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Comment by jacobolus | Hacker News Reader

Even if we assume that all of Piaget’s theories about developmental timelines are bunk, how does that invalidate the concept of teaching constructively in a child-centered, problem-centered way? Those seem like mostly orthogonal concerns.

As for block-based programming: that seems like something we can test empirically, and indeed there’s quite a bit of literature about it (which I have not read and am not familiar with, sorry).

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I was directly replying to the asked question. But, it is not just the developmental timeline that was off. There's also its hypothesis of what children learn and how they reason or what they are capable of that is inaccurate.

Child centered, problem centered is vague. More practically, the big things are: you want material that's novel to the learner but also somewhat familiar (this is true, regardless of age). Children's attention is more distributed and worse at blocking out irrelevancies. Therefore, more complex tasks (such as math) should be presented in a way such that the signal meant to be learned can be extracted with minimal ambiguity (less extraneous information in presentation). Few other things have replicated.

Thanks for your replies, which intuitively make sense and appear to come from a knowledgeable background. As in my question I would really like to read the peer-reviewed / field leading work that you're basing your statements on, same as the comment I replied to. Or even just names of people / labs / journals to search.

Yes, please do provide some citations. This is interesting stuff.

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