“Archaeology of Information” in the Primary School

摘要

Informatics education at the lower school levels is customarily interpreted as dexterity with the ICTs. However, in our view the importance of such operational abilities has been overstated, whereas the underlying learning objectives and the actual impact on children's intellectual development are still to be clarified. In this paper we consider a different educational perspective, whose primary aim is to provide children with appropriate mental scaffolding for computer science concepts and methodologies, many of which will be learned only later. Rather than exposing the pupils to a broad span of computing ideas, we essentially focus on representational codes and their potential to disclose new information by simple formal manipulations. Our approach is inspired by the early historical developments of ideas and tools, that allows us: (i) to propose engaging tasks within a background portrayed in the narrative register; (ii) to draw links with the topics of the specific history and mathematics syllabi; (iii) to reflect, at a meta-level, on the cognitive demands of relevant cultural achievements and on their pedagogical implications. After outlining our experience with pupils aged 6 and 9-10, we will briefly discuss children's subjective perception and feedback, in particular as to the retention of the material learned.