Interaction analogies and the ‘real world’

The children were able to identify positive analogies (the computer cats were like real cats in terms of appearance, behaviour, appetite) and negative analogies (they were immortal, passive and did not excrete). The children also discussed and explored areas of neutral analogy – a characteristic and authentic activity of science. Hesse, however, identifies ‘a further role for analogies’ beyond the ‘literal, point-by-point comparison of two systems’ and the identification of positive and negative analogies – between model and ‘target’, computer cat and real cat. As we have already mentioned, Johnson-Laird (1983) and Nersessian (1992) argue that analogies can themselves ‘do the work’ of changing conceptualisations and solving problems.

Hesse, too, developing ideas first advanced by Black (1962), describes (Hesse 1970, 1980) how analogies can be ‘interactive’; this involves the transfer of ideas and implications from the secondary system to the pri- mary, involving selection, emphasis, suppression and illumination. As a result of this interaction, ‘the two systems are seen as being more like each other, they . . . interact and adapt to each other’ (Hesse 1980: 163), even to

PATRICK CARMICHAEL

the point where they may lead to mental models of either system, or both being reassessed. What this means in the context of children’s learning is that they have opportunities to ‘re-experience the world’ (DiSessa 1986) and to take part in activities which are authentic science, but which are also personally authentic in that they are relevant to their own develop- ment as learners, not just as ‘proto-scientists’:

E: Look, look, they’re making a trail. What have they found?

F: Must be food . . . where’s the food?

G: In the hole?

F: Where’s the yellow ant?

E: That’s in the game. These are all black.

F: Where’s the boss ant?

G: In front . . . that must be it . . . no . . . that one.

E: It must have found the food and told the others. The area in which this kind of thinking and critical reassessment was

most evident was in the children’s discussions of the relationship between the target domain and the computer application itself, rather than between the target domain and its visual representation on the screen. On the whole, the children found it hard to articulate their understanding of how the simulations worked; only one, E (7 years old) recognised the critical role of the programmer in pre-defining behaviours: ‘There’s nothing in the computer to say “if you don’t eat for ten or twenty or some days then you die”, it just says “if your bowl’s full then eat some food”.’

Lack of technical insight did not prevent children from drawing parallels between the functioning of the computer and living things and, in doing so, going beyond comparative analogies. The question of whether ‘computer cats ever really die’ is interesting, then, not only as evidence of thinking about the death of a living thing (the cat represented by the model), but also because it signals the emergence of thinking about what ‘death’ might mean in the context of a computer-based model (the computer cat), and even of electronic devices more generally (the computer

through which the model is expressed).

This was also explicitly addressed in discussions of other concepts including intellectual capacity, memory and sleep. In relation to SimAnt children started to refer to the computer as ‘the yellow ants’ brain’ and then began to question how the computer could make all of the ants represented onscreen apparently function independently of each other. In the Vivarium program, children noticed that smaller ‘worlds’ appeared to run more quickly: ‘The computer’s got more work to do and it has to think for all the bugs . . . if you give it too many bugs and things it has to share its brain out and it can’t think that much’ (D, 7 years old).

In another example, E (7 years old) compared the ‘brain power’ of different computers and of the cats represented in Catz:

DO COMPUTER CATS EVER REALLY DIE?

R: Do you want to put your cat on a disk and take it home?

E: Mmm . . . yes. Will it work on my computer? R: Should do.

E: It might be really slow though like [mimes walking in slow motion] ‘cos it’s old [. . .] I don’t think it’s got enough brain to be a cat. It’s not as smart as this one.

Once they had learned to start up and shut down the computers, locate the icons with which programmes were launched and load and save pro- gramme files, familiarity with the hardware and software led the children to draw other parallels. The ‘sleep’ function, which allowed the laptops to conserve battery power, led to comments such as: ‘I’ve put the cats to sleep now. The computer’s sleeping so the cats are sleeping too’ (F, 7 years old). The question of what became of the cats was discussed by some of the children once they had become familiar with the process of ‘minimising’ windows. Here, A (4 years old) and C (5 years old) discuss switching between cats:

C: I want to see my cat now. Can I see my cat please?

A: [speaks into microphone on computer] You eat your food, and I’ll go and talk to the other cats. I’ll be back in a moment. [minimises window on screen, no cats are now visible]

C: Where’s my cat? R: A, where is your cat now?

A: I don’t know, just hanging about. He’s OK. He’s got food to keep him going.

C: Is he OK? My cat’s OK and he was switched off all week.

A: Yes, yes . . . the computer keeps them going. It remembers them. The interactions illustrated here have the potential to act as starting

points in discussions which address questions such as: in what way is a computer’s sleep like that of a cat? Or like that of a human? Does thinking of the computer as ‘like a human brain’ help us understand what it means for the computer to ‘sleep’? And conversely, does thinking of the human brain as ‘like a computer’ help us to understand what it is for us to ‘sleep’? In the same way, how might thinking of our brains as computers shape our conceptualisation of memory, or our interpretation of the act of for- getting, or of the tendency to be forgetful? As Hesse suggests, a powerful analogy can alter our thinking about both of the concepts or domains that it involves.

Interaction analogies and the ‘real world’