I’ll call her Alyssa. She is in 8th grade and has this wonderful sense of curiosity and enthusiasm for problem solving. This is my first time working with the Autodesk VEX Robotics curriculum ; so I was up with Allysa and her classmates – “I’m going to learn along side you”. I had some advantages having worked with Inventor for several years and participating on developing some of the STEM content for the curriculum. But this wonderful group of students seems to be perfectly ok having a teacher admit that they too are a learner. So Alyssa has this idea- how can I assemble theVEX components to create a device that could pick up and “deliver” a bowl of cat food from the floor to the counter. With confidence,(despite uncertainty) she emerged a few days later saying check this out…clunky yes- but did it work- yes.
So why am I excited and intrigued by this. Simply put, I think this is what learning is about, i.e., “making it your own”. This notion of students taking control of their own learning is central to the important theories of constructivism and cognitive development- theories that are often ignored in the quest to standardize learning. What was Alyssa doing? She was embracing this constructivist approach that emphasizes using prior knowledge and experience- (she had spent a couple of weeks going through the Autodesk VEX curriculum ) and then taking that knowledge and experience and “applying it to new situations”.
I’m not sure if it was a completely conscious decision, but the structure of the Autodesk VEX curriculum encourages this sort of “Disciplinary Understanding”, that Educational Psychologist Howard Gardner espouses. (Gardner is attributed with the notions of multiple intelligences). So Allysa , although she might not label it as such, was reaching for deeper understanding as she engaged in “thinking like a designer or engineer”.
The Autodesk VEX curriculum in this sense might be seen as a model that challenges the typical cookie cutter “drill and kill” curriculums that dominate our standards based (can you say “No Child Left Behind” ) curriculum. There is plenty of guidance to get you started, but learners are encouraged to use that experience as the platform to dive into their own ideas. It doesn’t matter if Alyssa or any of the other students in my class become engineers or designers (Although I bet a few will). What matters is that our classrooms must become places for contextualized problem solving. Places where students use resources, build on prior experiences, collaborate with others, and interact with other cultures. One curricular “kit” is not going to solve our educational crisis- but the focus on problem solving found in the Autodesk VEX curriculum is definitely on the right track.
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