The foundation of critical thinking is understanding how claims are supported or opposed by evidence, i.e. how information is relevant to whether a claim is true or false. Any particular piece of evidence can be cast in the form of a reason for, or objection to, some claim. So at the most basic level, the general principles and procedures you need to be a critical thinker are the ones governing reasoning and argument.
An easy to learn graphical programming language tailored to education software development.
Yes - although it is stronger on the concept of objects and more readily usable for modelling.
How does this link with the lab sessions. This is still evolving - although our aim is to develop content that is usable to have significant time outside the lab environment as a core part of the Kusasa program.
Yes, everything we develop will be under a creative commons license. With regard to translation - our content will be produced only in English but with ease of translation in mind.
All the pilot schools will be in Cape Town.
This project is a partnership between ourselves, the DoE and the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC). The DoE has provided tremendous assistance and expertise in helping get this project off the ground. So the short answer is yes, they are involved.
No. We want to see what effect increasing the time spent on Maths and English has on other learning areas. We're looking for the links rather than just helping learners achieve better Maths and English test results.
This project does not look at the efficacy of mother tongue instruction. It looks at the current system of instruction and probes the linkages in performance between subjects.
Mother tongue education is the idea that a learner is taught the fundamental concepts of a topic in their first language. Once they learn these concepts they can theoretically reapply them to an English curriculum. The idea being that children absorb concepts easily in their own familiar languages and can gain a fundamental understanding of them. But in a second language they simply become words that are learnt, but not absorbed.