Slashdot Mirror

As someone's sig on slashdot says, "all mammals learn by playing". I have a site where I talk about ideas like this. Science/engineering/math/philosophy/history are (according to my wild theories) actually very naturally interesting to average humans, but the presentation of them is so pathetically boring that it's no wonder that they look for something else to do when the subject gets brought up.

Video games often present optimization problems that would be rather dull if stated formally, but in the presentation of the game are quite engaging, even addictive.

My belief is that pretty much anything worth learning has this addictive element, and that, if we worked at it, we could start off sparking kids' interest, then provide more stuff to satisfy that interest, and encourage deeper exploration. Like drug pushing, basically.

Anyway, if you want to read stuff about it you can go to http://fulcrum.org/old_index.html if you want to read more about it.

You can see (with a shockwave browser, sorry) a couple of things I've done to sort of get started at

http://fulcrum.org/test/stretcher.html

http;//fulcrum.org/index.html

http://fulcrum.org/test/oodometer

i have little doubt that people will post all kinds of "Video games are exactly what kids today DON'T need! In my day a slide rule was what everyone wanted for Christmas!", etc in response to this story. But the truth is that people get into a field because something about it was intriguing to them. They learned it in spite of the way it was taught, not because of it. All I'm suggesting is that we try to make this happen less by the occasional accident and more often by design.

Everyone whines that, e.g., legislators don't know anything about technology, but then when you try to suggest a way, through making an introduction to technology fun and interesting, to fix that problem, it gets railed aganst as being nothing but glitz, etc, etc.

If you want "tough" subjects to remain an exclusive club, keep making the classes boring. If you want more people to understand the things you are interested in, you have to find a way to get them intrigued about it.

The "flippy triangle thing" on my home page is the beginning of something like that. It's an illustration of an abstract algebraic group. I'm trying to present it as an interactive art piece that will put the simple question "what is that?" in random passers-by's heads. Getting people to say "Hmmm, I wonder what that is?" about an abstract mathematical concept is a first step to a world I envision where we work as hard to entice people to "get into" science, mathematics, and history as hard as we try now to get them interested/addicted to the latest reality show stunt.

In other words, I think this guy is on the right track.

As someone's sig on slashdot says, "all mammals learn by playing". I have a site where I talk about ideas like this. Science/engineering/math/philosophy/history are (according to my wild theories) actually very naturally interesting to average humans, but the presentation of them is so pathetically boring that it's no wonder that they look for something else to do when the subject gets brought up.

Video games often present optimization problems that would be rather dull if stated formally, but in the presentation of the game are quite engaging, even addictive.

My belief is that pretty much anything worth learning has this addictive element, and that, if we worked at it, we could start off sparking kids' interest, then provide more stuff to satisfy that interest, and encourage deeper exploration. Like drug pushing, basically.

Anyway, if you want to read stuff about it you can go to http://fulcrum.org/old_index.html if you want to read more about it.

You can see (with a shockwave browser, sorry) a couple of things I've done to sort of get started at

http://fulcrum.org/test/stretcher.html

http;//fulcrum.org/index.html

http://fulcrum.org/test/oodometer

i have little doubt that people will post all kinds of "Video games are exactly what kids today DON'T need! In my day a slide rule was what everyone wanted for Christmas!", etc in response to this story. But the truth is that people get into a field because something about it was intriguing to them. They learned it in spite of the way it was taught, not because of it. All I'm suggesting is that we try to make this happen less by the occasional accident and more often by design.

Everyone whines that, e.g., legislators don't know anything about technology, but then when you try to suggest a way, through making an introduction to technology fun and interesting, to fix that problem, it gets railed aganst as being nothing but glitz, etc, etc.

If you want "tough" subjects to remain an exclusive club, keep making the classes boring. If you want more people to understand the things you are interested in, you have to find a way to get them intrigued about it.

The "flippy triangle thing" on my home page is the beginning of something like that. It's an illustration of an abstract algebraic group. I'm trying to present it as an interactive art piece that will put the simple question "what is that?" in random passers-by's heads. Getting people to say "Hmmm, I wonder what that is?" about an abstract mathematical concept is a first step to a world I envision where we work as hard to entice people to "get into" science, mathematics, and history as hard as we try now to get them interested/addicted to the latest reality show stunt.

In other words, I think this guy is on the right track.

As someone's sig on slashdot says, "all mammals learn by playing". I have a site where I talk about ideas like this. Science/engineering/math/philosophy/history are (according to my wild theories) actually very naturally interesting to average humans, but the presentation of them is so pathetically boring that it's no wonder that they look for something else to do when the subject gets brought up.

Video games often present optimization problems that would be rather dull if stated formally, but in the presentation of the game are quite engaging, even addictive.

