What is "Sunrise" - June 2023

At Museums Victoria we are working on the 'Sunrise Collection.' Why?

The collection in one sense typifies what was beginning to happen in schools in Australia in the mid-1980's. Computers were being placed in schools and some homes. Kids were controlling robots that could touch, hear and speak. The technology was going to make things very different, everyone thought.

Internationally it was more or less the same. Some countries were adding computers to their schools and certainly private homes were slowly acquiring what they called personal computers.

Quite typically, some people who had perhaps studied pure mathematics and data processing and used computers were asking questions about how they would make a difference. Some of these people thought that being able to program a computer would mean being able to get it to work for them. This dream persists today. Some other people thought they could use the artificial nature of the computer driving suitable software to create a new kind of environment for learning.

In the UK and the US, in particular, ways of programming that were accessible to children were emerging. People who were interested in how people could use these new environments thought they could learn most by looking at what children could do. This led to researching not what teachers could do at this stage, but what kids could so that teachers could support their learning, and hopefully gain access to what was being learnt, and how.

There were certain beliefs hovering in the background for the Sunrise Collection. Educational research had brought into question:

  • how Piagetian work was being interpreted in educational settings,
  • that people did not all start with empty heads that had to be filled with 'truths' and good understanding.
  • that each person constructed their own version of reality,
  • that 'knowing' was a verb, not a noun,
  • Marvin Minsky's idea that the human brain was like a society of thinkers, combining for a thinking task, being influenced differently, ,..., and that
  • current ways of working with children might change to adapt to the future.

Sunrise started with a number of years in the first half of the 1980's of introducing computers to people from all walks of life and of all ages. The work promoted the use of programming by users and, in particular, how to help people with disability benefit from the use of computers. In 1986 Sunrise was more formally initiated at ACER where ideas about schools of the future became prevalent. During three years with a background of the ACER, Sunrise led to two years in which children and trainee teachers weekly visited a 'classroom' in the Museum of Victoria, as it was then.

At that first 'Sunrise School', new ways of working with students were experienced. A lot was learned (and documented) about what happens in students' heads to do with schooling, as well as to do with what might be seen as curricula for school. Similarly with the student teachers - they had ideas in thier heads that seemed surprising when tested by the situation.

After the first Sunrise School ended its tenure, three significant Sunrise activities were developed:

  • MLC (Kew), remarkably an all-girls school, had a program that required all students to have their own laptop computers;
  • the Education Department of Queensland, in Coombabah Primary School, gave leptop computers to all students in a final year cohort and followed them into secondary school, and
  • a country school in NSW, Batlow Technical School, gave computers to a cohort of young students to go from being a technical school to a technology school.

These 'Sunrise Centres', as they were known, took advantage of the lessons from the first Sunrise School, notably including making sure all children had their own computer - an extended version of the idea of personal computers. All children were taught to program their computers and, in fact, more or less used programming exclusively - even when engaged in subjects such as French or history. Again there were lots of things to be learned and many of them have been documented.

In 1990 the entity Sunrise moved to RMIT. For three years, Sunrise at RMIT again tried to put into practice what had already been learnt in other Sunrise activities. 50 senior staff were engaged for 2 years in a three-year program designed to make RMIT, already a highly respected university of Technology, into a technological university. Again, a lot was learnt and documented in those years.

Historically, the Sunrise Collection sits in the middle of this on-going activity. What was learnt at each stage is exemplified or documented by items in the Collection.

The Sunrise School in the Museum made a lasting positive impression on the minds of some of the students; that all the girls and teachers at MLC (Kew) could take to computers as they did, reform their school practice as they did, and contribute to many others starting out with computers was wonderful; that the Queensland Department of Education was impressed enough to suggest that all students in Queensland schools should have their own computers, and the Batlow school set a new standard and way of working coming successfully from a population of itinerant workers, by and large, to a high-tech school. Sunrise at RMIT practised what had worked best in the earlier activities, albeit generally with children, with an impressive result for a university.

Perhaps what is not visible in this historical story, but was the driver for the 'adventure', is the effort to realise the role for computers to significantly change the potential for human learning. Children were watched closely because they were not already so clearly defined by their culture or schools but they were not considered to be different from adults in their learning.

So what is this role?

Sunrise is built on the notion of a constructive epistemology - that is, everyone has to build their own repartoire of 'knowing' and it is the sum of these efforts that make up the 'knowledge' of the community. Further, social constructivity is probably what is meant - where the individual is not independent of the culture in which they operate. This means these ideas lead to wanting people to collaboratively build their knowing, engaging with their culture.

