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Kid Health Experts Attack Video Game Summer Camp
Jack Action writes "The University of British Columbia runs a summer camp where kids get to play computer games for three hours a day. The camp organizers say it is 'a good social opportunity for some kids who didn't fit into other programs.' However, health professionals declare they are 'troubled' by the camp. A professor in UBC's department of medicine says kids should be outside and engaged in 'unstructured play,' while the CEO of an NGO that monitors kids' health chimes in that they already spend too much time in front of screens and not exercising. Do the health experts have a point, or are they just criticizing something they don't understand, or perhaps is not to their taste?"
The camp organizers say it is 'a good social opportunity for some kids who didn't fit into other programs.'
Back in High School we had a really cool teacher that let us setup a LAN with 5 computers in his classroom; We mostly played Quake and Warcraft II. It even expanded to the point that we had one guy running a D&D campaign, others would bring their MTG cards, and one guy was messing around with building robots. Point being, a good bulk of the guys that showed up were guys that weren't getting any meaningful peer interaction otherwise, because the other clubs and activities weren't up their alley . Gaming would happen, yes, but since there were only 5 computers a lot of socialization happened as well.
Now this doesn't make a lick of sense to me.
I admit to being a slacker. I don't know whether or not I'm a "genius" of any kind, and in fact I doubt it, but I passed all of high school and a 4 year college (in 6 years, admittedly) doing virtually none of the homework assigned. I have a decent grasp on pretty much everything I set my mind to in spite of that, even just barely passing. Am I ready to jump into any number of careers that require some of the more arcane things they taught? No. But I'd probably put myself in the 60-80% range of understanding for a lot of it. I'm fairly sure that at one point in high school, I didn't study for a math class, was the first to finish the test, and also got 100.
If you as a school system have to work someone 1000% as hard as I worked--or more--to get them that remaining 20-40%, you are completely out of your fucking minds.
And I don't want to hear any teachers telling me how hard it is to teach kids. I'm not bashing the teachers. It's possible nobody in the world today has figured out a classroom environment / mass teaching paradigm that actually encourages 90-100% retention without inordinate amounts of work. More likely, whether anyone's figured it out or not, virtually nobody is trying to implement it, and instead they're all working using the methods passed down from previous years, decades, centuries.
I'll tell you what, though; I was always up to listen to things and up for getting hands-on with anything. Homework was something that for whatever reason totally freaked me out, so I didn't do it, but if you gave me something interesting to listen to, or something interesting to do, I was all over it. I'm sure there are plenty of others. "Study this because studies say studying will teach you things" is no replacement for teaching.
End rant before I go in circles again.
I think that guideline is from college where you have 2 classes/week. Teachers teach what they were taught.
3 hours is only a small percentage of the waking day, so IMHO this camp sounds like a normal balanced summer camp.
Some camps are more intense. I once came across a daily schedule for a girls gymnastics camp, and it read like something from Army basic training. Workouts from 0700 to 1700. A good riding camp will have kids in the saddle five hours a day. Camps for competitive sports are so intense they're scary.