About

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I watch how many parents and teachers buys smartphones, tablets and lots of app’s and then they think the child will learn, just like that! That’s not much different from letting them watch TV all day! Don’t get me wrong, im not against these devices and I know how the intuitive approach can open many possibilities for the youngest audience ever. But playing Angry Birds is NOT learning physics! Please take some time consider what you are making your kids spending hours doing.

I’m gonna use this first post to explain the reason why I made this blog and how it will be used. The initiation above, is an example of that.

I want this blog to be an inspiration to others when it comes to constructive and creative activities and tools for children, and a reflection tool for myself.

I’m a teacher, soon i’ll have a master degree of IT Didactic Design, wich can be translated to something like: IT and learning. My forces are grounded in the intersection of e-learning, constructionism, web 2.0 and games. Meanwhile I have two kids. My son born in 2008 and my daughter in 2011.

I realized that combining my personal life with my theoretical background and experience on learning, I might participate in creating a meaningful blog for teachers, students, experts, parents and others.

This blog will contain reviews and personal anecdotes of learning-tools like: Apps, PC games, board games, toys, museums, textbooks and other activities, stuff and techniques that I find useful when it comes to giving your child a constructivistic form suited his or her personal learning style.  Primarily based on how I experienced my children interacting with it.

 

When it comes my personal learning theory, I’m a constructionist. Seymore Papert made this word up, inspired by Jean Piaget’s constructivism. Piaget argued that children don’t just adapt what the adults taught them, but form it with their personal experiences (assimilation) and therefore, the output is always shaped different and unique. Seymore Papert says that these assimilations could also help us creating physical models. By physical, he does not only mean “clay-like” sculptures or architectural models of buildings, but also programming, drawing, problem solving, and so on. In “The Gears of My Childhood”  ( http://www.papert.org/articles/GearsOfMyChildhood.html ) Seymore Papert defines he’s own way of thinking as “thinking in gears” because of his early interest in cars. He used gears instead of more formal techniques as his way of learning and being creative.

After many years, I recently found my personal mental model: Music! Being able to compose and produce my own music using my guitar, keyboard and computers, I could finally do what I wanted. Later I transfered this to other fields like curriculum design, game design and prototyping in general.

All this can be summarized to: Everybody learns through a personal learning style. And by enabling this, creativity will blossom and then everything will be possible!