superficial learning as a bridge to deeper learning
It might be time for me to put my Taekwondo suit on again after 18 years: mind you my
middle-aged "pot" might cause a problem there. Reminds me of when I did a flying kick
during my green-belt exam and managed to split my trousers: lots of ribald laughter
all round: especially when the Master presented me with the belt.
Scratch is certainly superficial, so superficial it hardly scratches the surface.
Think of learning chess by drawing pictures.
LiveCode as a teaching tool strikes just the right sort of balance between superficial and deep: think of learning top play
chess by learning checkers.
LiveCode can also be used all the way from checkers to Hexagonal chess without having to "changes horses in the middle of the race",
which is what a child has to do if s/he starts off on Scratch (and finds out that riding a kiddy bike with stabilisers has not prepared
them for a full-blown stallion).
The "superficial learning as a bridge to deeper learning" theory of education does not thrill my gorilla at all, as superficial is
always superficial, and even some superficial learning may actually prove a barrier to later deeper learning.
My father told me how, when he was 5 years old, he was taught to read with something called the Initial Teaching Alphabet:
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that employed an expanded alphabet, and was designed on the theory that if children learnt this first, learning the standard
English alphabet would be easier.
He became extremely proficient at reading using the ITA: and when he was presented with books written using standard English
he broke down in tears and found it extremely difficult to swap over.
Looking at the ITA, I can see that it is dead easy to learn: but then it is going to be a pain-in-the-bum having to unlearn half
of that and learn a new way of doing things: and the parallels between Scratch-like IDEs and other programming systems
should be clear to anyone.
As I teach English to children who write their language using the Cyrillic alphabet they experience quite a lot of problems insofar
as the Cyrillic alphabet and the Latin alphabet (used to write English) have quite a number of false friends (letters that look the same
but have completely different phonetic values): when I taught children whose first languages were Urdu, Arabic, Gujarati and Hindi
no such problems arose as their home writing systems are completely dissimilar to the Latin alphabet.