LEARNING BY SEEING

With their insatiable curiosity to learn how things work, generative Learners are constantly moving through the world asking questions and observing objects, people and situations. Having acute powers of observation of the Sherlock Holmes type, they notice the little details in objects and ask why they are the way they are? Generative learner identify materials that make up an object, it’s key components, features, criteria and markers of change. They use the physical laws of nature to reason up from first principles as to why something works the way it does.

Like a martian landing on Earth with absolutely no idea of how thing work, when walking through nature they observe the plants and animals as if seeing them for the first time and ask questions of what, why and how? There are no stupid questions. They look for the interactions and inter-relationships between things, looking for causes and their consequential effects, building a logical sequence of events or storyline to explain the outcomes. They take a first person perspective of things, even in some cases imagining themselves as a plant to animal to understand how it sees the world. They get their hands dirty and use their sense of touch to break apart materials to understand their make-up on a deeper level. They immerse themselves in scenarios to truly understand them from a user’s perspective. Not relying on the limitations of experience alone, they imagine to understand.

Their ability to observe acutely, is matched by their ability to reflect on past learning and experiences to draw past learnt knowledge from their storage network to compare it to their observations and make connections so as to build their knowledge base. They construct new explanations of phenomena continuously moving onto higher levels of understanding.