Kusasa

The Kusasa project aims to create, and implement in the Western Cape, a suite of curriculum aligned projects for grades 4-12. Each project is designed to develop and provide role models for effective thinking.

Kusasa projects are designed to:

• be self taught, peer mentored, and
• provide user feedback provide; analytical thinking skills that are useful across a range of disciplines;
• encourage and facilitate the effective modeling of concrete observations in software;
• be an exercise machine for analysis, process and synthesis.

Kusasa will consist of a pack of eight projects for each grade. These projects encourage learners to explore their personal interests and include curriculum content. Each project is designed with an intended intellectual outcome. These could be specific analytical, problem-solving and idea-generating skills. Examples include: partitioning a problem into sub-problems; identifying assumptions; and visualising a problem.

Kusasa will use the following programming environments to model concrete observations:

• Squeak
• Python

The incidental outcome of each project will be the acquisition of a range of mathematical and scientific thinking skills and concepts, which learners will practice regardless of the actual content of their projects. Learners will graduate from a Kusasa project with new thinking skills, new mathematical and science skills, and new content knowledge that they have absorbed through experiential play and modeling.