You are thinking of something else. Scratch is free and open source. It's very accessible for newbies. A good path for a group is to start with Scratch, where you can make a little arcade game in an afternoon without any prior programming experience. Then some kids can move to more advanced platforms, like Pygame, but some will be happy to stay with Scratch for a while, in my experience.
There are studies confirming that people with emotional problems are more predisposed to play some types of games. Moreover, video games can be therapeutic, helping players cope with their problems, especially where other support isn't available.
Piaget published his first paper, also on biology, at ten. He could not get into the local scientific library without being a scholar. He asked what it takes, and the librarian said "a publication" - so he did just that. http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/information/biography/pqrst/piaget_jean.html
I wonder if his early problems led him to study what children are capable of later. Ironically, his developmental theories were often misinterpreted to mean that children should be restricted from some studies, especially in mathematics. There are some videos of Piaget yelling at people for that, at conferences. He has fun studies on toddlers doing proportional reasoning and what not.
Speak for yourself, please. I find both funny. There are among (very few) things I read as soon as they update, checking several times a day. At any given time, there are probably several printouts of each pinned around my house.
What Garridan said about symbolic manipulation and rock-solid algebra is probably true about the majority of current calculus courses. However, I like to take a different approach to calculus. You start with general ideas explored somewhat qualitatively. The ideas include limits, series, convergence, and manipulating "infinities of different sizes." Once the ideas are in place, you gradually fill in the computational apparatus for them.
I do this with kids in Math Clubs, and they can be as young as six when we start. You can find parent descriptions of some of our meetings at the Natural Math email group: http://groups.google.com/group/naturalmath/topics There is also a good book about this approach, called "Calculus by and for young people" by Don Cohen: http://www.mathman.biz/html/chapters.html If this approach makes sense to you, consider getting Don's book from the library.
Are you claiming all ROLEPLAYING activities are not games? In this case, your definitions are not widely shared.
There are many classes of games that don't involve losing, and some that don't involve winning either. Cooperative games, roleplaying games, artistic games are some examples of genres that don't involve winning or losing.
EVE does have instances (for solo), or at least it had something similar back when I played. Also, EVE can't accommodate ten million people on one server. Maybe some years down the road, with some technology advances (cloud computing?) and significant game redesign, it may somehow become possible... But not yet.
Different people focus on different aspects of the game as large as WoW. I believe your experiences are valid - within the set of playing activities you experience yourself. Please don't over-generalize it to everybody, though. PvE and RP servers (or players) won't be affected as much, because world PvP has never been a big part of their gaming. Guilds raiding progression content will still raid together, because it takes consistent grouping - and their realm-specific social networks will stay within realms because of it. Arena teams, as well, are realm-based. Wintergrasp is a rather popular, successful way to make outdoors PvP meaningful and concentrated in time and space, and it won't get any worse.
The only minus I see for my style of playing is the inability to form Friends list cross-realm and to chat with friends from other realms. I usually add to my Friends list from groups I pick up. I hope Blizzard implements these options soon. They already made a step toward it with cross-realm Ignore list.
How can people call something that works "not viable"? What is wrong with getting support from people who like you and your work, directly? As you said in your last sentence, it would work for almost ANY endeavor.
Well, there are certain mayhem and killing urges in young men, probably biologically mandated - even best and brightest engage in such activities. One may argue that we are better off if such urges are channeled into fake worlds, rather than bringing death to real people and destroying real constructions and nature.
It is EXTREMELY IMPORTANT for game mechanics to be intrinsically connected to the content. "Solve an exercise, reload a gun" demotivates the content of exercises, because they are seen as obstacles to some (other) prize. It takes a bit more thought to figure out how to make your content a necessary part of the game play, but it's worth it.
For a good math example in particular, try Zoombinis.
This is a scary slippery slope. After some nasty atrocities, major international conventions now protect the rights of individuals to decline medical procedures.
As for scientific evidence, huge monetary conflicts of interests tend to erode people's trust. Can you blame people for that? Take the story of thimerosal (thiomersal). Even after it was officially prohibited in baby vaccines, the old ones were not recalled. How can one read this? If it's safe, why prohibit it? If it's not safe, why not recall it? Stories like that undermine the trust.
I was going to ask "Are you an American?" but I see you put an "s" at the end of your mathematics abbreviation, so you are probably not. There you go, spoiling a perfectly good burn!
