The Seymour test: Powerful ideas in early childhood education
Section snippets
Kittens and wooden blocks at the coding playground
From Seymour I learned the importance of powerful ideas. Every time I engage in a new project, either writing a curricular unit, designing a programming language or a robotic kit or creating content for an animated TV show, I first ask the question: What are the powerful ideas that young children will encounter when experiencing this? I always spend time dwelling in the domain to make sure I can truly identify the most powerful ideas. I learn from others and I read as much as I can. I study how
The Seymour test
Designing KIBO and ScratchJr was a lot of fun. However, throughout the process I kept asking myself: will these tools pass what I am calling “ The Seymour test”? Will he understand the powerful ideas I was trying to convey? What guided my efforts in the design of these programming environments was the goal to help children code in a playful way so they could engage in computational thinking. So they could encounter powerful ideas. Amongst them, one became the most salient and developmentally
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