My belief is that pretty much anything worth learning has this addictive element, and that, if we worked at it, we could start off sparking kids' interest, then provide more stuff to satisfy that interest, and encourage deeper exploration. Like drug pushing, basically.

Anyway, if you want to read stuff about it you can go to http://fulcrum.org/old_index.html if you want to read more about it.

You can see (with a shockwave browser, sorry) a couple of things I've done to sort of get started at

http://fulcrum.org/test/stretcher.html

http;//fulcrum.org/index.html

http://fulcrum.org/test/oodometer

i have little doubt that people will post all kinds of "Video games are exactly what kids today DON'T need! In my day a slide rule was what everyone wanted for Christmas!", etc in response to this story. But the truth is that people get into a field because something about it was intriguing to them. They learned it in spite of the way it was taught, not because of it. All I'm suggesting is that we try to make this happen less by the occasional accident and more often by design.

Everyone whines that, e.g., legislators don't know anything about technology, but then when you try to suggest a way, through making an introduction to technology fun and interesting, to fix that problem, it gets railed aganst as being nothing but glitz, etc, etc.

If you want "tough" subjects to remain an exclusive club, keep making the classes boring. If you want more people to understand the things you are interested in, you have to find a way to get them intrigued about it.

The "flippy triangle thing" on my home page is the beginning of something like that. It's an illustration of an abstract algebraic group. I'm trying to present it as an interactive art piece that will put the simple question "what is that?" in random passers-by's heads. Getting people to say "Hmmm, I wonder what that is?" about an abstract mathematical concept is a first step to a world I envision where we work as hard to entice people to "get into" science, mathematics, and history as hard as we try now to get them interested/addicted to the latest reality show stunt.

In other words, I think this guy is on the right track.

As someone's sig on slashdot says, "all mammals learn by playing". I have a site where I talk about ideas like this. Science/engineering/math/philosophy/history are (according to my wild theories) actually very naturally interesting to average humans, but the presentation of them is so pathetically boring that it's no wonder that they look for something else to do when the subject gets brought up.

Video games often present optimization problems that would be rather dull if stated formally, but in the presentation of the game are quite engaging, even addictive.

My belief is that pretty much anything worth learning has this addictive element, and that, if we worked at it, we could start off sparking kids' interest, then provide more stuff to satisfy that interest, and encourage deeper exploration. Like drug pushing, basically.

Anyway, if you want to read stuff about it you can go to http://fulcrum.org/old_index.html if you want to read more about it.

You can see (with a shockwave browser, sorry) a couple of things I've done to sort of get started at

http://fulcrum.org/test/stretcher.html

http;//fulcrum.org/index.html

http://fulcrum.org/test/oodometer

i have little doubt that people will post all kinds of "Video games are exactly what kids today DON'T need! In my day a slide rule was what everyone wanted for Christmas!", etc in response to this story. But the truth is that people get into a field because something about it was intriguing to them. They learned it in spite of the way it was taught, not because of it. All I'm suggesting is that we try to make this happen less by the occasional accident and more often by design.

Everyone whines that, e.g., legislators don't know anything about technology, but then when you try to suggest a way, through making an introduction to technology fun and interesting, to fix that problem, it gets railed aganst as being nothing but glitz, etc, etc.

If you want "tough" subjects to remain an exclusive club, keep making the classes boring. If you want more people to understand the things you are interested in, you have to find a way to get them intrigued about it.

The "flippy triangle thing" on my home page is the beginning of something like that. It's an illustration of an abstract algebraic group. I'm trying to present it as an interactive art piece that will put the simple question "what is that?" in random passers-by's heads. Getting people to say "Hmmm, I wonder what that is?" about an abstract mathematical concept is a first step to a world I envision where we work as hard to entice people to "get into" science, mathematics, and history as hard as we try now to get them interested/addicted to the latest reality show stunt.

In other words, I think this guy is on the right track.

As someone's sig on slashdot says, "all mammals learn by playing". I have a site where I talk about ideas like this. Science/engineering/math/philosophy/history are (according to my wild theories) actually very naturally interesting to average humans, but the presentation of them is so pathetically boring that it's no wonder that they look for something else to do when the subject gets brought up.

Video games often present optimization problems that would be rather dull if stated formally, but in the presentation of the game are quite engaging, even addictive.

My belief is that pretty much anything worth learning has this addictive element, and that, if we worked at it, we could start off sparking kids' interest, then provide more stuff to satisfy that interest, and encourage deeper exploration. Like drug pushing, basically.

Anyway, if you want to read stuff about it you can go to http://fulcrum.org/old_index.html if you want to read more about it.

