3V0233.09 Debugging (major story) 9/12

A LITTLE DEBUGGING — Sunday morning I gave Peggy the “Fermi Spool” experiments wheel and axle: two 3″ wooden wheels with a fat pencil between them as axle. This was Peggy’s first rolling toy — and it was able to get away from her. When it came my way I rolled it back to her. Other times she would crawl over to where it stopped to retrieve it. In her little bedroom play area, one boundary is our bed, raised clear of the floor by a simple metal frame. The spool rolled under the bed and the axle caught on the upright. Peggy approached the bed frame from the end of the bed — some 12″ from the support. Crawling directly toward her goal, Peggy first whacked her head on the bedspring (a box spring). Then, reaching, stretching her arm to its utmost, she still fell inches short of the target. what a wailing was there! Crying too. Peggy was angry and frustrated. My strong inclination was to help her, roll the spool over. Instead, I waited. As she flailed about, her head made enough of an excursion [?] that she could see one of the wheels around the corner of the box spring. She stopped crying and began a different solution, crawling around the corner then parallel to the bed till close enough to search for the spool directly.

RELEVANCE — This is a straightforward example of Peggy’s stumbling [into] the “bypass” solution to an impasse. It would be most interesting to return her to the same situation and observe if she has remembered the specific solution — then present her with an analogous problem (or maybe do so first).

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