Children can use furniture, cars, maximum capacity rooms, food, bottomless containers, just to name a few, to help them accomplish their construction goals. They can add verbs, change messages, and generally personalize these generic objects to meet their needs. In time, the experiences in modifying the generic objects will ease them into more sophisticated programming themselves. What is real and what is not In working with young children, we have noticed that some are not able to distinguish what is real in MOO from what is imaginary. We need to be cognizant that not all children have our sophisticated understanding of what is real.
Words are very powerful, especially printed words.
These are all fascinating questions for us to ponder as we work with curriculum in virtual space. Scaffolding The environment, with its help system, mailing lists, and channels provides opportunities for children and teachers to learn within the environment. Yet, we have much work to do to truly make these internal tools helpful to non-computer programmers. The contents of help needs to be tested with different users to be sure what is available is meeting the needs of teachers and students. If this environment is to be useful to teachers, it must NOT add to their already busy schedules.