The notion that you have to start paying as soon as you start enjoying something seems to be contrary to what little I know of how economies work. But I agree that "fun" is a weaker form of meaning, compared to some others. It may be more useful, in general, to talk about how meaningful an activity is for a person, rather than how fun it is. Unfortunately, many learning activities have no form of meaning whatsoever: they aren't useful, or fun, or profitable. It's interesting that some of the most "sticky" games out there - those that people play for tens of hours weekly, for years, like Warcraft - have so many activities in them resembling "work" more than "play."
Reader Rabbit is great till the First Grade level. I think the original creators sold the company at this point, but I am not sure. Anyway, their early games are fun and then it all turns into tests.
What is your goal as a teacher, though? Whom do you serve, and how? When students have had their time with you, what will change in their life and in this world in general?
There are different levels to "creation" though. When you arrange stickers around, you have (arguably) created some art, but then it's a different level from painting a picture from scratch. Most games only allow creation out of pre-made parts in a construction set, or else creation with one form of representations only: words, in roleplay. Eve Online is proud about "emergent world events" that it considers a sort of player creativity, but players don't make any entities, again, beside stories - such as novel ships or bases. Sims are a construction set, however elaborate. Now Spore, that's a different story, because you can supposedly create entities nobody can even predict. We will see.
Do you remember why girls did not find that particular game appealing? My guess would be that it does not have a story to it that would intrinsically tie the tasks to the overall goal.
Most so-called "educational" games are tests and nothing but tests. A learning, or educational, game is supposed to help you learn something you did not know before you started. On the other hand, a test, even in a game form, is a way to find out how well you learned something beforehand. You'd be amazed at how many educators don't even know the difference between a learning experience and a test.
At best, most games train you for faster recall of known facts, or give a text or video presentation of some facts and then drill the recall. The games where you learn something new by interacting with the game environment are still quite rare among so-called "educational" games.
If you talk about primitive and basic stuff, such as every example AKAImBatman used, then yes, a person willing to use plain drills for hours will probably outperform anyone NOT willing to do so, or maybe even people using other methods of training. I think the failure of many early games reflects just that. However, computer environments that actually use interesting computer capabilities beyond generating random routine exercises can help with higher order learning and creativity. This kind of learning is harder to document, at this point of development of pedagogical science, but not impossible. Here are a few examples of the differences computers can make:
- You can reflect on multiple strategy and history trajectories, having computers save all versions for your observation and analysis. From geometry construction (Geometer's Sketchpad, which is not a game) to Civilization and little DS roleplaying games, this ability to save the STORY of your attempts at problem solving, in some observable representation, has very high potential for learning more advanced skills, such as analysis, and to promote planning and management.
- Having reflected on the past events, you can automate and "macro" sequences of your steps, from pasting and copying whole entities to writing routines that repeat actions. This game mechanic isn't used all that much, because not many games allow users content creation anyway, but again, it is quite powerful for learning. As your conceptual understanding grows, you don't have to go through every step of every process anymore. The task of describing these "macros" to the machine is a nice learning task in itself, usually, because it promotes formalization and reflection.
- Computer environments can support collaboration, both through multi-user environments and through sharing of artifacts created in single-user environments (Spore). You probably don't need collaboration for primitive tasks such as arithmetic, but again, for more advanced (and more appropriate for humans) tasks, you need a community of peers. My kid participated in online poetry games, asked questions of researchers, ran group roleplaying sessions with friends, and contributed to community art projects, and she's not ten yet; a lot of these skills having to do with participation in various communities came from multi-user online games.
I can go on with more examples, but I would rather stop and summarize. We do not need computers or games to train children on low-level rote tasks. However, appropriate computer environments, including games, can promote sophistication of thought, reflection, work with advanced topics, and collaboration. There aren't enough games, yet, that use computer capabilities appropriately, but then the whole genre is quite young.
We have a running joke in my family, "Never go to doctors until you know your diagnosis and have researched the treatments." If you look at statistics of how many people die to medical mistakes per year, it's quite scary. I have many anecdotes about my family members dying, or almost dying, to easily avoidable medical mistakes or just laziness of diagnostics. And other cases where doctors were just greedy ("business-like"? hmmm).
