This is a summary of the article Constructionism and Deconstructionism
Author: Pavel Boytchev, Sofia University, Bulgaria.
Publisher: Constructivist Foundations
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Constructionism and Deconstructionism
Boytchev studies how constructionism works in real classrooms. He tests it at two levels: a university course and a secondary school program. He finds a hidden phase in learning that gets ignored: deconstruction.
Constructivism says people build knowledge through experience. Teachers guide rather than transmit facts. Dewey and Montessori pioneered this idea. Piaget extended it, describing learning as a process where students absorb new information into existing mental models.
Seymour Papert built on Piaget’s work and called it constructionism. His key claim: building physical objects helps build mental understanding. He also stressed that construction should happen in public, where others can see the process.
Boytchev’s course, Geometry of Motion, started in 2007 at Sofia University. It combines math, physics, and computer science. Students learn to represent motion through virtual mechanisms.
In 2010, Boytchev built Mecho, a programming library for constructing virtual mechanical devices. Students used it to build mechanisms from parts like beams and gears.
The tool struggled at first. During its first three years, 93% of students avoided using it. Boytchev identified four barriers:
– The learning barrier: only 15 hours were allotted to teach a new language, demonstrate motion, and explain Mecho.
– The conceptual barrier: building 3D projects was too complex for students to manage.
– The mathematical barrier: students couldn’t apply 3D orientation using Euler angles.
– The procedural barrier: 25 evaluation criteria overwhelmed students trying to meet them all at once.
Boytchev fixed each barrier. He rewrote Mecho in C++, a language students already knew. He automated 3D navigation so students could focus on the mechanism itself. He replaced Euler angles with four simpler angles. He grouped the 25 criteria into five ordered levels.
The results were clear. Student engagement jumped from 7% to 56%, an eight-fold increase. Enrollment nearly doubled too, growing from 36 students in 2012-2013 to 57 in 2014-2015.
Secondary school level: the weSPOT and Virtual Classroom projects
Boytchev also studied inquiry-based learning (IBL) with sixth graders (ages 12-13). IBL asks students to find answers through questions rather than absorb pre-packaged facts.
The first project, weSPOT, built a model with six phases and 40 components for structuring inquiry-based learning.
The second project ran a competition called “My Classroom: The Most Energy Efficient.” Three classes of 20 students each measured temperature, weather, and room conditions like open windows and air conditioner use. The pilot ran from November 17, 2012 to June 5, 2013.
This approach had problems. Data collection took three months, too long to hold sixth graders’ interest. Students also couldn’t repeat experiments or test different starting conditions.
For year two, Boytchev built the Virtual Classroom, a simulation tool. He made two decisions that seemed risky at the time. First, the simulation ran continuously with no start or stop button. Second, students could set unnatural conditions, like snow at 40°C, and watch the simulation self-correct toward equilibrium.
The tool shipped without documentation. Students had to discover its features themselves. This forced genuine inquiry. Some students ran nearly identical experiments and got opposite results due to small differences in starting conditions, a valuable lesson in scientific precision.
The core finding: deconstruction
After running both projects, Boytchev identified a pattern. Learning through construction actually happens in phases:
1. Deconstruction: breaking existing knowledge into smaller, reusable pieces.
2. Construction: reassembling those pieces into new personal understanding.
3. Creativity (optional): rearranging the pieces in original ways.
Most educational tools and research focus on phase two, construction. But Boytchev found phases one and three cause the most trouble for students. Deconstruction is a prerequisite. If students can’t break down new information, they fail at construction too.
He identifies four ways deconstruction shows up in his courses:
– Debugging: breaking down a program to find what’s wrong with it.
– Animation design: breaking complex motion into simple mathematical functions.
– Problem solving: breaking a problem into components like theorems or algorithms.
– Pattern recognition: finding meaningful structure in something that looks chaotic.
The problem with deconstruction: it’s hard to formalize. There’s no clear method to teach it, unlike construction, which has established tools and techniques.
Deconstruction beyond education
Boytchev argues deconstruction happens throughout life, not just in classrooms. A child breaks open a toy to see how it works. A scientist reverse-engineers a biological process. Even mathematics itself was built by deconstructing complex ideas into basic axioms.
The future of education
Boytchev argues that simply adding technology to classrooms (ICT) hasn’t fixed education. His proposed alternative: deconstruct education itself into its basic components, then rebuild it from scratch.
He points to three factors that will shape this future:
– Digitality: education is shifting from hands-on learning to manipulating virtual objects. He wants to merge both approaches.
– Ubiquity: learning that happens anywhere, anytime, through any media.
– Transparency: technology becoming so seamless that virtual and physical classrooms may become indistinguishable.
Conclusion
Boytchev’s central argument: deconstruction is the neglected half of learning. Educators focus almost entirely on construction, leaving deconstruction unsupported and unstudied. He calls for two steps before education can truly change: first, support deconstruction within existing education; second, deconstruct education as a system. Only then, he argues, can something genuinely new be built.