Learning by building

Jean Piaget described the child as a researcher who builds knowledge by acting on the world. His work on the origins of intelligence shows that thought takes shape through action, well before abstract language.

Seymour Papert, who worked with Piaget in Geneva, drew a pedagogy from this. In Mindstorms, in 1980, he described children programming a turtle, a small robot that draws shapes on the floor. To make it turn, the child imagines the movement from the turtle’s point of view, and can act it out with their own body. Geometry becomes an experience. This is constructionism: we learn particularly well by building an object that we can show, make work and discuss with others.

Constructionism is not free discovery. In 2011, two meta-analyses by Alfieri and colleagues compared ways of teaching through discovery. Letting students discover on their own leads to less learning than explicit teaching. Guided discovery, with feedback, examples and questions that ask students to explain, does better than the other forms of teaching compared. With a robot, it is the teacher who sets the challenge, prompts and has the students explain.

• The student forms a hypothesis, programs it, observes and corrects. This is a scientific approach.
• Mistakes are visible and harmless. The robot does not do what was intended, so you look for the reason.
• The target concept becomes a tool for meeting the challenge: an angle, a distance, a sequence of steps.
• The activity ends with an explanation, spoken or written, of what worked and why.