"Discovery cannot be setup; invention cannot be scheduled"

~Seymour Papert, MIT Artificial Intelligence pioneer

The MIT Learning Creative Learning class I'm taking is winding up, and this week, I ran across this somewhat dated (they use Scratch 1.4), but still highly relevant overview of what you learn about debugging code by creating in Scratch. Mitch Resnick, the inventor of Scratch, leads the discussion and you get to see him debug several kids' project, on the spot! Check it out here. Seymour Papert was Dr.Resnick's advisor and mentor in his early days, pre-Scratch, and it's worth adding this cool "moment" Dr. Papert once recalled:

"As they puzzled together, the child had a revelation:

"Do you mean," he said.
"that you really don't know how to fix it?"

The child did not yet know how to really say it, but what had been revealed to him was that he and the teacher had been engaged together in a research project. The incident is poignant. It speaks of all the times the child had entered in to teachers' games of "let's do this together" all the while knowing that the collaboration was a fiction".

Watching this, and participating in the entire Learning Creative Learning session, I "got" that without really trying, using platforms like Alice, Kodu, Scratch, and App Inventor steer you as a teacher towards this pure collaboration. And like a lot of things, you'll run into bumps, including kids that resist because sadly, I think this way of learning is so foreign, they honestly don't know what to make of a teacher who doesn't "know" all the answers. Maybe the best lesson after all, is to stop talking about the  "unexpected" like it's a bad thing! And, maybe tape a few actual "moths" to the lesson board ;)