Hmmm, good point about other behaviors. For example, I "discriminate" against game characters that jump around a lot, or in general move in spastic ways - it is a strong dislike and I am not going to go out of my way to help a character doing it, unless we are already in-game friends, whatever the character's race. Also, virtual world communications happen in words, and again, from personal experiences, I have a lot of likes and dislikes about the texting styles and everybody else does too, I am sure.
"virtual world avatars respond to social cues in the same ways that people do in the real world"
This phrase made me lol. Though I understand it's a metonymy, I choose to nitpick this fine morning, so there.
Avatars can't respond to anything, being representations. But people respond to representations in much the same ways as to the represented. So, to fix the phrase: "People respond to representations of social cues through avatars in virtual worlds in the same ways people respond to social cues." The claim has this "duh" quality. There is a reason those things are called "representations": they represent something for humans. We react to a video, a story or a picture of a love scene or a murder scene in ways similar to our reactions to the real thing, if weaker. All culture, from casual conversations (word representations) to art in any media is based on that premise. Why would the Second Life be any different?
This is a tall claim to make about an experiment impossible to conduct. How do you know what would happen? People are, biologically, group animals and there are powerful mechanisms for forming groups and, as a result, for distinguishing group members from non-members. When first introduced, people form groups by superficial means, such as appearances.
I do not like lectures in any space, so I agree with all you said about them, and can add a few more pages of criticism. Actually, it's my pet peeve that people DO replicate all the bad things about lectures and presentations in virtual spaces. The point I was trying to make is that looking at a layout of bodies in space, you can figure something out about the situation. I think virtual worlds do not have to replicate physical worlds, especially the restrictions, but they can offer us spatial and movement metaphors that can be handy.
There is a need to think hard of where you do and don't need or want those metaphors, though. No, I do not think it would be cool to have a 3d library of books looking just like a physical book library. Instead, I think it would be nice to have relational trees where you can zoom in and out and navigate branches by related subjects, authors, and so on. An example of such a tree structure that I particularly like is Visual Thesaurus. There is no need for an avatar anywhere near such a search, since it's a solo activity dealing with words. Avatars are valuable for interactive activities, but, again, not for all of them.
Yeah, but the problem there is that, even if you can get a virtual world sufficiently complex to visualize these things [gestures, facial expressions, and such], you'd still need adequate input to allow them to be expressed quickly and easily by a user. Exactly - that's where I'd like to see big development efforts. I am mildly hopeful about things like Wii Fit for whole body inputs, though now they are in very early stages. And yes, videoconferencing is better for many purposes for now, but the minus is that it does not directly support the "co-presence" metaphors of being in one space, moving closer or away, and so on. Hopefully, avatar-based worlds will somehow marry video conferencing in the future.
To use a quaint term, when you interact in meatspace, you are typically using multiple representations for your information flow. They include words, yes, but also gestures, facial expressions, voice, movement and positioning, and so on. Just consider: you enter a roomful of people and at a glance you can typically learn a whole lot about their relationships and interactions just from where they are situated in space. Who is close to whom? Is there a hierarchical positioning like " the lecture formation" (everybody crowded with one person in front), or somebody sitting in somebody's lap, or a lonely guy in a corner? These are rather minor examples of how space conveys meaning, but you can probably use your imagination from there. So yes, there are real benefits to holding meetings or conferences in 3d worlds, compared to world that don't have avatars. My hope is for the virtual worlds to develop some more. Right now there is pretty much nothing for facial expressions, for example.
One legitimate problem "handout epics" can cause raiders is to make recruiting process a tad more hard, because just the numbers (e.g. +healing or +damage) do not tell the story anymore. But guilds who only look at numbers while recruiting deserve whatever problems are coming their way, anyway. It takes just a couple of minutes to interview the person about the raid experience.
On the other hand, being able to gear up alts decently and to substitute that much needed alt healer or crowd control, now in decent gear, instead of canceling the raid, has been of tremendous help to all raiding guilds I know. Instead of running something like Molten Core all over again for all the alts, you can PvP or do heroics or craft gear on your own time and have the alt geared well enough for the guilds' needs.