You can see (with a shockwave browser, sorry) a couple of things I've done to sort of get started at

http://fulcrum.org/test/stretcher.html

http;//fulcrum.org/index.html

http://fulcrum.org/test/oodometer

i have little doubt that people will post all kinds of "Video games are exactly what kids today DON'T need! In my day a slide rule was what everyone wanted for Christmas!", etc in response to this story. But the truth is that people get into a field because something about it was intriguing to them. They learned it in spite of the way it was taught, not because of it. All I'm suggesting is that we try to make this happen less by the occasional accident and more often by design.

Everyone whines that, e.g., legislators don't know anything about technology, but then when you try to suggest a way, through making an introduction to technology fun and interesting, to fix that problem, it gets railed aganst as being nothing but glitz, etc, etc.

If you want "tough" subjects to remain an exclusive club, keep making the classes boring. If you want more people to understand the things you are interested in, you have to find a way to get them intrigued about it.

The "flippy triangle thing" on my home page is the beginning of something like that. It's an illustration of an abstract algebraic group. I'm trying to present it as an interactive art piece that will put the simple question "what is that?" in random passers-by's heads. Getting people to say "Hmmm, I wonder what that is?" about an abstract mathematical concept is a first step to a world I envision where we work as hard to entice people to "get into" science, mathematics, and history as hard as we try now to get them interested/addicted to the latest reality show stunt.

In other words, I think this guy is on the right track.

Let's phrase the question a different way:

"Should learning be engaging?"

Scientists do the hard, drudgerous parts of their work. Whay? Not because they spent a lot of time doing hard, drudgerous work in school, and they're practiced at it. They do it because they want to know the answer.

Kids will do hard, tedious things, too, if they want to know the answer. Good "real science in real classrooms" projects almost always involve a lot of fairly tedious steps, but the kids are willing to do that because their minds are turned on, and they want to know.

Watch a baby developing fine motor skills. It's painful--you have to sit on your hands or turn away after a while to suppress the urge to "do it for them". But they do it. They do "pen drills"--taking the lid off a pen and putting the lid on again, taking it off, putting it on. They work and work and work to get that lid on. Who is standing over them, threatening them with bad grades or detention for not getting their work done?

No one. The human mind will do the hard stuff once it gets interested. It's a human trait. The idea that we actually need to force kids through various drills is unproven at best. There is a tremendous amount of evidence to the contrary.

(See similar rants at

http://fulcrum.org/old_index.html
).

Now, I agree that it doesn't really do what we want to just have whizbang "hey that's cool" demonstrations and stuff. There's an article on that site about combustion--the "hey, that's cool" stuff is like lighting the leaves and dry grass, then you want to have something a little bigger for the fire to feed on, and eventually you get to being able to throw big logs on there. If all you do is show kids Bill Nye, it's like lighting a pile of dry leaves. Yes, the interest flares right up, but if that's all you have it will burn out pretty quickly and not really accomplish much. What you need is a good activity to go on to once their interest has been sparked by something Bill Nye'ish (Bill Nye's shows generally suggest a "try this yourself" activity, that would probably be a good place to start).

Of course, in my opinion the right way to do this is to show all the kids Bill Nye, then see who wants to try the "do it yourself" activity. Show kids the equivalent art or dance stuff and give them the opportunity to dig further into that. Let whoever wants to dig further into each thing so so, and whoever doesn't can do whatever it was that did spark their interest.

Some kids will want to work hard to learn to dance. Some will want to work hard to learn science or math. "But everyone needs to be able to do math!", you reply. Not really, and that isn't the point. If people need to know a topic, they will be interested in learning it, and they can learn it then. If you force them through it before they are ready, they will develop anxiety or general dislike for it, and you will have a hard time ever getting them to learn it when they finally do have something they want to do that would require it.

Attempting to teach a kid something they don't want to learn is, in many cases, _worse_ than a waste of time--it's a negative use of time. It convinces them that the topic is boring/hard/useless, and severely damages our chances of ever getting them to see what is interesting, fun, or useful about it.

Or, at least, that's what I think.

Second, many government research contracts force the professors to share their code.

Can you back this up? I am not sure why it was in the same paragraph with:

The Mach kernel, for instance, began life at Carnagie Mellon thanks to government money. Rick Rashid, one of the project's leaders, released it with a very open BSD-like license. He says that work developed with the public money deserves to be as free as possible. This has been going on for some time.

In this case, you have a person who realized that decided he should license things this way, and did so. I think that, when it happens, this is why.

I have worked on various projects that were funded by your tax money, and they are now being sold as proprietary software. In that case, the person who got the grant did not decide to put it out as open source. I also do not have numbers to back myself up, but I am guessing that the vast majority of government contracts do not require the source code to be released under a BSD type license.

I wrote something about this on the siliconvalley.com debate with Mundie et al:

http://www.fulcrum.org/features/public_domain.html