Since I don't want to leave this page here almost entirely empty, I have now copy-pasted the text from a message from my Facebook-group at https://www.facebook.com/lukasgirtannercom (dated from 2012-04-02), this should suffice (respectively summarize my ideas) as long as I don't write more elaborate/extended ideas here (the text is originally from the page "Draft of a leaflet" from the at the moment still unavailable page at http://www.lukasgirtanner.com):
"Wouldn't you like to understand the smartphones and computers which you daily use? Would you also like to move more in your daily activities and live more healthily? Do you also have an affection for lovely and playful animals? Are you also astonished about the curiosity and learning abilities of babies, toddlers and young children? And do you also want to protect the environment more? Or to at least achieve this for the children, the next generation(s)?
Are you also aware that new technologies solve many
existing problems while at the same time bring new problems with them (the need for
more raw materials and minerals and e-waste in case of smartphones, computer and robots)? Have you also thought how this
never-ending cycle of new technology solving old problems but at the same time
generating new problems could be solved respectively rendered as harmless as
possible (for people and the environment)?
There is a possibility to realize such a technology-rich upbringing in the future and at the same time also solve the problems associated with new technologies, thanks to making the acquisition of mathematical knowledge the ultimate focus/goal of all learning. The idea is to let babies and children grow up from birth with as many different/diversified animals and robots as possible (and human contact, too, of course, especially with the baby's/child's parents) and also outdoors (preferably also in wild nature or the woods) as often as possible. The children play already in their first months with the animals and robots and like that, they are motivated as early as possible in their lives for mathematics, engineering/information technology and the natural sciences. The children can learn the whole school curriculum (and much more) thanks to the animals and robots while moving with them and learn as self-directed/self-regulated as possible. The play would take place outside as often as possible so that the children are connected with natural environments as much as possible. In doing so, the children could be offered the best possible and most suitable learning environment so that they very early begin to understand technical and mathematical topics. The children would learn in flexible, mixed-age groups, while each child participates where it is intrinsically motivated and where its individual knowledge limit lies at any particular moment.
Thanks to the early childhood robotics, the children learn to understand computers and smartphones, which they will use increasingly as adults and furthermore, they can physically move around a lot thanks to the animals and robots. The social skills of the children are being promoted thanks to the working and learning constantly together with other children and each child is able to learn what it wants and according to its personal state of knowledge. A special emphasis would lie in collectively developing open source didactics of mathematics (and secondarily also didactics of physics, chemistry, biology, genetics, and electrical/software engineering) software. This software would be as configurable, interactive, intuitive, customizable and playful as possible, and increasingly cover all topics of mathematics and every child could learn mathematics (and the other natural and engineering sciences) self-guided with a large amount of already fully solved examples and also participate in the software's further development. (It is also clear that for various ages, there should be different kinds of software (in a similar way like other (for example physical) activities are different) since toddlers learn in another way than for example adolescents.) The mathematical learning would be embedded as much as possible into robotic activities, and in an ideal case, as many mathematical and physics topics as possible would arise already casually while doing robotics and electrical engineering. The long-term objective is to make (wo)mankind environmentally sustainable thanks to genetic engineering and robotic technology (and most important, a sufficiently quickly, ever-increasing knowledge of pure mathematics), even though people will still consume and travel moderately / in a limited and intelligent way.
New section: "So, to give an example, the children would already begin to play with robots when they are babies or at the latest when they are toddlers (because as babies, they predominantly need to be with their mothers, but even then, some robotics is probably possible), so they could as early as possible adapt their minds to the complexities of such machines. However, it is also important that for developing a truly imaginative and creative mind which is fundamental for any discovery of new mathematical insights, a wide range of activities, including physical and outdoor activities (and creative activities where robots play only a minor part, see further below) are necessary. But since robots (and also small computers like smartphones or tablets) can be present in all (or at least many) kinds of activities, they could (and in my opinion should) also be present there, giving a constant motivation to improve one's own electrical and software engineering knowledge. (Also key is the presence of animals which are a major incentive to do physical activities because of their diverse and spontaneous reactions to such playful activities.) It is important that the children still experience respectively have the opportunity to participate in the whole range of human learning and creativity like traditional arts or creative activities (playing also traditional games, theater, reading and discussing literature, painting, handwriting), but where possible, again with the presence of advanced technology. (I will have to merge these sentences a little bit together, there is redundancy in the sections above.)
Also clear is that a very strong emphasis should be on how to handle technology (configuration, models of sharing technology, lifecycle (production, use, recycling)) so that its environmental sustainability and efficiency can be maximized."
