Microworlds
Microworlds
What is a Microworld in AI?
A simulation may emulate some features of real phenomena but not others. Originally referred to as microworlds by Papert as a “… subset[s] of reality or a constructed reality so … as to allow a human learner to exercise particular powerful ideas or intellectual skills” (Papert, 1980, p. 204).
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MicroWorlds is a program that uses the Logo programming language to teach language, mathematics, programming, and robotics concepts in primary and secondary education. Wikipedia
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A microworld, for Papert, is an environment within which ideas in any domain can develop in a similar way. Turtle Graphics, for example, is a microworld where mathematical ideas can develop naturally. He referred to this natural process of learning, without the need for didactic instruction, as “Piagetian learning”.
Teachers cannot simply pour information into the heads of learners; rather, learning is an active process in which people construct new understandings of the world around them through active exploration... people don’t “get” ideas, they “make” them. (Italics in original) (Mitchel Resnick, 2002, p. 33)
To summarize, the foundation of a microworlds approach to learning is a constructionist, and an entailed constructivist, theory of knowledge acquisition. Learners construct their own understanding of the world by exploring it, and knowledge acquisition is particularly effective when they are making something meaningful within in it. The focus of education technologists is no longer on improving “teaching” to maximize the receipt of knowledge (as instructionism would have it). Instead, it is about setting up the right conditions for “learning”: creating an environment for exploring, creating, and doing. In Papert’s (1980b) own words, constructionism is about “giving children good things to ‘do’(Italics in original), so that they can learn by doing much better than they could before”. This raises the question of what exactly is a good thing to give children to do. For Papert, the answer to this question resides in a well-designed microworld.
In summary, a microworld provides an environment for exploratory, Piagetian learning without didactic instruction. A microworld does, however, have some constraints: It should be specific to a particular domain of knowledge, and it needs a low floor (to enable easy access at first) and a high ceiling (to enable progression to increasing complexity later). Above all, the microworld should enable the learner to make something that is personally meaningful to them. With this checklist in mind, it is now possible to see the theory of microworlds put into practice.
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see also:
https://edutechwiki.unige.ch/en/Microworld for features of Microworlds
perhaps see https://hal.science/hal-02438255/document (who was guy who made ALICE for teaching low-level stuff)
and Celia and Richard: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3482602
1992 paper - not available except via university...
Educational Studies in Mathematics
Vol. 23, No. 1, Classroom Dynamics (Feb., 1992), pp. 31-57 (27 pages)
Published By: Springer
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lots more available from Google search!