The HandsBook: PTP

In these early stages of the project, a book was started to better communicate and develop it.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction: From Motion to Notion 
• Art as a prerequisite of STEM fields
• Inner conversations lead to pseudo-code
• Activities which end up in final programs.
• Conclusion

Description

The Pen and Tablet Project (PTP) uses the Embodied Cognition philosophy. Concepts do not fall down from the sky, they enter the brain through the senses. Not only that, in the PTP, we emphasize the use of hands to direct neuronal connections, and the planned hand activities that lead to these brain structures.

At an anecdotal level, I can report my children's homeschooling activities during the past thirty years. The oldest one listened to a Fairy Tale tape at age three, and went ahead to produce a negative of it. That is, the bad witch became the good witch, and so on. The work was intense, listening to the tape several times, and then taping the new version. The younger one spent hours moving toys on the floor, and videotaping scenes one at a time, using stop motion. Thus developing the important notion of discrete steps. Eventually during high school, he did well in a programming class using Java.

Inner conversations do occur. Lev Vygotsky discovered the role of society in directing the child to eventually have full fledged inner conversations. The mentor leads the learner to pseudo-code.

At a later stage, once structured, computer languages are mastered, the student run final programs through their Pen and Tablet devices at servers in the Cloud.

This book presents work done over more than thirty years now. This is the time to put down on paper the results.  Based on hypotheses, more work is proposed to further the aims of the PTP. Central ideas of this work are the reality of Information (Jacob Bekenstein), and Knowledge (David Deutsch).