{"id":47,"date":"2022-01-21T06:47:34","date_gmt":"2022-01-21T06:47:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/cannons\/?p=47"},"modified":"2022-01-21T06:47:34","modified_gmt":"2022-01-21T06:47:34","slug":"zone-of-proximal-development","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/cannons\/2022\/01\/21\/zone-of-proximal-development\/","title":{"rendered":"Zone of Proximal Development"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

While I was earning my degree in Education I was taught a concept called the \u201czone of proximal development\u201d (ZPD). If you are like me, \u201cproximal\u201d probably isn\u2019t a word you hear often. It means something like \u201cnear to the center\u201d or \u201cnear to the point of attachment.\u201d To illustrate, the proximal end of your leg would not be near your foot, but where your leg attaches to your body at the hip. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

If we imagine a child\u2019s development as a set of three nested circles, the central circle would represent the child\u2019s \u201ccomfort zone.\u201d This is the area where a child can accomplish tasks without any help from their teachers (ex: a 1st grader counting to 10)\u00a0 The outermost circle, on the other hand, is the zone in which a child is incapable of completing a task, no matter how much assistance they are given (ex: a 1st grader computing the dot product of two vectors). I like to call this the \u201cdanger zone.\u201d I also can\u2019t call it that without getting images of TopGun burned into my head for hours.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Somewhere between those two areas is the Zone of Proximal Development. It is near to the central comfort zone and attached to other skills the child has already developed. However it is also far enough away that the child will be unable to complete tasks here without help. A teacher\u2019s job is to challenge their students with tasks in the ZPD and then provide them with the support they need to succeed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This support comes in a form that teachers like to call \u201cscaffolding.\u201d In construction, scaffolding is the support workers put around a building before its central structure is complete. The key to this metaphor is that the scaffolding is temporary. A 1st grader might need support completing addition and subtraction problems to begin with, but as they do more of them they build up their central structure. Eventually they are strong enough that the teacher can remove the scaffolding. The child can do addition by themselves! The child\u2019s comfort zone has expanded, as has the ZPD. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The reason I mention the ZPD is because it is applicable to learners at any age, and I have had to remind myself of that  in the past couple weeks. My current project is to build a Neural Network which can analyze songs and accurately predict their genre. The problem is I know relatively nothing about Machine Learning or Neural Networks. I thought I could kickstart my learning with TensorFlow guides on YouTube, but I didn\u2019t understand most of the code I copied from them. The content is in my \u201cdanger zone.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To get back into my ZPD I turned to an excellent online resource published by MIT called OpenCourseWare. The site provides recorded lectures and exercises for tons of college level courses completely free. These are the same courses MIT students pay thousands of dollars to take! You can even hear them in the background sometimes asking questions.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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So my tip for this week if you are struggling with where to get started in Machine Learning is check out the MIT OpenCourseWare class on it. There are complete lectures, detailed notes, and homework exercises. You\u2019ll learn the theory and mathematics you need to understand those Machine Learning models you are working with. If you get there and find that you are struggling with the math, you might want to check out the course on Discrete Mathematics. That is where you\u2019ll learn the symbols and notation mathematicians use to describe these complicated problems. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While I was earning my degree in Education I was taught a concept called the \u201czone of proximal development\u201d (ZPD). If you are like me, \u201cproximal\u201d probably isn\u2019t a word you hear often. It means something like \u201cnear to the center\u201d or \u201cnear to the point of attachment.\u201d To illustrate, the proximal end of your… Continue reading Zone of Proximal Development<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12041,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/cannons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/cannons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/cannons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/cannons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12041"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/cannons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/cannons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/cannons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47\/revisions\/51"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/cannons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/cannons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/cannons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}