Exploratory Learning

Abstract

In our department we have a long history of developing interfaces for learning, which are framed by constructivist and constructionist theories of learning. Thus we try to create effective opportunities for communication, exploratory and collaborative learning and working in common learning spaces. We build this specialization upon software platforms like SuperLogo and Imagine Logo (soft- ware environments being used in dozens of countries and thousands of schools for educational purposes), which have been creating since 90-ties with the aim to pro- vide children, students, teachers and (professional) educational software developers with intuitive yet powerful means to discover, communicate and cooperate. In our software platforms we are making use of the combination of several modern and innovative features like parallel processes, object-oriented paradigm, events, tools for straightforward on-line communication through the Internet, and programmable shapes – the possibility to specify the actors’ (i.e. turtles’) shapes by simple Logo commands. During recent years we have been exploring interesting opportunities emerged from these features, which allow us to create visual interactive objects in many diverse and inventive ways. Actors with shapes specified through programmable shapes may change in accordance with external settings; they may become pieces of interactive “jigsaw puzzle”, blocks of a building set inviting children to explore. They may continuously visualize actual states of other objects or relations among them – in such role we call them gauges and use them for increasing the children’s motivation and supporting them while children explore, modify or build behaviours in their learning processes. Gradually we have discovered that visual interactive objects might have diverse shapes and could be used in many effective and attractive ways in working with different age groups – from simple building blocks for pre-schoolers, through flexible objects for different representations of fractions, to complex items of software laboratories, in which future teachers construct their own knowledge and understanding of key informatics concepts. We will conclude our survey of challenging means for exploratory learning by presenting a few observations obtained by us or our partners from several recent European research projects.