Multiple Intelliences

This week we pooled our group: some students from last year's sessions, plus some new students.
Our topic today, Multiple Intelligences, is something that we've all been looking at in our respective classrooms, and we were able to bring together what we've already learned about Gardner's theory.

We talked about the strengths of each smart and also about where we think we fit into the theory. We noted that this is our "self image" and that the multiple intelligence quizzes are all based on this: our self awareness.
We touched on three different aspects of self: how we ARE, how we THINK we are (self image), and how we HOPE to be (self improvement).
Each student took three different Multiple Intelligence quizzes, and we talked about why it might be useful to take a test three different ways.
Here are the links to our quizzes:
Quiz 1
Quiz 2
Quiz 3
Each student then graphed the results, and we talked about how or why the results came out slightly differently in different surveys. We did notice however that in general the results were fairly similar, which is reassuring.
We were quickly running out of time before we got to pool our graphs, and began to touch on the big questions:
1. How do the results of a Multiple Intelligence quiz AID us?
2. How do the results of a Multiple Intelligence quiz LIMIT us?

Back next week with more interesting discussions from the Library at GD!

Cryptography

Today we started our session with two more curly questions: 1. What can you do with a brick? 2. List as many jobs as you can think of that don't exist yet, but will in the future.
It was fun to discuss our answers. We noticed that as soon as we begin to pool our ideas we can think so much more broadly.
We had a look at the Khan Academy website, where you can learn anything. In the applied maths section there is a whole series on Cryptography, including its history and a chance to try it out.
We watched the videos and discussed the Caesar cipher, how it was broken, frequency tables, and how to make it harder to decrypt. We also used the cipher to create our own coded messages.
What is cryptography?: What is Cryptography? A story which takes us from Caesar to Claude Shannon.

The Ship of Theseus

Our first session for 2015!
We had a great session today with 15 brand new faces. First of all the students had to consider their answers to two open ended questions: 1. Name everything you can think of that is orange. 2. What can you make with a pillow and a mirror?
We talked about the reasons we'd asked to bring them together, and discussed what it meant to think outside of the box, and what "curly" questions are.
Together we read the book "The Mixed Up Chameleon", which is a story about a chameleon who wishes to be like other creatures, until no part of his original body remains.
Our discussion centred around identity, what makes you you, and about being grateful for the things you have rather than wishing for others. "Be careful what you wish for," one of the students suggested. It was also a book about social identity; wanting to be like others, and about personality or instinct. We could tell that although the chameleon looked nothing like a chameleon by the end of the book, he was still a chameleon inside, as his first instinct when he saw the fly was to eat it.
The book also raised questions about change - how much can change about something before you can no longer call it the same thing, and it is actually a new thing.
This is a well-known paradox called the Ship of Theseus.
We watched an interesting video which introduced this paradox, and discussed the ship amongst our group. It is very cool that we all had different opinions on the idea, and that all our answers were valid.

 

If you want to explore more about the Ship of Theseus puzzle, the Khan Academy has a good learning video here:

 

Metaphysics: Ship of theseus: Jenn introduces us to a puzzle that has bedeviled philosophy since the ancient Greeks: the Ship of Theseus. She tells the Ship of Theseus story, and draws out the more general question behind it: what does it take for an object to persist over time? She then breaks this ancient problem down with modern clarity and rigor. Speaker: Dr. Jennifer Wang, Lecturer, Stanford University