![Seymour Papert](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/67/Seymour_Papert.png)
Constructionist learning is the creation by learners of
mental model
A mental model is an explanation of someone's thought process about how something works in the real world. It is a representation of the surrounding world, the relationships between its various parts and a person's intuitive perception about thei ...
s to understand the world around them. Constructionism advocates student-centered,
discovery learning
Discovery learning is a technique of inquiry-based learning and is considered a constructivist based approach to education. It is also referred to as problem-based learning, experiential learning and 21st century learning. It is supported by the ...
where students use what they already know, to acquire more knowledge.
[Alesandrini, K. & Larson, L. (2002). Teachers bridge to constructivism. The Clearing House, 119–121.] Students learn through participation in
project-based learning
Project-based learning (PBL) is a student-centered pedagogy that involves a dynamic classroom approach in which it is believed that students acquire a deeper knowledge through active exploration of real-world challenges and problems. Students le ...
where they make connections between different ideas and areas of knowledge facilitated by the teacher through
coaching
Coaching is a form of development in which an experienced person, called a ''coach'', supports a learner or client in achieving a specific personal or professional goal by providing training and guidance. The learner is sometimes called a ''coa ...
rather than using lectures or step-by-step guidance.
Further, constructionism holds that learning can happen most effectively when people are active in making tangible objects in the real world. In this sense, constructionism is connected with
experiential learning
Experiential learning (ExL) is the process of learning through experience, and is more narrowly defined as "learning through reflection on doing". Hands-on learning can be a form of experiential learning, but does not necessarily involve students ...
and builds on
Jean Piaget
Jean William Fritz Piaget (, , ; 9 August 1896 – 16 September 1980) was a Swiss psychologist known for his work on child development. Piaget's theory of cognitive development and epistemological view are together called "genetic epistemolo ...
's
epistemological theory of
constructivism
Constructivism may refer to:
Art and architecture
* Constructivism (art), an early 20th-century artistic movement that extols art as a practice for social purposes
* Constructivist architecture, an architectural movement in Russia in the 1920s a ...
.
Seymour Papert
Seymour Aubrey Papert (; 29 February 1928 – 31 July 2016) was a South African-born American mathematician, computer scientist, and educator, who spent most of his career teaching and researching at MIT. He was one of the pioneers of artificia ...
defined constructionism in a proposal to the
National Science Foundation
The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National ...
titled ''Constructionism: A New Opportunity for Elementary Science Education'' as follows:
Some scholars have tried to describe constructionism as a "learning-by-making" formula but, as
Seymour Papert
Seymour Aubrey Papert (; 29 February 1928 – 31 July 2016) was a South African-born American mathematician, computer scientist, and educator, who spent most of his career teaching and researching at MIT. He was one of the pioneers of artificia ...
and
Idit Harel
Idit R. Harel (born Idit Ron; September 18, 1958) is an Israeli Americans, Israeli-American entrepreneur and CEO of Globaloria. She is a learning sciences researcher and pioneer of Constructionist learning-based EdTech interventions.
Overview
Ha ...
say at the start of ''Situating Constructionism'', it should be considered "much richer and more multifaceted, and very much deeper in its implications than could be conveyed by any such formula."
Papert's ideas became well known through the publication of his seminal book ''
Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas'' (Basic Books, 1980). Papert described children creating programs in the
Logo
A logo (abbreviation of logotype; ) is a graphic mark, emblem, or symbol used to aid and promote public identification and recognition. It may be of an abstract or figurative design or include the text of the name it represents as in a wo ...
educational programming language. He likened their learning to living in a "mathland" where learning mathematical ideas is as natural as learning French while living in France.
Instructional principles
Constructionist learning involves students drawing their own conclusions through creative experimentation and the making of social objects. The constructionist teacher takes on a mediational role rather than adopting an instructional role. Teaching "at" students is replaced by assisting them to understand—and help one another to understand—problems in a hands-on way.
The teacher's role is not to be a lecturer but a facilitator who coaches students to attaining their own goals.
