Constructivism in Mexican Elementary School Education: Designing a Platform for Cooperative Learning Ivan A. Garcia and Carla L. Pacheco Technological University of the Mixtec Region/Postgraduate Department, Oaxaca, Mexico Email: {ivan, leninca}mixteco.utm.mx Abstract—In Mexico, the conventional teaching approach, when applied specifically to elementary school, seems to fall short of attaining the overall quality objective. The main consequence of this problem is when teachers are not sure that their students really understand the dynamic nature of concepts and mechanism since an early age, particularly in elementary school. This paper presents a pedagogical/technological platform, based on constructivism ideas, as a means of making the learning process in elementary school more efficient and interesting. The constructivist platform presented here uses graphical simulators developed for Web 2.0 as a support tool, creating a teaching and learning environment in which practical experiments can be undertaken as each topic is introduced and explained. Index Terms— Computer based education, pedagogy, cooperative learning, interactive platform, constructivist theory I. INTRODUCTION Nowadays, Latin America is composed by heterogeneous and fragmented societies which live between “pre and post modernity” in relation with the education. There is a lack of infrastructure and ideas that make it impossible to bring education for every child; moreover, when this education constitutes, considerably, the pillar for all countries around the world. The challenges in the educational sector have been affected by an increasing demand of services; it is necessary to improve the educational achievements and the necessity of innovation to participate in the possibilities of knowledge and information societies [2]. However, in spite of this situation, we are not paying attention to the advantages that could provide interaction with the different intellectual capabilities of students to improve the group learning and, by consequence, individual learning: something that has been denominated as: cooperative learning. The cooperative learning has been used since the 70’s when researchers proposed different approaches and studies to implement cooperative learning techniques with students at different ages and levels. Since then, the teacher was responsible for organizing, guiding and recording all activities of his students through support material as blackboards, books and templates, among others [20]. At the same time, many psychologists like [19] and [12] affirmed that the learning process was, fundamentally, an experience of social character where the language played a basic role as mediation tool not only between teacher and student; it was useful between all classmates too. The students learned how to explain, justify or argue their ideas against other students. According with Vygotsky: “…in a cooperative scenario, the students interchange their ideas for coordinating them to achieve shared objectives. When the problems arise, the combination of activities with communication will conduce to learn” [26]. Thus, the construction process for shared knowledge is a huge help in individual learning. In this sense, the cooperative learning is a social activity that involves a student community where the knowledge is shared and developed; according to [9] the knowledge social construction. Cooperative learning has been defined as the acquisition of knowledge, abilities, and attitudes through the interaction among the group. Recently, formal methods in classrooms have been developed and implemented; all of these have the main objective to improve the learning process through learning modules. These modules, physically perceptible, use situation modeling and provide a specific representation of a topic. Usually, the learning modules include experiments in the classroom with demonstrations through oral presentations. However, in a collective way, all students have to develop and acquire the necessary abilities for working as a team, they have to establish performance methods, generate alternatives, explain, justify and evaluate solutions; this process enables the existence of an effective collaboration [3]. In the last decade, IT development has stood out and new forms of society interactions have been created. With these, increasingly new IT systems have been developed with the intention of improving the cooperative interaction among users [21], [1], [28]. Moreover, different educative institutions which have adopted these technologies, have had to implement new methods for learning and teaching. Nevertheless, taking into account this influence and the impact of technological development on the society, nowadays our educational institutions are using a new set JOURNAL OF SOFTWARE, VOL. 5, NO. 6, JUNE 2010 565 © 2010 ACADEMY PUBLISHER doi:10.4304/jsw.5.6.565-572