Another problem I see is that guilds like "Death and Taxes" run through content faster than it can be added. If you just make the content harder (e.g. Naxx with only 5% of the population seeing it), you run into other problems. If you just make more of the content, for example, issue ten dungeons all at the same level of gear, you confuse and bore people and destroy the sense of progression - maybe. So it's a dilemma right there: how do you tune the speed of progression through the game.
"Teaching particular skills and methods isn't enough." We can say skills and methods are necessary, but not sufficient! Hehe. I think the biggest problem right there is the disconnect between skills and methods, on the one hand, and the environment where skills and methods are to be situated and developed, on the other hand. There were some very interesting studies on street sellers, nurses, business people that show that math skills, just like other skills, are tied to particular contexts where they are used. I can give you references if you are interested; for example, nurses making zero mistakes on the ward, but some 40% mistakes on the formal pen and paper test about "the same" math problems (proportions, ratios). If a skill is context-free, as much traditional school math is, most people won't be able to retain it in any shape or form at all. And negative views come in part from that disorienting sense of assuming a spherical cow in a vacuum - of math being detached from any context.
"it's impossible to learn more math if you haven't understood the earlier stuff" - I agree about some parts of math, and your example of complex and negative numbers is great for that. However, in other places the order can be very flexible. For example, you can work with many ideas from algebra, calculus or probability way early. Probably the most famous example of such work is the metaphor of "function machines", used frequently with very young kids. Also, in some situations introducing an earlier, prerequisite topic right as you study a more advanced topic depending on it is quite beneficial. At least the earlier topic is strongly motivated within the activity, because students get to see where it's used, right away. I've done negative numbers in the course of studying complex numbers with at least one person (an unschooler who somehow happened to miss negative numbers till then), and it worked, somewhat.
"So I want them to understand, and enjoy math." You will probably have to re-define what math is for that to happen. Because what students now define as "math" (mostly context-free exercises, and those "lists of steps to follow" you mentioned that lead to solving exercises) is not very conducive to understanding or love, for most people.
stewbacca, what frameworks did you use for "engagement"? I am now moving in the direction of "meaning" from psychology, with "fun" as a form of personal meaning, not the strongest among others, even for children.
Slashdot Mirror
You are thinking of something else. Scratch is free and open source. It's very accessible for newbies. A good path for a group is to start with Scratch, where you can make a little arcade game in an afternoon without any prior programming experience. Then some kids can move to more advanced platforms, like Pygame, but some will be happy to stay with Scratch for a while, in my experience.
Replacing teaching and learning functions of schools with computer tools is easier than replacing babysitting functions with computer tools.
There are studies confirming that people with emotional problems are more predisposed to play some types of games. Moreover, video games can be therapeutic, helping players cope with their problems, especially where other support isn't available.
Piaget published his first paper, also on biology, at ten. He could not get into the local scientific library without being a scholar. He asked what it takes, and the librarian said "a publication" - so he did just that.
http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/information/biography/pqrst/piaget_jean.html
I wonder if his early problems led him to study what children are capable of later. Ironically, his developmental theories were often misinterpreted to mean that children should be restricted from some studies, especially in mathematics. There are some videos of Piaget yelling at people for that, at conferences. He has fun studies on toddlers doing proportional reasoning and what not.
How did schools get into this conversation on learning?
Speak for yourself, please. I find both funny. There are among (very few) things I read as soon as they update, checking several times a day. At any given time, there are probably several printouts of each pinned around my house.
What Garridan said about symbolic manipulation and rock-solid algebra is probably true about the majority of current calculus courses. However, I like to take a different approach to calculus. You start with general ideas explored somewhat qualitatively. The ideas include limits, series, convergence, and manipulating "infinities of different sizes." Once the ideas are in place, you gradually fill in the computational apparatus for them.
I do this with kids in Math Clubs, and they can be as young as six when we start. You can find parent descriptions of some of our meetings at the Natural Math email group: http://groups.google.com/group/naturalmath/topics There is also a good book about this approach, called "Calculus by and for young people" by Don Cohen: http://www.mathman.biz/html/chapters.html If this approach makes sense to you, consider getting Don's book from the library.
Are you claiming all ROLEPLAYING activities are not games? In this case, your definitions are not widely shared.
There are many classes of games that don't involve losing, and some that don't involve winning either. Cooperative games, roleplaying games, artistic games are some examples of genres that don't involve winning or losing.
