Educational Website

The website that I choose is www.iknowthat.com.

It is during our regular project meeting that I first know about this website. We went through the animations in the math category and the math problems come up along with the plot development of the well-designed animation stories and everyone was amused by the funny stories.

Now when I relearn from the website, I find that it is a well-made learning website for children. It provides many subjects, like arts, language arts, math, social studies and so on and all the subjects have different contents for different grades beginning from pre-kindergarten. Under each subject, there are different settings that teach different contents. Let us take math for example. When the “math” button on the left side is clicked, many games are shown in the central part of the screen and ready to be played. If the mouse is put on a picture, words will replace the animation picture to tell you what this game is about, either computation or geometry, or arithmetic problems, or word problems. When you choose one and click the “play button” under the picture, you are brought to a journey with the cute animation hero called “Leon”, with whom you will experience interesting things, as well as difficulties which are made of math problems of the kind that you have chosen. The animations are well-designed with beautiful colors, many kinds of animals and attractive and funny plots. By helping him solve the problems, you can move on with the story and finally see how many problems you have got right and which ones you have got wrong. The program incorporates the boring learning process into interesting animation stories. Thus attractiveness of the learning process is increased and children will get more motivated in solving problems and learning knowledge.

Besides the high-quality game design, it provides more. We can see that it gives the space for the teacher-parent communication, so that the child’s progress can be known to both the teacher and parents at the first time. Also, children can take systematic quizzes here to examine how much they have mastered. It also provides help to their homework.

How to make it better? For certain that it is an excellent learning website, but it also has things to improve. For instance, it may be better if it can include instructions before the games. Though it includes the “teacher guide” part, the teaching is separated from the game part. This design is OK for students who already mastered the knowledge in a certain area and use the game to consolidate what they have learned, but for those who want to learn new knowledge from this website, it may be better if there are instructions proceeding the game to teach them the new things.

Non-linear Fiction

My non-linear fiction has been uploaded to the goole group.

I started to make the powerpoint when I came up with the beginning of the story. Then, when I gave the first pair of choices, I tried to think of what will happen after the choice was made. I used a linear, or, one-line-after-another way to organize my thought for coming up with the continuations of the story. For example, I first go with the "long road line". Then when the second pair of choices comes, I go with the first one of the two choices, namely, "accept the inviation of the bear". Then, along the line, I think about when and how to end this line, whether to simply give an end or to link it to another setting of the story.

P.S. I was encountered with a technical question with the last slide. When the hyperlink was established to link this slide to the second one, the hyperlink did not work... I have tried my best and could not figure out why...

Story Recall

This story, after reading it, is stored in my semantic memory, where our shared knowledge of the world is placed. As time goes by, changes happen to the recall of the story content. It is interesting that the number of letters increases each time for my three-time recalls (117 for the first time, 145 for the second time and 161 for the third time). The reason might be that during later recalls, I was afraid that I had forgotten more things than the first time recall, so I elaborated more on the things that I could recall, whereas during the first recall, I did not elaborate because I was hurried to write down all the things that left in my mind after reading.

A lot of details are contained in the first paragraph, like the time, the name of places, the description of the sounds, the thoughts of the young men, people on the canoe....But I missed several details and captured the gist of the meaning. It seems to me that when a lot of detailed information are gathered, it is hard to memorize them all.

For me, more attention was given to the two young men and I recalled their words and actions. I paid less attention to the others words, thus I recalled little about other warriors. Like when the people on the canoe first came to the two young men, they asked the two to join them, but I failed to recall this, only what the young men's response.


I remember that when I was reading the story, I read more slowly and carefully in the first part about one returned and one came to war. I read the ending part quickly and not attentively. I remember that at the time when I just finished reading, I only got the idea that people got killed in the war and when the young man came back to village, he died finally. Since less information is captured during the acquisition process, it definitely would make the recall hard to have some elaborations, thus I did not recall much of the ending.


It seems to me that the idea of what we have got from the story is the prime information in mind and it is hard to forget it. During recall, the idea can be represented with different words. In stead, the specific words and details in the story are hard to have a permanent place in the memory. The recall process relies on the meaning of the story, rather than the details of original words or phrases, though somethimes they are indeed memorized well for some people.

This concept map visually represents the participant's knowledge about cooking.

From the map we can see that there are three main subtypes under the general term "cooking", namely, types of recipes, methods of cooking and tools used for cooking. By observing the map it is not difficult for us to see that among these three subtypes, recipes occupy the biggest portion and tools the fewest. From this we can conlude that the participant is more familiar, or has more prior knowledge structured around different types of recipes in terms of cooking. And within the recipe subtype, Indian, Mexican and American are the most familiar recipes to him, as the structures for these types are more complicated than for the Chinese's.

