Learning techniques

Today’s session of the GABFEST Club session (at Window on America center Dnipropetrovsk) was dedicated to the topic “Learning techniques”. The focus of discussion was on the ‘Insight Learning” theory by W. Kohler, a professor of psychology widely known in the USA.
To start the discussion we have remembered the discoveries made by the Greek Archimedes (the “Eureka” story) and Isaac Newton (a dropping apple case).
Such terms as ‘insight”, ‘insight learning” and “Aha moment” were introduced to the audience. Insight, in learning theory, is an immediate and clear learning or understanding that takes place without overt trial-and-error testing. Insight occurs in human learning when people recognize relationships (or make novel associations between objects or actions) that can help them solve new problems.Once the basic terms were defined we watched a biographical video about professor. Much of the scientific knowledge concerning insight derives from work on animal behavior that was conducted by 20th-century psychologist Wolfgang Köhler. In one experiment Köhler placed a banana outside the cage of a hungry chimpanzee, Sultan, and gave the animal two sticks, each too short for pulling in the food, but joinable to make a single stick of sufficient length. Sultan tried unsuccessfully to use each stick, and he even used one stick to push the other along to touch the banana. Later, apparently after having given up, Sultan accidentally joined the sticks, observed the result, and immediately ran with the longer tool to retrieve the banana. When the experiment was repeated, Sultan joined the two sticks and solved the problem immediately. This result, however, is ambiguous, because it appeared that Sultan solved the problem by accident — not through insight.
We have watched and discussed several “National Geographic” videos about clever animals. The club members shared their own experiences about having an “Aha! moment”.
During the second part of the session the WOA Head Svitlana Usenko has presented the book display of the new  donations  by the US Embassy in Ukraine.
At the end of the session all the new comers introduced themselves.
The session was very educational and enjoyed by all the participants.
The number of participants – 32 persons.