' in library language) wayfinding needs. I'm very excited for some of my navigation analysis methods to be applied to this particular real world design project, and I anticipate to gain insightful results from this research.The literature for library spatial research is surprisingly enormous (ACRL/LLAMA Guide; Crumpton & Crowe, 2008; Saanwald, 2008; WBDG Guide). More specifically to public library designs, I found academic works that explain in great depth how important appropriate spatial cognition and wayfinding planning would be (Beecher, 2004; Jones, 2000; Galan-Diaz, in press).Interestingly though, previous real world architectural projects involving public library design have seldom mention any systematic attempt to empirically understand how patrons use the space. They are focused on the details of the physical properties (i.e., colour, shape, configuration) and mission statements of the library or the assumed (not actually measured) interest of the patrons.Although my research has just began, I'm already seeing important research leads and potentially crucial questions:

How/why/when do patrons use the space of existing library?

What areas (and why) have higher visitation frequencies than others? Why?

What are the problematic spatial areas (ie., high need with low visitation)? (And what areas don't need re-design!)

How to install/reinforce new and desired services for patrons?

More to come soon..."

#spatial flow #spatial cognition #research #library #architecture

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maxluscher · 15 years

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'Brown bag' talk @Exploratorium

I will give a short talk at 1pm Oct/13/2009 (changed date&time!) in the Exploratorium, San Francisco, CA

Spatial Strategies: Routes of Exploration in Novel Environments

Why do some people like to follow the same routes over and over again while others are more curious about exploring their environment? When we enter an unfamiliar space, our cognitive system interacts with the surroundings by either acquiring new information or using existing representations. This interaction is influenced by heuristic spatial strategies, such as finding shortest distances or increasing our knowledge of the space. The behavioural outcome is the route that we take, however, it also determines the efficiency of later navigations. Frequent exploration patterns indicate a functional trade-off between spatial learning and the distance travelled. In this brown bag lunchtime presentation, I will demonstrate this trade-off and further investigate the effect of the spatial environment.