Yes We Can

What makes a good juggler? Practice.

When you let go, amazing things happen.

Last Saturday at Whampoa, a 10-year-old who had never spoken up or answered questions in class got up and not only led her group in a presentation – she did an entire demo. Brief, to the point, and effective, Anna (all kids' names have been changed)  and her three team-mates told us to stand on one foot, and then close our eyes and continue to stand on one foot. Then she explained why it’s a more difficult to balance when you close your eyes.

Then another group got up and read an entire story they’d written - out loud, in unison. It was about an alien with 24 arms and 5 legs discovering juggling and then practicing really hard to win an intergalactic talent competition. It had a well-organised, credible plot.  Well-illustrated too.

At first I thought the 10-year-old, in the group Andy, had written the story and the rest had just drawn and coloured. It turns out that it was Shah, one of the 8-year-olds, who came up with most of the plot - and Andy was mainly the scribe.

We wouldn’t have discovered what the kids were capable of if we hadn’t let go of the agenda and improvised a little.

At the beginning of the session, we had a guest: the amazing Mickael Bellemene, contact juggler. Link here He gave the kids a preview of his gravity defying act and talked about how much he loved his craft even as a kid (didn’t like school), how much he practiced (the whole day for days on end, at one time - until he got injured) and how important it was to do things well.

Then we asked the kids to get in groups of four, come up with questions of their own, research the answers, and present - to everyone.

As with the past two sessions, we modelled the hour after Sugata Mitra's Self Organised Learning Framework in which four kids choose their own teams, share one PC, research and discuss answers, and present. The adults stayed away unless asked to help. In our case, we discovered that when we did that, the kids tended to copy and paste facts off the web, and then present stuff they didn't really understand.

We've been working on how to get over this - and the solution turned out really differently between the two groups of kids. The volunteers on Anna’s team first helped the girls come up with a narrow enough question. From my end of the room I heard words like fulcrum, flexible, balance from Anna’s group. First-time volunteer, Beverly, engaged the normally shy Anna like no one had been able to before. She and another volunteer, Hui, helped the kids come up with progressively more biteable chunks of information they could work on. 

  

On the other end of the room, Andy's group wanted to find out how aliens juggle. They went online, found some "Roswell" / alien-sighting sites, but in the end, no one could agree if the web could tell them definitively whether aliens exist. Hence the tale of Intergalactic Creatures Have Talent. Worked out fine, in my view. 

If they two things the team took away were:

- Google doesn't know EVERYTHING - really!

- and "hey, I can write and tell a pretty darn good story!"

then we'd done some really nice work that day - both the adults and the kids.

 My lesson for the day: relax, look, listen, learn. Be amazed.

Could Robots Rule the World One Day? Another SOLE weekend.

At Whampoa, our SOLE (Self Organised Learning Environment) experiment continues. It's an education - for us the adult volunteers, the senior high-school/ junior college volunteers, and the kids.

Over the past three Saturdays, we've pretty much followed the Sugata Mitra's SOLE framework: 8-12 year olds get to choose their own groups, one laptop per four-child group to research a question, each group has a helper - the only kid in the group who's allowed to be the conduit between the group and the adults, and the adults step in only when asked/ approached.

Today's questions:
1. Why are bruises purple?
2. Could robots rule the world one day?

The second question got some really interesting answers. The kids talked, wrote stuff, and didn't seem to have a consensus. One of the girls said robots were really smart and could build / make things. And that robots could be very scary - like if they were used in wars. They decided "maybe" robots could rule the world - because they could destroy buildings and could be used as weapons.


But robots could rule the world only if humans were scared of them. "But only god can destroy the world," added one boy earnestly. The oldest kid in the group was maybe 10. And a 5-year-old sneaked in today. He was the group's illustrator. He was also the one who told us, very seriously, that the Transformers are not real. They were drawn by computers - to which a 10-year-old piped up with "CGI!"

Did the group have fun? The Robot team did.

The Bruise team got a little ... bruised because the workload ended up being lopsided and one person ended up doing most of the work. That's something we're going to have to work on.

It's a process of adjustment and tweaking. Step in too much and the groups lose their autonomy. Stand back too much and the groups wouldn't get as much out of this as they could. It's so difficult for most of us adults not to plunge in and "guide" or get involved.

Lots of other kinks to work through - but one step at a time. 

I have learned one thing though. I've realised that if I were to boil down what I wish our education system could deliver to our kids - it's Confidence, Curiousity, and the ability to Collaborate. Much more useful than chasing Cars, Condos and Country Club memberships in my view.

When I was a kid, the acceptable middle class professions were Doctor, Lawyer, Engineer. The path seemed pretty clear cut. In this century however, who knows what types of jobs the future will deliver? 10 years ago, the phrase "Social Media Strategist" hardly existed. What will work look like when these 8 year olds start their professions?

This much I do know - curiousity would propel kids to ask questions, look for answers and find ever better ways of doing things; confidence would give them the self-belief to understand they have to be masters of their destinies. And they could be the smartest kids on earth, but without enough emotional intelligence to collaborate with others, the highest IQ in the world wouldn't help a bright child live up to his or her potential.

How Do Mozzies See - and other big questions

A really astounding morning at Whampoa today!

My friend and fellow volunteer Hui-e and I attended TEDxSingapore a couple of weeks ago and saw a video of TED Prize winner Sugata Mitra talk about his experiments with Self Organised Learning Environments and the future of learning: http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_build_a_school_in_the_cloud.html

So, we tried it out at Whampoa with our 7-12 year olds. today. In a nutshell:

• Ching-Hua and Priya (both also volunteers) worked on what Mitra called the "Big" questions - aimed at piqueing kids' curiousity. The questions had to be phrased in a not too concrete manner to leave room for, well, thinking.
• We asked the kids to pick their own groups of four...one group had three because we had 11 kids today. 
• Each group selected a question from our list:
• How do mosquitoes see?
• Why's the sky blue?
• Where does petrol come from?
• Then we left them the heck alone. Kinda. Each group had a "helper" who were the only conduit to the volunteers and vice versa. So, if they had questions, the helper had to speak to an adult. If there were things the kids were unhappy with, they had to go through the helper.

I gotta tell ya - I wasn't sure where this would go. I'd been fully prepared that some kids would run around, not want to do the work, prefer to be at the playground or playing boardgames. But wow, they all got down to it.