Arturo's Notes on minutes 00:00 to 5:00

Not only are we fools, but we are easily fooled.
makes it fun, but difficult to get a picture of our world

"trying to perceive images into objects rather than what's there."- **schema**
we see things not as they are but as we are.

reality= hallucination, waking dream **Plato's allegory of the cave.**

Simple things may not be, complex things may be simple.

Brainlets
Sensory **our eyes form one image**
Reasoning
Perspective:





Second Pass:


Alan Kay's view of simplicity

Understanding

AI-complex ideas

"The pursuit of the ultimate goals of AI -- the design of intelligent artifacts; understanding of human intelligence; abstract understanding of intelligence (possibly superhuman) -- continues to have practical consequences in the form of new industries, enhanced functionality for existing systems, increased productivity in general, and improvements in the quality of life." (source)

do we find things simple and understandable and miss the point?

complex ideas- tricky, but secret weapon. (Locke's philosophical view of complex ideas)
Shakespeare- we go to the theater to be fooled

makes it difficult to get ANY kind of picture on the world or ourselves

Betty Edwards.
the brain percieves images is faulty.- our filters our faulty (this has already been proven to us)
-Edwards uses exercises to bring out creative abilities in our right hemisphere of the brain...believes in the lateralization of brain functions.
-he mentions Betty Edwards other talks

what is the conclusion of realizing that we see things not as they are but as we are?

becoming self-aware:


(I think Desteni might actually be a cult...but this video applies to self awareness and our discussions of "filters")



we have to get around our flaws...we must be humble and admit we are blind.

what constitutes powerful ideas?

We make progress when our perspectives are changed







Now I know that this isn't in my section, but it relates to our discussions:

Gloria's notes on minutes 5:00 to 10:00

Kay discusses complexity and simplicity. He says complexity is when we do more and that we like to do more. And that doing more is not necessarily beneficial.

He discusses Murray Gell-Mann's talk the day before on emergent properties (here's the talk). Another name for emergent properties could be architecture as a metaphor by using the same old material and thinking about "non-obvious non-simple ways" of combining it. He explains the fractal beauty of nature: "elementary particles are both sticky and stand offish and they are in violent motion", giving rise to complexity of our world.

He then discusses Rosling's gapminder "stuff" (more about gapminder). He thought that it was the greatest thing he'd seen in conveying complex ideas simply but then he thought that maybe it was too simple. So he checked to see how well these simple potrayals of trends over time matched up with ideas and investigations on the side. In conclusion, the Rosling's method was successful in conveying complex data in a simple way.

He (a former molecular biologist) didn't like the film shown the day before on the simulation of the inside of a cell b/c it misses what most students fail to understand about molecular biology--about why there's any probability of two complex shapes finding each other the right way.

--We confuse adult confistication with the actual understanding of a principle--

He provides a demonstration of what should be taught on the pythagorean theorem in high school (more on the pythagorean theorem). He explains that the current method taught in schools with complex proofs is not how students should learn to delve into mathematics. He demonstrates the kind of proof we need to learn to understand before getting into math--the demonstration is very simple, involving colorful, labeled shapes.

Philip's notes on minutes 10:00-15:00 of the Kay lecture:

The first demonstrative example in the segment was with 6-year-olds making geometric shapes out of smaller cardboard shapes. The smaller shapes were similar to the larger ones, in the geometric sense of the term.

By adding these smaller shapes to the outside edge of the larger version, a larger version of the same shape would result each time. The teacher had the kids fill out a chart for the numbers of shapes, and cut each shape out of cardboard. Which sounds a little like busywork, but the idea was that it forced them to slow down and think about what they're doing.

According to Kay this caused 6 year olds to do real thinking - when they saw the same trends applied regardless of their assigned shape, they basically derived the 1st and 2nd order discreet differential equations with minimal prompting from the teacher!

