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Kids Can Swipe a Screen But Can't Use LEGOs
SpankiMonki sends this news from The Guardian:
"Children are arriving at nursery school able to 'swipe a screen' but lack the manipulative skills to play with building blocks, teachers have warned. They fear that children are being given tablets to use 'as a replacement for contact time with the parent' and say such habits are hindering progress at school. Addressing the Association of Teachers and Lecturers conference in Manchester on Tuesday, Colin Kinney said excessive use of technology damages concentration and causes behavioural problems such as irritability and a lack of control."
The issue is not the building blocks themselves, but the serious lack of coordination skills on the part of the children.
If you can't get a couple of blocks to snap together, how are you going to deal with tying your shoes?
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I didn't know that the bricks could only be used once, and in one specific order.
Allow me to blow your mind. Those same pieces can be used to build what ever you can imagine. Then they can be taken apart and used to build something totally different. The instructions are only a suggestion.
It because he uses the kragle.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
It's not the blocks that are important, it is the active use of imagination and motor skills. Comparatively less imagination and motor skills are used interact with a flat, rectangular panel of glass. Kids learn (partly) by playing and doing. With tablet screens, they are not doing as much. Fruit Ninja does is not as good as blocks.
Exposing children to new technology is a terrible idea.
An Egyptian legend relates that when the god Thoth revealed his invention of writing to King Thamos, the good King denounced it as the enemy of civilization. "Children and young people," protested the monarch, "who had hitherto been forced to apply themselves diligently to learn and retain whatever was taught them would cease to apply themselves and would neglect to exercise their memories."
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Most parents today are horrible.
So, just like all parents have always been everywhere, except in the halcyon myths of ahistorical memory, then.
Stories like this are hilarious. Do people really think that "moral panic over new tech" is going to sell to anyone who's been paying attention, well, ever?
Bad parents will always parent badly. New tech has nothing to do with it. Removing new tech from bad parents won't make them better. It will make them parent badly in different ways.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Reminds me of one of the most frustrating realizations of my life. When I was a kid, I was a big fan of Lego. I often asked for lego as gifts but rarely got any.
As an adult, I found out why. My mom asked me what a little boy in the family might want as a gift. I asked what he was into, and one of the things was Lego. Apparently he was a big fan too.
"Then you can't go wrong with more Lego," I said.
My mom replies "But he already has Lego."
*GIANT FUCKING FACEPALM*
Now it all made sense :-(
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Those same pieces can be used to build what ever you can imagine.
No so easily nowadays. Lego comes with huge numbers of very specialized pieces which are taylor made for that particular model. You can get the basic bricks but most Lego today is aimed at building one model and then playing with it rather than getting a pile of bricks and letting your imagination run wild.
There is one exception though: Mindstorms! This is simply brilliant and the new EV3 version even runs Linux! It's one of the few toys that are around today that I really wish I had been available when I was a kid.
Colin Kinney said excessive use of technology damages concentration and causes behavioural problems such as irritability and a lack of control.
Seriously? These `behavioural problems` describe every pre-schooler I've ever met.
Don Dugger
"Censeo Toto nos in Kansa esse decisse." - D. Gale
The main quote comes from a teacher who works for a think tank(that needs funding) talking about conversations he had with other teachers... not stuff he's done himself.
"I've spoken to a number of nursery teachers who have concerns over the increasing numbers of young pupils who can swipe a screen but have little or no manipulative skills to play with building blocks – or pupils who can't socialise with other pupils, but whose parents talk proudly of their ability to use a tablet or smartphone."
which is already concerning, as fine motor skills are very important, the other sentence in the article that worried me was the mention that kids now have trouble memorizing even simple lines for a play, since they are used to information being easily always available so they aren't putting in the effort of learning it.
As much as easy global information access is great, unless you learn the basics it's quite difficult to make sense of what's available and to have an informed opinion. Just because you have a river of information always available it doesn't help if you can't relate to it, it makes you that much more susceptible to being influenced, because since you are not able to discriminate between quality information and misleading or wrong information, any page/blog/article of somebody with an agenda can just point to "studies" that support their point (no matter how objectively wrong that point is) and it transforms informed discussions into popularity contests.
I don't think it's tinfoil hat time in terms of there being some sort of overall arching conspiracy about this, but it sure is concerning when you have a society like ours where media has many orders of magnitude more funding and impact than academia, I mean, even the word "academia" nowadays is overlaid with negative connotations (at least in North America) rather than the respect it should evoke: these days an actor/model stating an opinion can easily counterbalance hundreds of scientists/academics with fact-based studies.
Before the internet there were just as many crackpot theories around, however they were not presented as if they were the same as science, if you went to the library you wouldn't find in the astronomy section geocentric books shelved together with heliocentric and general relativity ones: now with your browser on the "internet library" you can find professional-looking sites pro/anti everything and without the tools learned in school/university how can you make sense of which is right? especially in cases where the science is counter-intuitive for a particular issue?
-- the cake is a lie
You're doing it wrong. LEGO kits are intended to be assembled into a model, then disassembled and reassembled into a different model. That's why the enclosed instruction book shows how to build more than one model. For a dramatization of how wrong you're doing it, go see The LEGO Movie.
Most parents today are horrible. They do NOT interact with the chile like laying on the floor and playing with them. Get your asses off the couch and lie on the floor playing with your kids showing them how to stack blocks, and play.