By this visual representation with symbols, we can quickly and easily get a holistic understanding about the participant's mental development in this specific domain. Since different subtypes are marked with different colors, it is very clear that his knowledge about the tools are not so developed as about recipes and methods for cooking. Indeed, during his doing of this map, he struggled with the names of the tools. Thus the brainstorming in this part is also much shorter than the other two parts.

The process of producing this map is also a process that the participant organizes his thought and knowledge in the domain of cooking, since he needs to pay attention to the relations between concepts, say, which concept is linked to which and with a certain term, what can be generated from it and what can be next to it on the same level.

Also in the process of making this map, the participant was reminded of a lot of words or experiences about cooking inspired by drawing the circles and writing words. Here the map serves as a learning enhancement by which the participant can learning or relearn some knowledge and enhance it.

In all, concept map is an easy and clear way of representing information structure in a person's mind for others to see visually and this process is also beneficial to the participant who can organize one's thought and ideas and enhance the knowledge at the same time.

Long-term Memory Test

I did this test with the same participant who have done the first memory test. We sat along a long table in his office in the afternoon, around 3:30 and began the test.

Above is the result of his test.

We can see that he memorized 14 words the first time and 12 the second time. The two that missed the second time are "analysis" and "brush". It seems that there is no big difference between the two times. Once the words are memorized the first time, they are not easily forgotten after an hour in the second time.

After my interview with the participant at the end of the second test, I know that the method he used to memorize the words is to relate the words with his personal experiences. Then by recalling his past events, he recalled the words. That is to say that he tried to store the words in his episodic memory. For instance, the first two items are the commonly seen objects in his office (paper and seat), so he did not relate them to any stories, but he got confused with seat and chair. We can see here that the synonyms of a word which are also commonly used by a person can be an intervening element in memorization. For the word Tire, he relates it with a place (the method of loci), a cetain state where his grandma lived and he changed his tire there. Then the next word "love" cause he loves his grandma. And they used to go to the "beach". They also did some "analysis" about what they should do for the holidays and after that they had some "conjunctions". For the word "brush", he related it with a girl he dated in high school who likes brushing her hair and asked him to keep a brush in his car so that she could brush her hair any time. But he did not recall this in the second recall. For the word "hunger" he related it with the fact that when he was a teenager, he always felt hungry (but he did not recall this word in either time) and also as a teenager, he learned to use "keyboard". He loves sports, and the players have "numbers" on their clothes. Still as a teenager, he did not drink (as related to "bottle"). The most interesting thing happened to the memorization of "wheel". (Cont.) When he heard the word "wheel", he memorized it by associate it with his favorite hockey team call "red wings", which has a red wheel with a wing as the team symbol. He memorized the image, but when he recalled the image, the "wing" replaced the "wheel" in his memory and he thought that I mentioned "wing" or "wings". This may due to the reason that in everyday experiences, the wing image impresses him more than the wheel image does.

Then for the last word system, he memorized it by relating it to the fact that the sports teams have their operating system.

Memory Test

The participant of my memory test is a male native speaker who is in his thirties and is working on PhD degree in Special Education program. The test began at noon in the participant's office while we sitting at a round table. He turned his his left side to me and faced the wall, because he thought that as such he would not be able to see the paper in my hand with all the numbers and letters.

Above is the result description of his test:

In the number groups, we can see that the Magic Number Seven works well for him. He can memorize all the numbers when the quantity is fewer or close to seven (Though he put 4 in front of 5 in the second group). When the quantities become bigger, he gets confused. Sometimes he adds numbers that are not there, sometimes he misplaces number and sometimes when he tries to recall the exact sequence of certain numbers, he gets totally at lost for the others.

In the letter groups that do not form words, he got mistake in every group. The first group (T S Y L Q P) is the only one that one letter is missed (though there is consequence problem). It comes to the conclusion that random letters that do not make any sense when grouped are very hard to memorize, especially when the quantity is more than seven. This conclusion is strengthened by the participant's telling me that he got "QWERTY" exactly correct in the third letter group because he was taught by his teacher in the past that the keyboard of a computer is called "qwerty" board, since these letters are in the same row on the keyboard. Thus when he heard these letters read, he chunk them into a group as one unit, which facilitates his recalling.

As to the letter groups that form words, the participant admitted that these are different from the previous letters in that he could memorize each word as a unit, no matter how many words are there, which he could not do when the letters do not make sense when grouped.

The first group can be regarded as 5 units, which is easy for him to memorize and he got them correct.

It is interesting to see that for the following three groups, the number of words he got correct never passes the Magic Number Seven. (For the PAPER and BAG groups, he both got 5 words correct). The correct number increases in the LOVE group. He got seven correct. It should due to the reason that there are the sementic relations between every two neighboring words.

The last group is repeated quite smoothly by the participant. It is quite easy for him. He said that is because all the words can make sense and form a sentence, and the sentence becomes one unit in his head.

