Constructive Web site for psychological education

Larisa L. Travina: Program Systems Institute RAS; Pereslavl-Zalessky, Russia; E-mail: larisa@ai.botik.ru

Evgeny D. Patarakin: University of Pereslavl; Pereslavl-Zalessky, Russia; E-mail: pat@dll.botik.ru

We believe that educational Web site ought to be as conceptual as a book or a film. The main concept of our Constructive Web site is a Kelly's psychology of a man as "personal scientists" in anticipating the world. This psychology offers the opportunity to integrate many different knowledge representation approaches and different psychological technics within one framework and one Constructive Web Site where students played role of researchers.

There are three ongoing educational projects the results of which are stored on Constructive Web Site:

"Lets play with our own Constructs!"
"Lets deceive your school psychologist!"
"TEN"

"Lets play with our own Constructs"

Within the framework of the Personal construct microworld students can create a computer map of their inner worlds and then improve this map. While using microworld procedures you can choose the personality of a student as a subject for the study. The system of constructs, received through microworld commands, reveals the system of notions used by the person in everyday life without explicit representation. Most significally, in a difference to general psychological tests, student can use microworld commands to add new constructs, to delete unimportant or surplus constructs, and therefore make better self-knowledge presentation.
In the last version of the microworld we have used methaphors "list is a table" and convert UCB-logo lists of clasters directry to html-tables.

So, Netscape users can see clasters as a tables.

The project "Lets deceive your school psychologist!"

The main idea of the project "Deceive your school psychologist!" is to teach students to analyze the drawings of "Nonexistant animal" and after it to find an answer to the question: "Is knowledge so powerful that it can change our behaviour?" Students 10 to 15 years old participate in this Project. To start with, all of them drew and named nonexisting animals. Then the tutor draw students' attention to the following features of nonexisting animals: Size, Direction, Position on the sheet of paper,? Parts of the body, Type of desigh, Sense? meaning of the animal's name.
Full text of this tutorial (in Russian) is available as a part of the University Psychological Web-site. After the lecture and discussion all the participants of the Project made new drawings of nonexisting animals. They have not decieved the psychologist but changed some nonverbal constructs.

Project "10"

The main idea of Project-10 is to create a community of imaginary animals. The children are learning to work with different media and to develop a better understanding of the biological properties of living creatures. Through creative activities children aquire basic notions of ecological balance and intricate interconnections between different species. Every particapant has done the following:

he or she drew an imaginary living organism (plant or animal);
made a plasticine sculpture of the animal or plant;
wrote a story about the relations between the different non-existent species.

During all these projects students played the role of researchers, studying their own mental categories and mental categories of another people, evaluated the changes of their own mind during educational activity.