Problem-based learning
Problem-based learning
Problem-based learning (PBL) is a student-centered pedagogy in which students learn about a subject through the experience of solving an open-ended problem found in trigger material. The PBL process does not focus on problem solving with a defi ...
is a constructionist method which allows students to learn about a subject by exposing them to multiple problems and asking them to construct their understanding of the subject through these problems. This kind of learning can be very effective in mathematics classes because students try to solve the problems in many different ways, stimulating their minds.
The following five strategies make problem-based learning more effective:
# The learning activities should be related to a larger task. The larger task is important because it allows students to see that the activities can be applied to many aspects of life and, as a result, students are more likely to find the activities they are doing useful.
[Wilson, B. (Ed.) Constructivist learning environments: Case studies in instrumental design. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Educational Technology Publications.]
# The learner needs to be supported to feel that they are beginning to have ownership of the overall problem.
# An authentic task should be designed for the learner. This means that the task and the learner's cognitive ability have to match the problems to make learning valuable.
# Reflection on the content being learned should occur so that learners can think through the process of what they have learned.
# Allow and encourage the learners to test ideas against different views in different contexts.
Constructionism in social sciences
Not only can constructionism be applied to mathematics but to the social sciences as well. For example, instead of having students memorize geography facts, a teacher could give students blank maps that show unlabeled rivers, lakes, and mountains, and then ask the students to decipher where major cities might be located without the help of books or maps. This would require students to locate these areas without using prepared resources, but their prior knowledge and reasoning ability instead.
Digital storytelling is another application of constructionism to the social sciences. Students can visit institutions in the local community, to understand and document their histories, develop local maps using tools like
OpenStreetMap to enrich digital maps and debate the purpose and activities of local public institutions to build an understanding of political science (civics). Digital storytelling has been used b
government schoolsin
Bengaluru to develop students understanding in the social sciences.
Constructionism and technology
Papert was a huge proponent of bringing technology to classrooms, beginning with his early uses of the
Logo
A logo (abbreviation of logotype; ) is a graphic mark, emblem, or symbol used to aid and promote public identification and recognition. It may be of an abstract or figurative design or include the text of the name it represents as in a wo ...
language to teach mathematics to children. While constructionism has, due to its impetus, been primarily used in science and mathematics teaching (in the form of
inquiry-based science
Inquiry-based learning (also spelled as enquiry-based learning in British English) is a form of active learning that starts by posing questions, problems or scenarios. It contrasts with traditional education, which generally relies on the teache ...
), it is arguable that it developed in a different form in the field of
media studies in which students often engage with media theory and practice simultaneously in a complementary
praxis
Praxis may refer to:
Philosophy and religion
* Praxis (process), the process by which a theory, lesson, or skill is enacted, practised, embodied, or realised
* Praxis model, a way of doing theology
* Praxis (Byzantine Rite), the practice of fai ...
. More recently it has gained a foothold in
applied linguistics
Applied linguistics is an interdisciplinary field which identifies, investigates, and offers solutions to language-related real-life problems. Some of the academic fields related to applied linguistics are education, psychology, communication rese ...
in the field of
second language acquisition (SLA). One such application has been the use of the popular game ''
SimCity
''SimCity'' is an open-ended city-building video game series originally designed by Will Wright. The first game in the series, ''SimCity'', was published by Maxis in 1989 and were followed by several sequels and many other spin-off "''Sim ...
'' as a means of teaching English using constructionist techniques.
Beginning in the 1980s,
The LEGO Group
Lego A/S (trade name: The Lego Group) is a Danish toy production company based in Billund, Denmark. It manufactures Lego-brand toys, consisting mostly of interlocking plastic bricks. The Lego Group has also built several amusement parks aroun ...
funded research of Papert's research group at the MIT Media Laboratory, which at the time was known as the "Epistemology and Learning Group." When LEGO launched its
LEGO Mindstorms Robotics Invention System in 1998, which was based on the work of his group, it received permission to use the moniker "Mindstorms" from Seymour's 1980 book title. In The LEGO Group's
LEGO Serious Play
LEGO SERIOUS PLAY is a facilitation methodology developed at The Lego Group. Since 2010 it is available under an open source community-based model. Its goal is improving creative thinking and communication. People build with Lego bricks 3-dimensi ...
project, business people learn to express corporate issues and identity through the medium of plastic bricks.