My kid goes to doctors less than once a year, and still she accumulated a few ridiculous examples. Once a doctor was strongly pressing for a surgery - and when we equally strongly asked for alternatives, and she explained that yes, we could try a course of antibiotics, but "it will take the whole three or four days, and we could do the surgery today." I could almost see the dollar signs in her eyes. A dentist wanted to do some major procedures under general anesthesia - luckily, we knew that baby teeth should soon fall out and they just started to deteriorate before falling out (like they often do), so we saved the kid the general anesthesia and us several thousand dollars - the teeth fell out within a few months and the next visit to (another) dentist there were no problems. I went to a neurologist with some headaches, and she told me that, first, she gets headaches more often than I do (relevant!) and second, she can prescribe a brain scan (MRI I think) as a helpful treatment (!!!) because it's all in my mind, so once I do an MRI and know it's clear, the headaches will go away. It turned out I had a vision problem and the eye strain was causing headaches, which I figured out later, no thanks to her. I can keep telling these amusing stories all night. The point is that doctors make a lot of mistakes, and some of them just aren't trying (that guy reading his e-mail while "listening" to me describing symptoms? yeah) and those who are trying are limited in their knowledge and skills, just like the rest of us.
Games fulfill some needs and desires people have. Intellectual stimulation, cognitive training, companionship, roleplay and what not. From playing EVE for half a year or so, it seems to me to be directed at fulfilling a need to dominate through the symbolism of money and firepower. I kept asking people, "but what do you DO while you play?" - because I could not figure out how to occupy myself IN GAME during those two-hour-in-real-time flights on autopilot, or gate camping sessions (shudder). I despaired and joined a small, disrespected pirate corp, expecting them to have more action, but it was the same thing. People responded that they just kept the game in the background doing other things, or checked markets, or read up on weapons, or chatted it up in Ventrilo (the pirates; me being female was very entertaining for them, in itself). It never felt like an experience for full immersion - more like a complicated screensaver with spreadsheet conferencing capabilities. The views are breathtakingly beautiful, but that can't occupy hours upon hours. The PvP fights, when they happen, are over before you figure out what's going on - they mostly felt to me like that joke about a shrink science conference: "We are all professionals here, let's just unzip and compare." One side dominated and ganked the other in seconds. All the PvE fights I experienced were nothing but target practice, and with auto-targeting, it wasn't quite entertaining too.
Anyway, I do have a point and I want to make it. EVE pioneered several interesting game ideas, but by focusing on them almost exclusively, it did not manage to support fulfillment of enough needs humans have, so it could not become immersive for the majority of people who tried it, and that's what people expect from MMOs now. It has its devoted followers, and it would be very interesting if anyone analyzed what kinds (say, psychological profiles) of people find it attractive. My personal hope for EVE, though, is that either the same company, or someone else, will take those strong points - possibility for emergent content, complex economy, interesting in-game physics - and will use the points to build a game that fulfills more of those needs and desires humans have. Economy is fascinating, but a world consisting of nothing but economy has a very limited attraction, as EVE subscriber numbers show us.
The clarity of goals seems to change with age. Understanding and formulating and delineating what you want is a big learning task. It seems to me that older people tend to be better at this task.
It is interesting to compare your point on C "stuck in her brain" to the above post, which claims that memorization of things such as multiplication tables in necessary for successful abstract programming:-) A balance is needed here. On the one hand, some content knowledge is needed as fodder for abstraction; on the other hand, you don't want content acquisition to take place of learning thinking skills.
My learning experiences are somewhat similar. I took Calculus at 15-16, and Differential Equations and Numerical Methods and a bunch of other theoretical stuff in 16-20, and I could do the work, but... There was some kind of qualitative change in learning toward the late twenties, when theories started to make a more global sense for my life. I am somewhat at a loss of words to describe it. It seems that older people go through more changes of that sort, too, when learning becomes meaningful on deeper levels.
This issue of "free time" complicates the matter very much. Most people see my question in terms of "year time". Given two years, the teenager will make more progress than an adult. You formulated the difference: the teenager has more free time to devote to this learning. I am trying to shift focus "from years to hours". At what age would people need more man-hours to learn?
It makes sense: the differences in having or not having a reason to learn are quite important here. Adults tend to learn for a particular reason; children often learn, let's face it, for no particular reason other than some political curriculum decision. It is interesting in this regard to look at learning of more self-directed homeschoolers.
What you are saying is that learning is irreducibly complex. Then my question can be more meaningfully rephrased as, "Is age a contributing factor to the complexity of learning?"
Thank you for the article. The hyperglots I new personally said that it is a big experience to learn your second language, and still big and different experience to learn the third language, and then it "gets easy." It strangely reminded me of what mothers of many kids say. One kid turns your life upside-down (like first language acquisition does to babies), and the second kid is a big difference. With the third kid, you "have more children than hands" - similarly, many people comment that it's hard to learn a third language AND keep the second! And then, parents say, it's not much different if you have five or six children.