"Also a key is to allow children to learn natural languages which are as dissimilar as possible from as early as possible, so instead of for example learning German and English (which are very similar languages) from an early age, they should learn for example one Indo-European language and a language from a completely different language group, for example the Chinese language (these languages out of two (or possibly also three or more) different language groups should be taught with priority, also at least partially depending on the cultural background (most importantly the mother's/parent's mother tongue(s)) and the feasibility to allow the child to learn as many different and diverse language groups as possible) from birth because later, they still can learn a second Indo-European language relatively easy because they have grown into the greatest possible linguistic diversity from birth which maximized their linguistic flexibility and increases their abilities to later on learn languages from other differing groups and of course also additional languages from a language group that they already know." (Sorry for this section here, the main focus should actually lie on mathematics, but the issue of language learning/acquisition is too important to be left out, furthermore, while it might not be proven that learning as different as possible languages from birth might also increase mathematical abilities and imagination, it certainly doesn't diminish this imagination.) Too many parentheses in this section, I will have to word the sentences differently.
2013-07-30, around 12:50h - 13:00h: I amended/extended the text a little bit. What is still missing in the text above is to pinpoint on the primacy of mathematical thinking instead of any too radically constructivist approaches (both in terms of "thinking agents" (who is doing mathematics) and didactics of mathematics). So, genetic engineering and robotic technology may help in becoming mathematically more intelligent and being able to better connect to tools of the didactics of mathematics, but the cognition itself that occurs naturally (or at least naturally after an evolutionary process as it has been the case also in the past of the human species) will probably remain at the core of any mathematical discovery for at least a very long time. Or in other words (and according to my intuition, maybe I am wrong or I oversimplify relationships/reality): The idea that genetic engineering and electrically engineered technology will make humans more intelligent (respectively sufficiently intelligent for the increasingly demanding problems to solve) and also in a more general sense (preferences/lifestyle/behavior, emotions, body configuration) environmentally sustainable or "save" humanity from extinction should always be considered in the context of mathematics and how quickly/deeply humanity manages to extend its purely mathematical knowledge (and apply it to engineering, which is actually secondary because it is much easier to apply existing mathematical knowledge to physics and other natural or engineering sciences than moving forward within pure mathematics itself (but still, the ability to apply mathematical knowledge is important because the people who are not at the forefront of mathematical discovery can still participate as engineers or natural scientists and this needs mathematical thinking too)).
2013-07-30, 15:35h: By the way, feel free to comment. There is a comment functionality at the bottom of this blog entry here (you might have to be logged in, I am not sure), so I would welcome any comments.
2013-07-31, 19:45 - 19:52h: I just checked the leaflet that I made in spring 2012 (in German language) (see http://lukasgirtanner.com/index.php?title=Version_5_of_the_leaflet ) and compared it with what I wrote here. When reading through this German language virtual leaflet, I realized that I when I was initially creating this page here, I completely forgot to mention the importance of sign language which is a very good example of multimodal learning which is so important because it is much more efficient and imagination-friendly than learning in a narrowed/restricted way. I also didn't emphasize enough on this page here how important playful activity is: A child should be allowed to learn the necessary "subject matter" in a way that is as playful as possible, so that the child doesn't even realize that it is learning something that "has to be learnt"; this type of learning is also called "flow learning".
2013-07-31, 20:01h - 20:06h: Now, I also read through the page http://lukasgirtanner.com/index.php?title=Draft_of_a_leaflet (where most content is also written in English), whose bottom part was the precursor of the Facebook pages's leaflet and the initial text here and I was astonished how well I managed to describe how children could grow up also in the first part of the leaflet (which I didn't copy-paste onto this page here). Maybe I will just copy all English-language content from there to this website here too in order to further clarify what I mean/envision. It will be a challenge to remove redundancy in the various texts. Maybe it would also be a good idea to omit the date/time indications (or move them to a separate archive page) that are written here now, it is too technical.
2013-07-31, 20:17h - 20:33h: What I forget to mention on the three previous leaflets (see the three links above) is the importance of giving the children the opportunity to participate in deciding how a learning environment should look like respectively be configured; the learning environments should be governed as democratically as possible with the involvement of both children (probably also in an institutionalized form like parliamentary or debate sessions), parents and other adults. Like that, it is possible to ensure that the children are empowered because the adults are willing to change/improve the learning activities according to the wishes of the children. And because of the vast range of activities being offered, the children also know from what they can choose from and can therefore meaningfully participate in the improvement of their own learning environments and activities.
(I also realized that this page here has considerably grown, so maybe I should replace the page's second section with a statement that reflects the current situation.)
2013-08-10, 23:39h - 23:46h: What is also still missing is the importance of discovering and creating music, which means children should have enough opportunity to learn various (and as diverse as possible) musical instruments (also from an as early as possible age), learning to compose (also with the help of software) and also occasionally singing (and possibly drawing connections / recognize interrelationships between mathematics and music). (I also emphasized the importance of outdoor activities by mentioning it in a second place in the text above.)
But most importantly, all these activities have to serve the goal of enhancing/enabling the mathematical imagination of a child and to create as much as possible sense for the "austere"/"strict"/pure beauty of mathematics.
