Learning Activities (Actividades de Aprendizaje)

What this is. Smoother’s practical catalog: around fifty activities with evidence and purpose, organized so that the person designing and the person orienting can choose, compose and sequence what they need in each Learning Unit (Unidad de Aprendizaje). The activities are the smallest-scale operational units — what the person who is learning does minute by minute. They are distinct from the complete pedagogical instruments (Case Studies, Role Simulation, Scenarios, Riddles, Visualizations), which are pieces with a structure of their own.

What the catalog is for

A practical inventory, so the wheel is not reinvented in every design. Informed selection: each activity says when to use it, what it exercises and what evidence it has behind it. Composition: what combines well with what. And methodological traceability: each activity is linked to one of the six Learning Task Types (Tipos de Tarea de Aprendizaje — the cognitive work being done) and to the components of the Learning Object (Objeto de Aprendizaje) that it exercises.

Five general principles

Purpose before technique. An activity serves a component of the Unit’s learning object; it is never applied for its own sake.
Variety over prescription. A well-designed Unit combines activities of different types, to sustain interest and cover multiple preferences.
Evidence over tradition. Where research backs a technique, it is cited. Where it is an original framework or one from practice, it is labeled honestly.
Application over exposition. Priority goes to activities that require doing, deciding, creating or reflecting over those that only require receiving.
Whole tasks over part-task practice. Most of the catalog exercises whole tasks — something is solved in its real operational form. Part-task practice is focused training on a routine sub-skill that needs automation, and it is useful only when that automation is the bottleneck; it never replaces work with whole tasks.

How each activity is described

Six fixed fields: what the person who is learning does · what it exercises (which components of the learning object it develops) · when to use it · evidence · sources · what it combines well with, plus variations where they apply.

Organization: by Learning Task, plus three cross-cutting layers

The activities are grouped by the six Task Types:

Exploration and Comprehension — prior-knowledge activation, worked-example study, three-part lesson, structured reading with prediction, interactive video with embedded questions, guided observation.
Interpretation — self-explanation prompts, classification of examples and non-examples, analogical mapping, variation theory, concept maps built by the person who is learning, reciprocal teaching, the Feynman technique.
Critical Analysis — analysis of erroneous examples, confronting misconceptions, lateral reading, source evaluation, argument-structure mapping, steelmanning, the five whys.
Application and Creation — productive failure, faded worked examples, concrete→pictorial→abstract sequences, concept attainment, prototyping, role play, backward chaining, snowballing, the purposeful-and-deliberate practice loop.
Assessment and Feedback — free recall, cued recall, retrieval roulette, hinge questions, exit tickets, muddiest point, 3-2-1 cards, confidence ratings, flashcard retrieval and spaced review.
Metacognition — pre-task planning sheet, error journal, self-assessment of study strategies, goal setting, calibration check, learning journal.

And three layers that cut across all six:

Debate and collaborative work — Think-Pair-Share, Save the Last Word, fishbowl, Socratic seminar, snowball discussion, concentric circles, jigsaw, talking chips.
Language scaffolding — sentence frames, tiered vocabulary practice, vocabulary pre-teaching: so that the demand is one of thinking and not of language.
Play — six forms (competition, puzzle, role, construction, performance, collection), added in September 2026 because until then the catalog did not have a single entry whose verb was to play.

How to use it

By Task Type: identify which Task Type is needed at each moment of the Unit and choose one or two activities from that section. By sequence, with already-tested patterns — for example, to introduce a new topic: prior-knowledge activation → worked example → self-explanation → cued recall; to go deeper into a familiar one: productive failure → analysis of erroneous examples → faded examples → free recall. By modality, with explicit adaptations: nano-learning admits only the structurally compatible activities and excludes those that require extended time; diploma programs and bootcamps take in those with long-term power.

Evidence

Level: varies by activity. Each entry carries its own label, under a four-level convention: Strong (multiple studies or meta-analyses with consistent effects) · Moderate (reasonable and replicated evidence, less extensive) · Emerging (promising initial research, still limited) · Original (a framework of our own or from the pedagogical tradition, without direct experimental support — no less valuable, and labeled honestly). The organization by the six Learning Tasks plus the cross-cutting layers is Smoother’s own.

The Play section carries its label written on its face. The six forms are Original — a Smoother design position, authored by Carlos Miranda Levy, and none of them is backed by play research: the verified neighboring literature deals with designed digital games and with gamification, neither of the two reports adolescent ages, and therefore neither licenses any form of play in this catalog. The bound on the other side — the seductive-details effect, robust in direction and in mechanism and small in magnitude, with a university or adult sample — exempts no entry: a form of play adjacent to the concept is a design defect. That is why every declaration of play answers the A5 test in writing: what is the person practicing while they play, and would removing the play remove the learning or only the appetite? Both answers are admissible, but the answer is written down — without it the activity is decoration, not design.

Elements absorbed from external frameworks. A technique that comes from an external pedagogical approach enters the catalog as an activity with a label of its own, justified by its own literature and never by that of the framework it came from, and without carrying that framework’s name where the name would import authority the activity does not have.

Acknowledgement. The systematic curation of the catalog — the evidence-level convention, the honest labeling and several named activities — draws on Gareth Manning’s open-source library education-agent-skills (CC BY-SA 4.0), including the honesty of its explicit list of exclusions. The debt is explicit and permanent, and this catalog is likewise offered as a base on which others may build.

Learning Tasks · Memory and Learning · Case Studies · Role Simulation · Scenarios · Riddles and Puzzles · Elements of Materials · Learning Units · Study and Practice Techniques · Professional Frameworks · Experience Layer

Source

protocol/smoother-actividades-de-aprendizaje.md — state of 2026-09-17 (open section of the CHANGELOG, after 0.40.0).