building is learning

To Cambridge for the Science Festival today. The obviously populist bits were a bit mobbed but we were lucky enough to have lunch with Andrew and he steered us towards some splendid stuff, starting with a trip to the Whipple.

It's a fantastic little place, with great collections. I didn't really notice the numbering system until I was looking at the pictures just now. Is there a Dewey Decimal System for things?

The big bit of noticing for the day though was how easy and useful it was to learn through building stuff. These two anatomical doodahs at the Whipple gave me more sense of where the bits inside you are supposed to go than the endless hours of medical TV I've watched. Because you have to rebuild something, you have to see how it all fits together. (Warning - do not attempt home surgery using illustrations above, these are both 'before' stages)

Later, over at the Centre For Mathematical Sciences, we spent more excellent time doing and building math stuff. Arthur was delighted and excited to discover that maths (which he likes) is more than adding and times-ing. I'm reading Richard Sennett's The Craftsman at the moment and he talks in there about how making is thinking, it's also dawning on me that building is learning.

Comments

[Ste]

Hi Russell,

I'm very off topic, but...what happened to the account planning school of the web?

[Andrew]

The pleasure was all mine. Lovely to meet the three of you.

Building is learning: definitely true for me. The reverse works too - learning is building, piling bits of knowledge on top each other until we can clamber up on them and see the view.

I like that.

[Nat]

Hi,

There is something like a Dewey Decimal System for the classification of objects. It's the subject of a forthcoming book:

'NATO: The Military Codification System for the Ordering of Everything in the World' by Suzanne Treister.

http://ensemble.va.com.au/Treister/NATO/NATO.html