The Computer as a Creative Educational Tool

CHAPTER 33 The Computer as a Creative Educational Tool Sylvia Weir SYLVIA WEIR was born in South Africa and received her scientific and medical training there. In 1950, she received her medical degree (M.B., B.Ch.) at the University of Witwatersrand with residencies in internal medicine, surgery, and pediatrics at Coronation Hospital, Johannesburg, South Africa. She obtained a B.Sc. in 1945 from the University of Witwatersrand with majors in physiology and histology. After 10 years in medical practice as a pediatrician in South Africa and Britain, she moved into the field of artificial intelligence and joined the Department of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh . Her research and teaching has involved the use of computers as a tool for the understanding of human cognitive activity with a growing emphasis on issues of learning and teaching. First in Edinburgh and now for the past 5 years at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), she has worked with the use of computers in the education of exceptional children: physically handicapped, autistic and emotionally disturbed children, and children with specific learning disabilities. Dr. Weir is currently part of the MIT LOGO group which is jointly housed in the Division for Study and Research in Education and the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. INTRODUCTION The education of all handicapped children can be significantly enhanced by the introduction of computer-based activities. In his summary of last year's conference on Research and Utilization of Educational Media for Teaching the Deaf, Robert Stepp (1981) points to the exciting potential of the computer, a comparative newcomer in the field of education of the hearing impaired. Stepp comments on the difficulty of meeting the needs of special learners with a combination of handicaps. The flexibility of the computer allows the teacher to tailor the learning situation to the very specific requirements of a particular child, and nowhere is this more important than in the education of the multihandicapped child. Stepp stresses two themes running through that conference. Participants questioned the wisdom of relying too heavily on intelligence testing for the identification of giftedness. "There are many areas of participation and performance that will demonstrate creativity and excellence in students whose cognitive development may not be outstanding." His second message pointed to the need to make instruction for handicapped students interactive. He quotes Forsdale (1981): We in the instructional materials field have a resource we have underutilized: the learner himself. Although his needs have long guided us in the content of our materials, his capabilities have frequently been largely ignored. 690 A.A.D. I September 1982 Creative Educational Tool The Logo system is a computer-based learning environment that makes tailoring activities to the specific needs of individual students particularly easy and provides a way to achieve creative participation. Gross physical handicap imposes a dependent, passive role on its victims . The uncompromising way in which Logo places initiative and control in the hands of users allows them to have a direct effect on their environment . This experience is often the first in which the students tackle problems which require them to initiate solutions, try them out, decide when to change track and when to persist, respond to feedback —all those things that tend not to happen in the usual dependent situations that characterize their lives. For aU Logo learners, benefits flow from the structured nature of the activities, the immediate feedback, the possibility of a concrete approach to abstract ideas, and the emphasis on ways of doing things, rather than on answers— the emphasis on process rather than product. Logo has been used over a wide range of age and ability with kindergarten, primary, secondary school children, and with college undergraduates . I have used Logo with physically handicapped, emotionaUy disturbed, mentally retarded, and dyslexic children. As well as its general educational use, Logo provides a tool for diagnosis and remediation (Weir, 1981a, 1981b). THE LOGO SYSTEM Logo was developed a decade ago by Seymour Papert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and is described in Papert (1980). The system is now avaUable on a Texas Instrument (Tl) home computer and on an Apple II computer. The Logo language contains a set of powerful graphics primitives, a...