OLPC
In the video, Kay demonstrates some creative learning software for the style="border: 2px inset ; margin: -3px; padding: 3px; position: relative; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); width: 100%; height: 100%;"00 laptop, a laptop that is part of an initiative to get computers to students in developing countries. The program allows users to use basic scripting functions, and in the example some of these basic functions are used to let students discover some basic principles of variables and velocity, including some relatively sophisticated concepts like acceleration, in a way that is elegant and makes sense.

This kind of learning invites kids to discover concepts for themselves, leading to better understanding than traditional teaching in modern k-12 schools.

One example is cited in which kids decide to test the constancy of gravity - Aristotle (who thought that speed of a falling object was proportional to its mass) and Aquinas (who also had a fundamentally inaccurate understanding of gravity) didn't actually try it, but according to Kay, Galileo thought like a child (i.e. not in the conditioned, traditional way an adult might look at a problem and not figure it out) and actually tried it which led to his discovery. Kay suggests that 1 in 30 kids actually cuts straight to the chase whereas it took adults hundreds of years. Kids are actually better, then, at some kinds of problem solving because they're not tainted in the same way.

Extended Notes:
According to Kay, Julia Nishijima is a kind of math prodigy, she just gets it. In that post from the discussion board, (link: http://lists.squeakland.org/pipermail/squeakland/2007-August/003737.html) he reiterates the same idea about her methods for getting the kids to discover concepts, saying she "set up projects that would induce the children to discover and derive second order discrete DEs (first order is steady growth, second order is quadratic, etc.), These are the very same progressions that can be used for velocity and acceleration, F = ma, Galilean gravity, etc. so it is terrific to get started with these as tools one has derived in first grade." I did search for more info on Julia Nishijima, but couldn't find anything outside of very similar references to what Kay said in the talk.

She brought the kids all together and asked them, "What have you noticed about what you did?" and they went crazy, they were all amazed that their results were the same. By learning about variables in a situated way, it becomes unforgettable. It seems that some concepts - acceleration for example, were discovered by the children themselves almost on accident as they played with the variables. The example that Kay creates with the car seems really intricate for something that kids would have come up with, but from what he says he seems to imply that they did similar things with the car example.

Shelby's notes on minutes 15:00-end.

At the 15 minute mark, Kay begins to discuss how to apply the program to science. After showing how the car could accelerate on the computer, he then shows students doing a real life experiment by dropping a ball off of a roof and timing the rate of descent. He then takes a film of the experiment and plugs it back into the program, where the program shows that the acceleration of the ball is the same as that of the car. He then goes on to explain how his program to create $100 laptops will allow children around the world to have access to these types of programs. The problem, he says, is not finding computers, but finding mentors. In order to compensate for this, Kay believes that we must create a new user interface. He quotes Marshall McLuhan, saying that children are what we send to the future.





Class Notes:

Arturo's Class notes 2/19

How can you learn in a way that doesn't block further learning?

Where does curiosity come from?...Is it valuable?

Cathy Sierra
head first-software books
Cognitive seduction

Hero's Journey- The Hero Has a Thousand Faces
-metaphor for learning...making it a quest..."level up"
If you can get atomic/complex, you can make a breakthrough...

Is there a way for us to tune our perspectives?

Fun and Play- Learning
Instruments- Science Experiments...

Curious- stop the little voice in our head that tells us "that's strange"

[Dr. C. here: actually, I meant that we should not stop the little voice in our head that tells us "that's strange." Making more stuff strange for ourselves is one way to keep ourselves tuning our perspectives. It's hard, but worth it, to play with not taking things for granted. See Isaac Asimov on science.]

____________________

Don't Shut down you filters prematurely

The Context: Alan Kay has a sort of authority...great is not a mediocre adjective for Kay.

What is the thing I'm not telling myself?

Metaphors play with your filters


PAY ATTENTION
-----------------------------------
Getting above "meh"

Why is curiosity good? --seratonin to brain, makes us think "oh! learning!"; fuel to push us to stimulate our brain; "cognitive seduction"

our "filter was too aggressive" on the annotations. we need to open up our filter wide enough--our curiosity loose enough--so we can learn.

using metaphors; write out and explore your confusion;