I gave my daughter a earfull having my granddaughter use the ipad at 2 to keep her entertained. No you play with her using physical objects, and interaction.
Most parents today are horrible. They do NOT interact with the chile like laying on the floor and playing with them. Get your asses off the couch and lie on the floor playing with your kids showing them how to stack blocks, and play.
I gave my daughter a earfull having my granddaughter use the ipad at 2 to keep her entertained. No you play with her using physical objects, and interaction.
You should really do both. My daughter had her own desktop computer before the age of 2. Mainly because she was so fascinated by me working on one all day. I loaded a bunch of edutainment programs on it for her. We didn't use it as a baby sitter though. We would do things together on it. Though sometimes she used it herself. But we also played with MegaBlocks when she was at that age too. It was fun to see how high we could stack them, or chase each other around with them on our fingers. As she got older we got Kinects and smaller Lego blocks. Eventually she needed a new computer and eventually a laptop. The only thing she asked for for her 7th birthday was to have her computer connected to the internet.
She had a school project a few weeks ago where she looked up information on the internet for a poster about an element and built a 3D model of the atom using metal rings and styrofoam balls. Her teacher went nuts over both.
Anyhow, as important it is to have fine motor control, computers are ubiquitous these days. Trying to keep kids away from them is not the best approach. However, I agree with you. Parents shouldn't use them as a baby sitter either.
We are talking about little kids. You tend to get them the Big Blocks instead.
... because little kids don't have the dexterity to use regular Legos. The reason two year old kids can use an iPad and aren't ready for standard Legos is because the latter requires more skill. TFA claims claims that exposing kids to technology is causing our civilization to spiral down the drain, but provides no evidence whatsoever, other than anecdotes and conjecture.
It also fails to acknowledge that LEGO is itself technology -- relatively modern, high technology in the grand scheme of humanity -- or provide any meaningful distinction between "good" technologies like verbal language and "bad" technologies like iPads.
As with virtually all "kids these days" rants it's nothing more than an attempt to relive the past by forcing it on today's young people.
Except that you're actually wrong.
minifgures (lego people) and their tools/accessories aside, the models today are almost completely made from select colors of commodity pieces.
What's changed is that the range of commodity pieces has expanded some, and models in general tend to make more use of some more elaborate pieces that attach in ways which allow more articulation of the model as well as smaller pieces (meaning they favor plates over bricks).
Sure that X-wing may have a special R2-D2 minifigure and windshield piece, but the rest of it will be common plates and a few bricks, with some hinges for the S-foils.
Now if you're buying the $10 sets you're probably getting like 1-2 mini figures and a tree (or setting apropriate equivalent) and that may look like it's 90% custom molded tree pieces, but when you go for the bigger $60+ sets you get tons of structural pieces.
This is completely wrong. Here's the instructions to the latest X-Wing. Flip to the back and count the number of "special molds" yourself. Do you see anything in there that can't be used for anything but an X-Wing?
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
We are talking about little kids. You tend to get them the Big Blocks instead.
... because little kids don't have the dexterity to use regular Legos. The reason two year old kids can use an iPad and aren't ready for standard Legos is because the latter requires more skill.
How did we go from building blocks for 2-year old kids to standard lego blocks? You know there is a difference, do you? If not, please STFU. Just to help you and those who sadly do not know the difference:
TFA claims claims that exposing kids to technology is causing our civilization to spiral down the drain,
TFA is not claiming that. You are claiming that it does, though.
but provides no evidence whatsoever, other than anecdotes and conjecture.
Anecdotes and conjecture are valid form of preliminary evidence with which to request further scrutiny of something.
Also, from personal anecdote (feel free to dismiss because ZOMFG anecdote!) kids at that early stage require specific stimulus to develop hand fine grained motor skills. Playing with sand, clay or building blocks (not standard lego blocks, but building blocks for toddlers) help do that.
Going into the (ZOMG!) anecdote: One of my nephews had a learning disability co-related to not developing hand fine motor skills, some type of proprioception problem related to ADHD/Asperger/Autism. He simply could not hold a pen without it falling off his fingers. Good fortune it was detected on time, and was put on specific corrective therapy to develop not just finger strength but the necessary coordination to do what he needed to do with his hands during that state of his body/mind development.
Feel free to dismiss this as you wish. Whatever gets your intellectual kicks.
With that said, I'm not against kids using technology. I was delightfully fascinated when I saw my older daughter (now 5) using my smart phone at the age of 2, and I'm fascinated how my youngest one (1.5 year old) fiddled her way into unlocking my phone (despite it being locked with a swipe-shape lock.)
But I keep my daughters away from technology if that precludes them from the other type of tactile-proprioceptive activities that have been developed over time to assist in their development: finger painting, puzzles, blocks, sculpting with silly putty, running around.
All those things are fun, but they are not just for fun. They have an evolutionary purpose.
There is a reason why kids play with soil instinctively. It is not just curiosity. It is the child mind and body instinctively seeking activities that trigger learning and development.
Yep. I really pissed off my relatives years ago when my daughter and I went to Christmas at their house. I brought every kid two things, a flashlight for reading in bed and a box of clay. The kids and I sat around for hours playing with the clay while the sparkly toys just sat there.
It is the same singular or plural.