The Turing Test

Is the Turing Test a sufficient test? That is, if a machine passes the test, would you agree it is intelligent?

When we say that our human beings are intelligent, we mean that we have the brain which has a high-level comprehensive ability to allow us to think, to reason, to plan, to learn, to understand and to use language.

However, with and only with these properties is not enough for becoming an intelligent man, who, just as each one of us, use the intelligence we have to learn from the environment, make self-development, gain experience, and on the basis of all these to form our own personalities and view of the world. A man is who he is with all his past experience, his personality, his belief, desire and his unique way of sense-making. These are the things that a human-designed and programmed computer cannot achieve. Therefore, even if a machine passes the Turing Test, we can only say that it has a strong ability to reason, to process information and to imitate, but we can never say that it has sufficiently proved itself to be intelligent.

Is the Turing Test a neccesary test? That is, does a machine have to pass this test in order to be intelligent?

I agree that the Turing Test may be regarded as a necessary test for intelligence due to the fact that keeping reasonable and meaningful conversation with another person requires the abilities such like reason, logic and language, which are indispensable components of intelligence, to a great degree. A test that can achieve the same effect can also be a necessary test for intelligence. Therefore, the Turing Test is not necessarily the only test, but a necessary test which can test some aspects included in the intelligence.

Will a machine ever pass the Turing Test? Why or why not?

There exists the possibility that a machine can pass the Turing Test. Let us suppose first that the interrogator for the test, by himself, can come up with various questions that all fall within the scope of A. The designer of the machine is a huge team of experts from all possibly related disciplines. They have done programming for the machine so that it can deal with all questions within the scope of B. If the interrogator’s questions are fully covered by the scope of B, the machine then can answer all questions of the interrogator, since the “collective wisdom” of the programmers has surpassed the interrogator’s ability of making a correct distinction by asking questions. Second, we can assume that the real female human being is one who is not good at expressing and convincing others. Her insufficient ability to make herself clear will make it harder for the interrogator to tell who is who and will increase the possibility that the interrogator will make a wrong decision.

Will a machine ever be intelligent? Why or why not? (This may or may not be the same answer to the previous question).

I am with the view that a machine cannot ever be intelligent, due to my understanding of what it is to be intelligent. A machine can never actively find from the surrounding environment useful things and predict that these things can do itself good in the future. A machine can never make sense of all kinds of connotations in people’s words and thus fully understand each individual’s meaning beyond their own usage of language. A machine can never feel the world as we humans do to solve all kinds of unforseeable difficulties and to learn from its individual experiences and further form its own personality and view of the world. A machine can never act according to its own desire or belief. Or, at least, this is what we, as human beings, would not like to see and would prevent from the beginning of designing a machine.

How the Mind Works

Mind is the conscious thought of individuals processed by the brain in the charge of mental activities like memory, perception, reasoning, imagination, et. al.. When an individual gets stimuli from the outside world, mind empowers the individual to process the external input and to deal with it according to one's own will.
Mind’s working process begins from perceiving something. Inputs from the outside world trigger the mind's awareness. Some “Action” takes place in “The external world” and we perceive it through one or more of the bodily senses, which enables us to see, to hear and to feel. Then the stimuli get processed and sent into the working memory and long-term memory part of the mind for discrimination.
For example, when we are reading books, we pay attention to the words and the sensory system sends the information to the working memory in our brain. While information is stored there, we search in the long-term memory for the match between the incoming information and what inside our memory, which contains all the linguistic knowledge we have already had. If these two match, the outcome is sent to the working memory and we are able to recognize the words and then further able to read them out or explain them to others.
The inputs just mentioned that trigger the mental activities are something in the external world. This is a “bottom-up” information processing. However, the inputs can also be something from the “inside”, such as the inner thought or memory of one’s own. In this way, the human understanding is not guided by the external materials, but by the knowledge that has been stored in the memory or the brain. For example, if you have a blueprint of an electricity-supplying system, as a person without any professional knowledge, you might need to rely heavily on the picture to identify what the various patterns stand for. But if you are an experienced engineer, with much professional knowledge equipped in mind, you can identify the function of the blueprint at once without much searching in your brain. Therefore, the information processing is a “top-down” way.
It seems interesting that sometimes we are not aware of our mental activities. For instance, when we see words like “bed” and “book”, we recognize them immediately and think they are too easy and we do not need to think about them. And when we are walking, we are not aware that we are using the mind to guide the motor system to function. Yet in other times, if we have a troublesome issue in mind, we are fully conscious that “We are thinking about it”. When the information we are processing is so familiar for us, we need little mental resource for deal with it, and it will fall under the automatic control of the mind. When the information needs much mental resource to be processed, we would be conscious that we are “using the mind” to deal with it and thus it is under “conscious control”. It seems that at one time, only one conscious process can occur in our mind, otherwise the information will interfere with each other.