October 2nd, 2008 and Plato's Allegory of the Cave

In today's discussion we started off with questions as always. We then started with a powerpoint on how children's mind's develop over time and how we can use this to teach of future students. We also discussed how should we know how one can recognize the knowledge that a child has. We should base lessons and theories on how children learn, and take into account their culture and hertitage. For our class activity, which went along with the movie we watched, we did Plato's Allegory of the Cave. In this activity each group was given four black boxes, with a mystery object inside of it. We all had to make assumptions on what we thought was in the box and what we thought it was like. We then wrote our assumptions doen on a piece of paper, and then correlated all of our answers together to get a couple solid assumptions about what we thought was in the "mystery boxes." Our group guessed that the four boxes held marbles in them, because of the way they rolled within the boxes. But we were also asked to predict and guess what else was inside, but what we didn't know was that there were little square objects attached to the box, kind of like an obstacle course or something. As a class we discussed our predictions and found out the answers.