EVE does have instances (for solo), or at least it had something similar back when I played. Also, EVE can't accommodate ten million people on one server. Maybe some years down the road, with some technology advances (cloud computing?) and significant game redesign, it may somehow become possible... But not yet.
Different people focus on different aspects of the game as large as WoW. I believe your experiences are valid - within the set of playing activities you experience yourself. Please don't over-generalize it to everybody, though. PvE and RP servers (or players) won't be affected as much, because world PvP has never been a big part of their gaming. Guilds raiding progression content will still raid together, because it takes consistent grouping - and their realm-specific social networks will stay within realms because of it. Arena teams, as well, are realm-based. Wintergrasp is a rather popular, successful way to make outdoors PvP meaningful and concentrated in time and space, and it won't get any worse.
The only minus I see for my style of playing is the inability to form Friends list cross-realm and to chat with friends from other realms. I usually add to my Friends list from groups I pick up. I hope Blizzard implements these options soon. They already made a step toward it with cross-realm Ignore list.
How can people call something that works "not viable"? What is wrong with getting support from people who like you and your work, directly? As you said in your last sentence, it would work for almost ANY endeavor.
Well, there are certain mayhem and killing urges in young men, probably biologically mandated - even best and brightest engage in such activities. One may argue that we are better off if such urges are channeled into fake worlds, rather than bringing death to real people and destroying real constructions and nature.
It is EXTREMELY IMPORTANT for game mechanics to be intrinsically connected to the content. "Solve an exercise, reload a gun" demotivates the content of exercises, because they are seen as obstacles to some (other) prize. It takes a bit more thought to figure out how to make your content a necessary part of the game play, but it's worth it.
For a good math example in particular, try Zoombinis.
This is a scary slippery slope. After some nasty atrocities, major international conventions now protect the rights of individuals to decline medical procedures.
As for scientific evidence, huge monetary conflicts of interests tend to erode people's trust. Can you blame people for that? Take the story of thimerosal (thiomersal). Even after it was officially prohibited in baby vaccines, the old ones were not recalled. How can one read this? If it's safe, why prohibit it? If it's not safe, why not recall it? Stories like that undermine the trust.
I was going to ask "Are you an American?" but I see you put an "s" at the end of your mathematics abbreviation, so you are probably not. There you go, spoiling a perfectly good burn!
Hmmm, good point about other behaviors. For example, I "discriminate" against game characters that jump around a lot, or in general move in spastic ways - it is a strong dislike and I am not going to go out of my way to help a character doing it, unless we are already in-game friends, whatever the character's race. Also, virtual world communications happen in words, and again, from personal experiences, I have a lot of likes and dislikes about the texting styles and everybody else does too, I am sure.
"virtual world avatars respond to social cues in the same ways that people do in the real world"
This phrase made me lol. Though I understand it's a metonymy, I choose to nitpick this fine morning, so there.
Avatars can't respond to anything, being representations. But people respond to representations in much the same ways as to the represented. So, to fix the phrase: "People respond to representations of social cues through avatars in virtual worlds in the same ways people respond to social cues." The claim has this "duh" quality. There is a reason those things are called "representations": they represent something for humans. We react to a video, a story or a picture of a love scene or a murder scene in ways similar to our reactions to the real thing, if weaker. All culture, from casual conversations (word representations) to art in any media is based on that premise. Why would the Second Life be any different?
This is a tall claim to make about an experiment impossible to conduct. How do you know what would happen? People are, biologically, group animals and there are powerful mechanisms for forming groups and, as a result, for distinguishing group members from non-members. When first introduced, people form groups by superficial means, such as appearances.
I do not like lectures in any space, so I agree with all you said about them, and can add a few more pages of criticism. Actually, it's my pet peeve that people DO replicate all the bad things about lectures and presentations in virtual spaces. The point I was trying to make is that looking at a layout of bodies in space, you can figure something out about the situation. I think virtual worlds do not have to replicate physical worlds, especially the restrictions, but they can offer us spatial and movement metaphors that can be handy.
There is a need to think hard of where you do and don't need or want those metaphors, though. No, I do not think it would be cool to have a 3d library of books looking just like a physical book library. Instead, I think it would be nice to have relational trees where you can zoom in and out and navigate branches by related subjects, authors, and so on. An example of such a tree structure that I particularly like is Visual Thesaurus. There is no need for an avatar anywhere near such a search, since it's a solo activity dealing with words. Avatars are valuable for interactive activities, but, again, not for all of them.
