Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
page_id=226
Stage 4. There comes a time when the learner has identified the abstract content of a number of different games and is practically crying out for some sort of picture by means of which to represent that which has been gleaned as the common core of the various activities. At this point it is time to suggest some diagrammatic representation such as an arrow diagram, table, a coordinate system or any other vehicle which would help fix in the learners mind what this common core is. We cannot ever hope to see an abstraction, as such things do not exist in the real world of objects and events, but we can invent a representation which would in some succinct way give the learner a snapshot of the essence that he has extracted or abstracted through the various game activities. Each one of the learned games can then be mapped on to this representation, which will pinpoint the communality of the games. This stage can be called the representation stage. Stage 5. It will now be possible to study the representation or map and glean some properties that all the games naturally must have. For example it could be checked whether a certain series of operations yields the same result as another series of operations. Such a discovery could then be checked by playing it out in one or more of the games whose representation yielded the discovery. An elementary language can then be developed to described such properties of the map. Such a language can approximate to the conventional symbolic language conventionally used by mathematicians or freedom can be exercised in inventing quite new and different symbol systems. Be it one way or another, a symbol system can now be developed which can be used to describe the properties of the system being learned, as the information is gathered by studying the map. This stage can be called the symbolization stage. Stage 6. The descriptions of the symbolization stage can get very lengthy and often quite redundant. There comes a time when it becomes desirable to establish some order in the maze of descriptions. This is the time to suggest that possibly just a few initial descriptions would suffice, as long as we appended ways of deducing other properties of the map, determining certain definite rules that would be allowed to be used in such deductions. In such a case we are making the first steps towards realizing that the first few descriptions can be our AXIOMS, and the other properties that we have deduced can be our THEOREMS, the ways of getting from the initial axioms to the theorems being the PROOFS. This stage could be called the formalization stage.