Thursday, May 6, 2010

How the Brain Wants to Learn

This was a challenging workshop presented by Cognitive Scientist Dr. Michael Connell. The purpose was to encourage the implementation of cognitive science in exhibit design. He presented a Knowledge Design Matrix and compared it to the Periodic Table. I must admit I was pretty lost in the first part of this session. Towards the end we broke into small groups to improve an existing exhibit called Rainbow on Your Plate and move toward an exhibit with different levels of challenge. Our group wanted to place this exhibit adjacent to a farm then a grocery store or market and finally the meal so that children could have a better understanding of the source of food.
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2 comments:

  1. AngelicaMay 10, 2010 at 10:26 AM

    Periodic table - ugh! I was traumatized by my chemistry teacher. He would throw tennis balls at students - I think it was supposed to be electrons or something.

    He lit a match in front of my face (trying to proove some point) - and this was the time of big hair and lots of hairspray. I blew it out and got in trouble. Better to be in trouble than no hair!

    I like the idea of what the program was trying to communicate. This layering of learning. Creating multiple activities out of one. Just wish he made sense when presenting. Periodic table - seriously - we're children's people not building an electron microscope!

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  2. Michael W. Connell, Ed.D.June 17, 2012 at 7:57 AM

    Hi, Renee and Angelica.

    This is Mike Connell (I facilitated the ACM session back in 2010). I appreciate the feedback. We wanted to do a workshop format that year with more time (2-3 hours), but that wasn't possible given the conference constraints, and so we had to fit the overview of the framework plus hands-on activities and debrief/discussion in 75 minutes (not ideal).

    The workshop has gone through two additional design iterations since then and it sounds like you'll be happy to know that the periodic table is nowhere to be found in the current version. ;)

    Paul Orselli comments on this year's workshop in his blog post of May 14, 2012 here:
    http://blog.orselli.net/2012/05/portland-takeaways-interactivity-2012.html

    Thanks again for your comments--it's helpful to know about your experience so we can keep refining the design to best meet your needs.

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