Collective Development of Cognitive Abilities Using the “4C” Approach

The article continues a series of papers on collaborative research and learning. The subject of the study is a system consisting of an educational project group, subjects prescribed and a cognitive learning infrastructure. The latter includes the hardware and software components, an infrastructure service team, and a mentor component. The basic concept of the study is the necessity for mutual adjustment of all components of this system. The main research tool is the “4C” approach, which was the result of the development of cross-technologies of the situational center. The approach is based on the “collaborative”, “cognitive”, “configurable”, and “convergent” concepts. The service team consisted of a logician, a computer assistant and a facilitator. The members of the study groups were diagnosed using various methods, including MBTI. The possibilities of the approach are illustrated by two experimental studies of the authors. The first study involved the implementation of a reflexive version of the well-known Rock-Paper-Scissors game. The peculiarity was that the decision on the choice was made by pairs of players. The task of the study was a preliminary analysis of the algorithms for the solution, which were formed in groups. The second study consisted of an experimental study of the "uncanny valley" phenomenon. The peculiarity of this study was to test the hypothesis about the possibility of explaining this phenomenon using the theory of catastrophes in Whitney assembly format. The experiments were carried out with the participation of schoolchildren and students of Omsk and Vladivostok.