Yeah, but the problem there is that, even if you can get a virtual world sufficiently complex to visualize these things [gestures, facial expressions, and such], you'd still need adequate input to allow them to be expressed quickly and easily by a user.
Exactly - that's where I'd like to see big development efforts. I am mildly hopeful about things like Wii Fit for whole body inputs, though now they are in very early stages. And yes, videoconferencing is better for many purposes for now, but the minus is that it does not directly support the "co-presence" metaphors of being in one space, moving closer or away, and so on. Hopefully, avatar-based worlds will somehow marry video conferencing in the future.
To use a quaint term, when you interact in meatspace, you are typically using multiple representations for your information flow. They include words, yes, but also gestures, facial expressions, voice, movement and positioning, and so on. Just consider: you enter a roomful of people and at a glance you can typically learn a whole lot about their relationships and interactions just from where they are situated in space. Who is close to whom? Is there a hierarchical positioning like " the lecture formation" (everybody crowded with one person in front), or somebody sitting in somebody's lap, or a lonely guy in a corner? These are rather minor examples of how space conveys meaning, but you can probably use your imagination from there. So yes, there are real benefits to holding meetings or conferences in 3d worlds, compared to world that don't have avatars. My hope is for the virtual worlds to develop some more. Right now there is pretty much nothing for facial expressions, for example.
One legitimate problem "handout epics" can cause raiders is to make recruiting process a tad more hard, because just the numbers (e.g. +healing or +damage) do not tell the story anymore. But guilds who only look at numbers while recruiting deserve whatever problems are coming their way, anyway. It takes just a couple of minutes to interview the person about the raid experience.
On the other hand, being able to gear up alts decently and to substitute that much needed alt healer or crowd control, now in decent gear, instead of canceling the raid, has been of tremendous help to all raiding guilds I know. Instead of running something like Molten Core all over again for all the alts, you can PvP or do heroics or craft gear on your own time and have the alt geared well enough for the guilds' needs.
Another problem I see is that guilds like "Death and Taxes" run through content faster than it can be added. If you just make the content harder (e.g. Naxx with only 5% of the population seeing it), you run into other problems. If you just make more of the content, for example, issue ten dungeons all at the same level of gear, you confuse and bore people and destroy the sense of progression - maybe. So it's a dilemma right there: how do you tune the speed of progression through the game.
^^ me, forgetting to log in.
"Teaching particular skills and methods isn't enough."
We can say skills and methods are necessary, but not sufficient! Hehe. I think the biggest problem right there is the disconnect between skills and methods, on the one hand, and the environment where skills and methods are to be situated and developed, on the other hand. There were some very interesting studies on street sellers, nurses, business people that show that math skills, just like other skills, are tied to particular contexts where they are used. I can give you references if you are interested; for example, nurses making zero mistakes on the ward, but some 40% mistakes on the formal pen and paper test about "the same" math problems (proportions, ratios). If a skill is context-free, as much traditional school math is, most people won't be able to retain it in any shape or form at all. And negative views come in part from that disorienting sense of assuming a spherical cow in a vacuum - of math being detached from any context.
"it's impossible to learn more math if you haven't understood the earlier stuff" - I agree about some parts of math, and your example of complex and negative numbers is great for that. However, in other places the order can be very flexible. For example, you can work with many ideas from algebra, calculus or probability way early. Probably the most famous example of such work is the metaphor of "function machines", used frequently with very young kids. Also, in some situations introducing an earlier, prerequisite topic right as you study a more advanced topic depending on it is quite beneficial. At least the earlier topic is strongly motivated within the activity, because students get to see where it's used, right away. I've done negative numbers in the course of studying complex numbers with at least one person (an unschooler who somehow happened to miss negative numbers till then), and it worked, somewhat.
"So I want them to understand, and enjoy math." You will probably have to re-define what math is for that to happen. Because what students now define as "math" (mostly context-free exercises, and those "lists of steps to follow" you mentioned that lead to solving exercises) is not very conducive to understanding or love, for most people.
I am downloading your demos at I type this. I have too many questions to ask here. What's a good way to contact you, since you offered?
stewbacca, what frameworks did you use for "engagement"? I am now moving in the direction of "meaning" from psychology, with "fun" as a form of personal meaning, not the strongest among others, even for children.