Cool thanks, Colin!

Hey Colin,

Our Brainyflix video contest just ended, and I wanted to thank you for helping us get the word out. We got 800 submissions from across the country!

That said, MIT was really happy with the results and will let us run another contest, so we're going for it! But this time, we're gonna have kids create Brainypics flashcards - which are images and sentences paired up with a one of our SAT/ACT words. The contest ends May 22nd, and there'll be iTunes and a cash prize like last time. To boot, we'll double the payout if the kids can hit a certain goal. More details at brainyflix.com/main/contest_rules.

Do you mind passing my message along to your HS colleagues again?

Thanks,
Jack

Hi Colin
Sorry about the long delay in getting back to you. My mind, as they say, has been on other things.

Pentimoes are shapes made by joining five squares along their sides. (Like dominoes, which are two squares joined sharing one side)


I think I was talking about a lesson where I gave a class of Year Four students their first experience of using a spreadsheet program.
They had experienced “Windows” programs before, so they knew how to click and drag with a mouse and so on. So I started by showing them how to make the cells in a spreadsheet square-shaped and how to fill these with different colours.
Then I asked them “How many different shapes can you make by putting two, then three, four or five squares together with shared sides?”. You can see, I hope, that I was presuming they would treat the coloured “squares” on the screen like real objects. All of them apparently did this readily. Some of them, even without been told to do so, were soon clicking on and dragging the “squares” around with their mouse.
About 10 or 12 minutes into this lesson, one of the boys turned away from his computer and said to me, “I have never played this game before!”
Since he said this with a big grin and an excited look on his face I assumed he was having a lot of fun. I was happy too, and not just because this supported some of my notions about how people use spreadsheet programs.
I could also see that he was constructively using what he already knew ( in this case something he knew about about computer games ). He was doing so to understand what he was doing in this new experience.

Constructive Learning, amongst other things, implies that we can, for instance, use something outside our head, such as a spreadsheet program running on a computer, to act as a “scaffold” to help us build on and change the ideas already in our minds...

Please let me know if you want to give me feedback about the projects etc in the book
Cheers
Des