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1. what do you consider the main argument of the article? Many new media follow a model exemplified by television: A small group of designers produce content that the rest of us passively consume. The consumer model provides no opportunity for personally meaningful activity for the majority of people, but it is possible to move past this. New computational media can and should enable people to become designers, give people tools to express themselves, and allow them to do things that may create meaning in their lives, instead of helping them be better couch potatoes. 2. do you agree or disagree with the main argument? give a answer based on your own experiences? Yes, I agree. I can think of several examples where becoming a designer and not just a consumer transformed an experience in a very positive way. For example, my first experiences teaching children were meaningful and important to me in a way that being a student never had been, and afterwards the experience of being a student in a classroom was also changed as I became more actively and critically engaged by my teachers’ teaching. 3. enumerate in which situations 3.1. you acted as a designer/active contributor Throughout my own undergraduate education overall, in many programming projects, while writing, producing my website, designing and building a bookcase recently… 3.2. you acted as a (passive) consumer During many particular classes during my undergraduate career, watching television and movies, reading other people’s writing, viewing websites… 3.3. situations in which you believe you should have acted differently There are many, of course, but what comes to mind now that I am about to graduate are all the classes I’ve taken that I didn’t put a full effort into, or assigned to a lower priority than some other thing in my life, and all the material that I’ve had paraded in front of me and chose not to fully engage with. 1. describe your solution (if you found one) or why you were unable to find one? The rope around the earth. Yes a cat will fit through. The additional yard seems tiny in proportion to total circumference at the equator, but an extra 6 inches is also tiny in proportion to the radius of the earth. They are related by the formula c = 2πr no matter how big the circle. 3 feet / 2π is half a foot or so. 2. what did you learn solving (or thinking about) the problem? In thinking about my thinking process while solving it, it seems that the key moment was when I began using the words circumference and radius. Those words allowed me to reframe the problem in a more abstract way. 3. what kind of knowledge was most important for solving the problem? Mathematical knowledge. Basic geometry and algebra. The symbol and concept, pi. 4. are (or would be) computers helpful in solving these problems? For a computer to solve it, the question would first have to be framed in a way the computer can understand by a human being. If that person can do so correctly, she must already know the answer. So no, I don’t think computers would be helpful for this problem.
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