From 2005 to 2014, there was the
One Laptop Per Child initiative to put constructionist learning into practice in the developing world. The aim was to provide
$100 laptop
The OLPC XO (formerly known as $100 Laptop, Children's Machine, 2B1) is a low cost laptop computer intended to be distributed to children in developing countries around the world, to provide them with access to knowledge, and opportunities to " ...
s to every child in the developing world.
Computer programming languages
A number of
programming language
A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Most programming languages are text-based formal languages, but they may also be graphical. They are a kind of computer language.
The description of a programming ...
s have been created, wholly or in part, for
education
Education is a purposeful activity directed at achieving certain aims, such as transmitting knowledge or fostering skills and character traits. These aims may include the development of understanding, rationality, kindness, and honesty ...
al use, to support the constructionist approach to learning. These languages are
dynamically typed
In computer programming, a type system is a logical system comprising a set of rules that assigns a property called a type to every "term" (a word, phrase, or other set of symbols). Usually the terms are various constructs of a computer progra ...
, and are
reflective
Reflection is the change in direction of a wavefront at an interface between two different media so that the wavefront returns into the medium from which it originated. Common examples include the reflection of light, sound and water waves. The ' ...
. They include:
*
Logo
A logo (abbreviation of logotype; ) is a graphic mark, emblem, or symbol used to aid and promote public identification and recognition. It may be of an abstract or figurative design or include the text of the name it represents as in a wo ...
is a
multi-paradigm language, which is an easier-to-read adaptation and dialect of
Lisp, without the
parentheses
A bracket is either of two tall fore- or back-facing punctuation marks commonly used to isolate a segment of text or data from its surroundings. Typically deployed in symmetric pairs, an individual bracket may be identified as a 'left' or 'r ...
. Logo is known for its introduction of
turtle graphics
In computer graphics, turtle graphics are vector graphics using a relative cursor (the "turtle") upon a Cartesian plane (x and y axis). Turtle graphics is a key feature of the Logo programming language.
Overview
The turtle has three attribut ...
to elementary schoolchildren in the 1980s. Its creators were
Wally Feurzeig,
Cynthia Solomon, and Papert.
*
Smalltalk is an
object-oriented
Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm based on the concept of " objects", which can contain data and code. The data is in the form of fields (often known as attributes or ''properties''), and the code is in the form of p ...
language that was designed and created at
Xerox PARC
PARC (Palo Alto Research Center; formerly Xerox PARC) is a research and development company in Palo Alto, California. Founded in 1969 by Jacob E. "Jack" Goldman, chief scientist of Xerox Corporation, the company was originally a division of Xero ...
by a team led by
Alan Kay
Alan Curtis Kay (born May 17, 1940) published by the Association for Computing Machinery 2012 is an American computer scientist best known for his pioneering work on object-oriented programming and windowing graphical user interface (GUI) d ...
.
*
AgentSheets
AgentSheets was one of the first modern block-based programming language for kids. The idea of AgentSheets was to overcome syntactic challenges found in common text-based programming languages by using drag and drop mechanisms conceptualizing com ...
is an early block-based programming environment for kids to create games and simulations. It is developed by
Alexander Repenning
*
Etoys EToy or EToys may refer to:
* Etoy, Switzerland, a small town
* Etoys (programming language), an educational programming language
* eToys.com, a Dot-com era company/website
* etoy, a conceptual art group
* Electronic toys, typically built for and ...
is being developed since the 1990s under the direction of
Alan Kay
Alan Curtis Kay (born May 17, 1940) published by the Association for Computing Machinery 2012 is an American computer scientist best known for his pioneering work on object-oriented programming and windowing graphical user interface (GUI) d ...