These sessions with the speech therapist were most FUN I had with various ways of learning a foreign language. Oscilloscope work of matching mouth movements and sounds to visuals somehow reminds me of the pleasant feeling you get playing "Dance Dance Revolution", where the visuals support rhythm and movement work. Military has also developed some good language learning techniques for spy training, I've been told:-)
It's interesting that several people commented on learning algebra through programming. This possibility may depend on learning or thinking style differences, and also on the kind of help people around the child provide.
Suppose a person reaches the needed capacity to do upper level math at some age, say 15 or 20. Will the ability to learn programming change with further aging?
I've been working with frameworks using Piaget and social constructivist ideas together, such as enactivism. While children can't do "piagetian-sense abstraction" (formal operational, say) until later, there is surprisingly much they can do within familiar contexts, or while co-creating knowledge with adult helpers. Ideas such as "situated abstraction" explain part of it. Literature on adults learning math that I have seen so far was not developmental or even age-comparative, least of all comparing adults to children. Maybe this comparison is just "a wrong question":-) If you know of relevant studies, I would love to look at them. Another issue here may be that adults and children rarely belong to the same communities of practice. I am studying homeschoolers as a multi-age learning community.
I took some speech therapy for foreigners learning English. What helped me learn to distinguish the sounds I could not previously tell apart was not listening to them, but LOOKING at their visual representations. For example, there is an oscilloscope of sorts that draws a "shape" of each sound. As you try to match the correct shape, you learn to distinguish sounds through the visual feedback, and not through your ears - they can't do the job initially. Another helpful visual tool is a diagram of your mouth position as you produce the sounds. You can compare the two positions, try to reproduce them, and through these actions eventually learn to hear the difference.
Learning a new language because it resolves a lot of the issues and difficulties encountered in an already known language or because it is necessary for the project one wishes to work on makes age irrelevant Obviously, you CAN learn new languages at any age over seven or so. But is age irrelevant? Does the ability to learn languages depend on age as a variable?
Slashdot Mirror
The notion that you have to start paying as soon as you start enjoying something seems to be contrary to what little I know of how economies work. But I agree that "fun" is a weaker form of meaning, compared to some others. It may be more useful, in general, to talk about how meaningful an activity is for a person, rather than how fun it is. Unfortunately, many learning activities have no form of meaning whatsoever: they aren't useful, or fun, or profitable. It's interesting that some of the most "sticky" games out there - those that people play for tens of hours weekly, for years, like Warcraft - have so many activities in them resembling "work" more than "play."
Reader Rabbit is great till the First Grade level. I think the original creators sold the company at this point, but I am not sure. Anyway, their early games are fun and then it all turns into tests.
What is your goal as a teacher, though? Whom do you serve, and how? When students have had their time with you, what will change in their life and in this world in general?
There are different levels to "creation" though. When you arrange stickers around, you have (arguably) created some art, but then it's a different level from painting a picture from scratch. Most games only allow creation out of pre-made parts in a construction set, or else creation with one form of representations only: words, in roleplay. Eve Online is proud about "emergent world events" that it considers a sort of player creativity, but players don't make any entities, again, beside stories - such as novel ships or bases. Sims are a construction set, however elaborate. Now Spore, that's a different story, because you can supposedly create entities nobody can even predict. We will see.
Do you remember why girls did not find that particular game appealing? My guess would be that it does not have a story to it that would intrinsically tie the tasks to the overall goal.
Most so-called "educational" games are tests and nothing but tests. A learning, or educational, game is supposed to help you learn something you did not know before you started. On the other hand, a test, even in a game form, is a way to find out how well you learned something beforehand. You'd be amazed at how many educators don't even know the difference between a learning experience and a test.
At best, most games train you for faster recall of known facts, or give a text or video presentation of some facts and then drill the recall. The games where you learn something new by interacting with the game environment are still quite rare among so-called "educational" games.
If you talk about primitive and basic stuff, such as every example AKAImBatman used, then yes, a person willing to use plain drills for hours will probably outperform anyone NOT willing to do so, or maybe even people using other methods of training. I think the failure of many early games reflects just that. However, computer environments that actually use interesting computer capabilities beyond generating random routine exercises can help with higher order learning and creativity. This kind of learning is harder to document, at this point of development of pedagogical science, but not impossible. Here are a few examples of the differences computers can make:
- You can reflect on multiple strategy and history trajectories, having computers save all versions for your observation and analysis. From geometry construction (Geometer's Sketchpad, which is not a game) to Civilization and little DS roleplaying games, this ability to save the STORY of your attempts at problem solving, in some observable representation, has very high potential for learning more advanced skills, such as analysis, and to promote planning and management.
- Having reflected on the past events, you can automate and "macro" sequences of your steps, from pasting and copying whole entities to writing routines that repeat actions. This game mechanic isn't used all that much, because not many games allow users content creation anyway, but again, it is quite powerful for learning. As your conceptual understanding grows, you don't have to go through every step of every process anymore. The task of describing these "macros" to the machine is a nice learning task in itself, usually, because it promotes formalization and reflection.
