October 26, 2011

“The majority of the students were in special education classes both inside the facility and in regular school. Typically, in special education the process stays within the standard school epistemological framework, often presenting much the same material just slower and with more personal attention. We were trying to make a more fundamental change by focusing on the design and construction of personally meaningful projects determined by the learners and not pre-set by others, by allowing extended periods of time for depth and robustness of exploration, by not just focusing on articulation of knowledge primarily through text but rather by facilitating hands-on creation of concrete artifacts and thereby facilitating multiple learning styles and by having a better than 1:1 ratio of computational materials so that each student could create multiple projects simultaneously and express their ideas in forms more closely resembling their own conceptions.”

Cavallo, D. Papert, S. and Stager, G. (2004) Climbing to Understanding: Lessons from an Experimental Learning Environment for Adjudicated Youth. In the Proceedings of the International Conference on the Learning Sciences. Santa Monica, CA. June 22-26, 2004. pp 113-120.