, most recently by the
Viewpoints Research Institute, based on
Morphic tile scripting. Etoys was initially targeted at primary school math and science education.
*
Physical Etoys is an extension of Etoys that allows to control different devices such as Lego NXT, Arduino Board, Sphero, Kinect, Duinobot, Wiimote among others.
*
Scratch was developed in the early 21st century at
MIT Media Lab
The MIT Media Lab is a research laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, growing out of MIT's Architecture Machine Group in the School of Architecture. Its research does not restrict to fixed academic disciplines, but draws from ...
Lifelong Kindergarten Group led by Papert's pupil
Mitchel Resnick
Mitchel Resnick (born June 12, 1956) is Lego Papert Professor of Learning Research, Director of the Okawa Center, and Director of the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab. , Resnick serves as h ...
. Like Etoys, it is based on Morphic tile scripts. Scratch was initially designed specifically to enhance the development of technological fluency at after-school centers in economically disadvantaged communities.
NSF's grant A Networked, Media-Rich Programming Environment to Enhance Informal Learning and Technological Fluency at Community Technology Centers
National Science Foundation
The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National ...
, Sep 2003.
* StarLogo TNG was developed by the MIT Scheller Teacher Education Program under Eric Klopfer. It combines a block programming interface with 3D graphics. It is targeted at programming games and game-like simulations in middle and secondary schools.
*NetLogo
NetLogo is a programming language and integrated development environment (IDE) for agent-based modeling.
About
NetLogo was designed by Uri Wilensky, in the spirit of the programming language Logo, to be "low threshold and no ceiling". It teache ...
was developed by Uri Wilensky. It was developed to teach children computational reasoning and thinking, and extends the Logo
A logo (abbreviation of logotype; ) is a graphic mark, emblem, or symbol used to aid and promote public identification and recognition. It may be of an abstract or figurative design or include the text of the name it represents as in a wo ...
language by enabling the existence of many, many turtles at the same time. NetLogo is widely used not only in the K–12 environment, but also by researchers interested in the concept of agent-based modeling
* AgentCubes is a block-based programming environment for kids to create 3D games and simulation. It is developed by Alexander Repenning
*Easy Java Simulations or Ejs or EJS
Easy may refer to:
Arts and entertainment Film and television
* ''Easy'' (film), a 2003 American romantic comedy film
*''Easy!'', or ''Scialla!'', a 2011 Italian comedy film
* ''Easy'' (TV series), a 2016–2019 American comedy-drama anthology ...
was developed by Open Source Physics Open Source Physics, or OSP, is a project sponsored by the National Science Foundation and Davidson College, whose mission is to spread the use of open source code libraries that take care of a lot of the heavy lifting for physics: drawing and plot ...
under Francisco Esquembre. The user is working at a higher conceptual level, declaring and organizing the equations and other mathematical expressions that operate the simulation. It is targeted at programming physics simulations in secondary schools and universities.
* LEGO WeDo is a graphical programming language for children of age 7 years and up, used with the LEGO WeDo power function hub.
*LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3
LEGO Mindstorms EV3 is the third generation robotics kit in LEGO's Mindstorms line. It is the successor to the second generation LEGO Mindstorms NXT kit. The "EV" designation refers to the "evolution" of the Mindstorms product line. "3" refers t ...
is a dataflow graphical programming language for children age 10+.
* Robot Emil is a constructionist educational tool for children. It is targeted at primary schools and teaches programming step by step.
References
{{Reflist, 30em
External links
The Nature of Constructionist learning
– MIT open-to-all online reading list on constructionism
Lifelong Kindergarten Group
– MIT Lifelong Kindergarten research group
Center for Connected Learning and Computer-Based Modeling
– Northwestern University's Constructionist learning and agent-based modeling research group
Ackerman on Constructivism vs Constructionism
– Edith Ackermann draws out the differences between Piaget's Constructivism, Vygotsky's Socio-Constructivism and Papert's ConstructioNism
Learning theory (education)