Changes

==Sugar Digest==

==Sugar Digest==

1. I was in Brussels last week to attend TedxKids. I have to admit that I was not very anxious to make yet another trip across the Atlantic Ocean, but I had made a commitment to run a workshop for roughly 50 ten-year-old children, whose parents would be attending the Tedx lectures. (My former colleague at MIT, Dan Ariely has done some nice studies on “time discounting” that explain why is it easy to make such commitments far in advance while dreading them when the actual event is just around the corner.)

1. I was in Brussels last week to attend [http://www.tedxkids.be/ TedxKids@Brussels]. I have to admit that I was not very anxious to make yet another trip across the Atlantic Ocean, but I had made a commitment to run a workshop for roughly 50 ten-year-old children, whose parents would be attending the Tedx lectures. (My former colleague at MIT, Dan Ariely has done some nice studies on “time discounting” that explain why is it easy to make such commitments far in advance while dreading them when the actual event is just around the corner.)

While I was not at all surprised that I would enjoy working with the children—we spent an intense 45 minutes exploring Turtle Blocks—I was very pleasantly surprised at the quality of the program overall. One speaker after another demonstrated some tangible aspect of Constructionist learning (although few actually referred to Papert et al.). The children built sensors, did 3-D printing, build robots, programmed, wrote music, and generally had a blast.

While I was not at all surprised that I would enjoy working with the children—we spent an intense 45 minutes exploring Turtle Blocks—I was very pleasantly surprised at the quality of the program overall. One speaker after another demonstrated some tangible aspect of Constructionist learning (although few actually referred to Papert et al.). The children built sensors, did 3-D printing, build robots, programmed, wrote music, and generally had a blast.