Coming to See Action as Symbol: the Computer as Collaborator

Abstract

Our work with young children began as a project and a place that we called The Laboratory for Making Things. Our hypothesis was that deep learning could accrue in an environment where projects were designed that used differing kinds of objects/materials, that utilized differing sensory modalities, that held the potential for differing modes of description, but that shared conceptual underpinnings. This article focuses on the work of one eight-year-child, whom I call Laf, whose most notable quality was integrity – he needed to understand for himself. I trace Laf’s work as an example of a response to the question I had put to myself: Could the computer be a collaborator in helping children effectively make moves between their own body actions in clapping and the necessary numerical–symbolic instructions to make the computer drums play what they had clapped?