It is often assumed that saying this means everyone has to go through a tortuous procedure of discovering the knowledge .... This is not right. In some cases, a learner, of whatever age, entrusts their thinking to that of someone else and is told what they might need to know and adopts it - eg in a lecture. But at the other end of the scale, perhaps when there is not such trust in the knowledge purveyor, or the learner has an unexpected background, it is not so easy to teach/learn what's involved. These are cases where a way of learning might need to be supported. Of course, the computer can be used to deliver the lecture, or statement of facts, or video of something, ....

Learning to use a computer is something that can happen unconsciously almost like learning to speak and today we are all convinced that the young are naturally 'digital natives'. Sunrise ideas would suggest this is true but what it means is they know how to drive the computers not necessarily displaying or using digital literacy. This is the difference between one who knows how to drive a car and one who knows how to make it work.

And why does it matter how to make it work? We want better cars in the future and we want people to have better computers in the future, ones that help them learn and become better knowers.

Constructionists are interested in how to support human contstruction of knowledge. That is, what can a computer offer that will help? Constructionists have been tempted to think it is microworlds. That was the thinking when the Sunrise School was in the Museum.

So what is a microworld? It is not just something on a microcomputer, as many have assumed. In fact, microworlds are often things that are recognised as having the characterists of 'good' microworlds but are very hard to design. When computers are used to provide learning activities for people they are almost always designed  by 'teachers' or at least subject experts. The teacher's role is finished before the student takes the lesson. In the same way, educators design microworlds and then make them available to students. The difference, however, is that the former activities are usinally managed  by the software whereas for the latter, it probably does not matter what the student does, they will still be benefitting from using the microworld.

A microworld can be a very simple representation of the real world. For example, by having children giving instructions to a robot to move around a square, the problems of friction, momentum, and other complex physics phenomena can be forgotten while the angle of turning is played with. This gives a sense of how an exterior angle of a square, and perhaps later a generalised polygon, can be designed as a unit on a screen. For modularity, the drawing device needs to return to its initial state - this is important in lots of contexts but not easily learned sometimes. There is a rule that quickly enables this modularity - the sum of the turns must be 360 x X where X can be any whole number and a polygon will be drawn following an instruction such as:

REPEAT X (times) going forward Y (whatever distance is chosen) and turning right 360/X degrees.

The microworld first attracting excitement was such a simple microworld. Using it to think with, Abelson and diSessa wrote a serious (and thick) book of mathematics (not sums to be done but real mathematics expressed in a new way). The microworld does not explicitly teach anything but to do something one seems, inevitably, to come across some powerful ideas. Already by the time of the Sunrise School, it was clear that having such a microworld and particularly a teacher who could quickly spot the potential powerful idea, and perhaps articulate it with the student, a lot could be learnt by the student.

One feature of microworlds that has proven interesting is that they may be simple to play with at first (a low floor) but able to be used for serious, hard things (a high ceiling). If a microworld can be enjoyed by a user to do something, but inevitably brings them into contact with something that questions their prior knowledge, it can thus stilmulate learning. So placing the right-sized hurdle in the works is a good way to achieve this but it usually requires a subject expert who knows what students are likely to have misconceived and what they might do to correct their thinking at least to what they consider a better perspective after dealing with the hurdle.

The Sunrise Collection offers examples of the process of learning, in some cases by having videos of children working together around a screen and having the children and the screen both being videod to show their body language, their chatter, and what they do with the computer, all at the same time. A wonderuful example is a video showing that an 8 year old thought that a ball passing back and forth over a tennis net was shot up into the air and then somehow calculated how much it needed to turn to end up on the raquet of the next player and made that turn. A sense of what gravity does was a powerful idea associated with this exercise.

So perhaps it is computer literacy that mattered most to Sunrise. In deciding how to write up an activity, a couple of Sunrise people did what they usually did - they did not assume they would write a document using a word-processor, or have a spreadsheet possibly showing in a temporal way what happened, or .... They had a strong sense that the first thing they would do is think about how they might use what they were doing, as they did it, at the time, immediately, and possibly in the future. They laughed at themselves! Having the potential of having to think about how to do something was both thrilling and burdensome - by the time they had it right, others probably would have completed the activity. On the other hand, being able to construct a model of an aeroplane foil and seeing what wind might do to it is probably not within the scope of most people - but a great exercise for someone curious about how foils work.

 

Glossary

Constructionism

https://www.constructionismconf.org/

https://waset.org/constructivism-and-constructivist-learning-conference