#mit 11.132x

[music-ed-notes-blog]

Lessons from SimCalc

Recently I have been exploring MIT's course 11.132x, "Design and Development of Educational Technology" on EdX.

Today I watched the videos in which Drs. Erik Klopfer and Jeremy Roschelle talk about the development of SimCalc, a system that teaches math concepts through graphs.

Dr. Roschelle talks about the concept of SimCalc, but also about the development process, and what he thinks made it work.

A few things jump out me.

Multiple Representations

One is related to content. Dr. Roschelle mentioned a theory that multiple representations can help more people learn. For example, presenting a math concept as an animation and a graph can be more effective than presenting it as a graph alone.

I wonder if multiple representations can also help people learn music. For example, in presenting the concept of articulation, we could represent articulations with pictures. Long, smooth articulations would be depicted as long, abutting rectangles. Short articulations would be depicted as short, separated rectangles.

On one hand, it might help people understand the concept of articulation. But on the other hand, it might not help them learn to hear articulation. They may get the symbolic concept, but not acquire the actual skill.

I don't know if learning the concept actually distracts from learning the skill. It's something I wrangle with.

Development Process: Team

Dr. Roschelle also spoke about the SimCalc team, the skills they brought. The initial SimCalc team had a domain expert with vision, an educational technologist, and a learning science researcher. He said that this team was crucial to making SimCalc work.

I am coming to learn that team is essential. And I'm not yet sure how to build teams for music education. This is something I need to learn.

Development Process: Change

Dr. Roschelle also mentions that SimCalc changed greatly over the course of its development. This is also something I wrangle with. I want to get things right early, but I need to accept that I won't. I need to learn to accept that things will change, and that we can't know everything in the beginning.

Distribution: Packaging

Dr. Roschelle spoke about how packaging and format helped SimCalc succeed. The SimCalc team made it easy for teachers to integrate into existing curricula. They made it a turn-key product, so that it would be easy to install and use.

And, crucially, they made it modular. So that teachers wouldn't have to throw out the existing curricula they knew. Instead, they could take bits and pieces from the SimCalc curriculum. So that they could integrate it gradually.

Gradual integration also helped SimCalc spread, because individual teachers could take little bits, test them, and then tell their colleagues about them.

I think of this as the bite-size sample model. You might not want to try a new food, so instead you just try a sample. You find out that it's good, so you bring back some samples for your friends.

[music-ed-notes-blog]

Constructionism in Music Education

Recently I learned about Papert's "Constructionism" theory in MIT's "Design and Development of Educational Technologies" EdX class.

As I understand it, the main idea of constructionism is that we learn through making things, through constructing. Sometimes we learn by making physical things. We develop a sense of mass and gravity when we build a tower out of books. We can also learn by making abstract things. When we write a story, we develop a feel for pacing and dialogue. We could not learn these things from passive reading or listening. Words alone are insufficient. We have to do things to understand.

Can the theory of constructionism apply to music education?

Do people learn music better when they can build music, play with it, experiment with it? Can we make tools that help people experiment with music?

I think the answer to all of these questions is 'yes'. I say this because there are many things in music which are difficult or even impossible to describe in words. Often the only way to understand something in music is to hear it or play it. There is no way to tell a beginning music student in words what the difference is between a major and minor chord. But when you play a chord, then it becomes clear. When you have the student play the chord herself it becomes even clearer.

I think digital tools can help people play with music. For example, there are online 'chord explorers' that let people play different chords with a click of button.

It's important to note that constructionism has limits, in music and in general. We can't learn everything from making or building. Sometimes it's better learn from rote memorization or drilling. For example, it's probably faster and more effective to learn multiplication tables through memorization. Similarly, sometimes it's best to learn a melody by rote first, before trying to understand it and build new melodies from it.

It's also important to realize that building effective tools is not easy. A good tool has to hit a sweet spot. It must be expressive enough to allow for a range of exploration. But it must not be too difficult for beginners, otherwise few people will use it. This is one of the problems with musical instruments: they are hard to control at first!

A good tool also needs to be integrated with guidance. A tool alone will be insufficient for most people. If we give an abacus to an average math student, it's unlikely that he'll learn multiplication. Instead, we need to combine the tool with content and coaching. We tell the student about multiplication, we do a few demonstrations on the abacus, we coach him on how to use it. Even better, we coach a group of students, and then have them coach each other.

Constructionist education can't do everything, and it's not easy to do well. But despite these limits and challenges, I think the theory of constructionism can give us useful ideas about how to learn music.

I want to explore ways in which it musical tools can be combined with virtual coaches. One idea is to have the coach introduce a new concept, and then use a tool to allow students to play with that concept. The coach says "Here's a toy, go play!"