Metacognition and Debugging
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debugging is thinking about thinking - bugs in software are similar to "bugs" in us - it's possible to debug our thinking the same way as you can debug software
- Thinking About Thinking Requires Something to Think About - in the process of debugging, we think about our thinking about the programming problem - the generalisation here is that this "method" can be applied to any thinking
- related to Constructionism
many children are held back in their learning because they have a model of learning in which you have either "got it" or "got it wrong." But when you learn to program a computer you almost never get it right the first time. Learning to be a master programmer is learning to become highly skilled at isolating and correcting "bugs," the parts that keep the program from working. The question to ask about the program is not whether it is right or wrong° but if it is fixable. If this way of looking at intellectual products were generalized to how the larger culture thinks about knowledge and its acquisition, we all might be less intimidated by our fears of "being wrong."
— Seymour Papert - Mindstorms
- writing is one! - there's thinking by writing, and writing also enables metacognition and debugging of one's thinking by allowing one to take a "step back" and look at the process
- and one step further metacognition and debugging
- this might be loosely related to Metacognition and Debugging where we can also simulate our own thinking process to debug it (and even further simulating a brain inside a brain is one of ideas of Computationalism)
- helps with seeing multiple takes on the same ideas, which helps with thinking for yourself (metacognition)
- one realisation of this is Metacognition when Debugging - thinking about the possible problem in the algorithm allow us to think about our thinking process
Szymon Kaliski © 2021