- Computer environments can support collaboration, both through multi-user environments and through sharing of artifacts created in single-user environments (Spore). You probably don't need collaboration for primitive tasks such as arithmetic, but again, for more advanced (and more appropriate for humans) tasks, you need a community of peers. My kid participated in online poetry games, asked questions of researchers, ran group roleplaying sessions with friends, and contributed to community art projects, and she's not ten yet; a lot of these skills having to do with participation in various communities came from multi-user online games.
I can go on with more examples, but I would rather stop and summarize. We do not need computers or games to train children on low-level rote tasks. However, appropriate computer environments, including games, can promote sophistication of thought, reflection, work with advanced topics, and collaboration. There aren't enough games, yet, that use computer capabilities appropriately, but then the whole genre is quite young.
We have a running joke in my family, "Never go to doctors until you know your diagnosis and have researched the treatments." If you look at statistics of how many people die to medical mistakes per year, it's quite scary. I have many anecdotes about my family members dying, or almost dying, to easily avoidable medical mistakes or just laziness of diagnostics. And other cases where doctors were just greedy ("business-like"? hmmm).
My kid goes to doctors less than once a year, and still she accumulated a few ridiculous examples. Once a doctor was strongly pressing for a surgery - and when we equally strongly asked for alternatives, and she explained that yes, we could try a course of antibiotics, but "it will take the whole three or four days, and we could do the surgery today." I could almost see the dollar signs in her eyes. A dentist wanted to do some major procedures under general anesthesia - luckily, we knew that baby teeth should soon fall out and they just started to deteriorate before falling out (like they often do), so we saved the kid the general anesthesia and us several thousand dollars - the teeth fell out within a few months and the next visit to (another) dentist there were no problems. I went to a neurologist with some headaches, and she told me that, first, she gets headaches more often than I do (relevant!) and second, she can prescribe a brain scan (MRI I think) as a helpful treatment (!!!) because it's all in my mind, so once I do an MRI and know it's clear, the headaches will go away. It turned out I had a vision problem and the eye strain was causing headaches, which I figured out later, no thanks to her. I can keep telling these amusing stories all night. The point is that doctors make a lot of mistakes, and some of them just aren't trying (that guy reading his e-mail while "listening" to me describing symptoms? yeah) and those who are trying are limited in their knowledge and skills, just like the rest of us.
Games fulfill some needs and desires people have. Intellectual stimulation, cognitive training, companionship, roleplay and what not. From playing EVE for half a year or so, it seems to me to be directed at fulfilling a need to dominate through the symbolism of money and firepower. I kept asking people, "but what do you DO while you play?" - because I could not figure out how to occupy myself IN GAME during those two-hour-in-real-time flights on autopilot, or gate camping sessions (shudder). I despaired and joined a small, disrespected pirate corp, expecting them to have more action, but it was the same thing. People responded that they just kept the game in the background doing other things, or checked markets, or read up on weapons, or chatted it up in Ventrilo (the pirates; me being female was very entertaining for them, in itself). It never felt like an experience for full immersion - more like a complicated screensaver with spreadsheet conferencing capabilities. The views are breathtakingly beautiful, but that can't occupy hours upon hours. The PvP fights, when they happen, are over before you figure out what's going on - they mostly felt to me like that joke about a shrink science conference: "We are all professionals here, let's just unzip and compare." One side dominated and ganked the other in seconds. All the PvE fights I experienced were nothing but target practice, and with auto-targeting, it wasn't quite entertaining too.
Anyway, I do have a point and I want to make it. EVE pioneered several interesting game ideas, but by focusing on them almost exclusively, it did not manage to support fulfillment of enough needs humans have, so it could not become immersive for the majority of people who tried it, and that's what people expect from MMOs now. It has its devoted followers, and it would be very interesting if anyone analyzed what kinds (say, psychological profiles) of people find it attractive. My personal hope for EVE, though, is that either the same company, or someone else, will take those strong points - possibility for emergent content, complex economy, interesting in-game physics - and will use the points to build a game that fulfills more of those needs and desires humans have. Economy is fascinating, but a world consisting of nothing but economy has a very limited attraction, as EVE subscriber numbers show us.
Find people who program and speak French, and hang out with them - you will learn.
The clarity of goals seems to change with age. Understanding and formulating and delineating what you want is a big learning task. It seems to me that older people tend to be better at this task.
It is interesting to compare your point on C "stuck in her brain" to the above post, which claims that memorization of things such as multiplication tables in necessary for successful abstract programming :-) A balance is needed here. On the one hand, some content knowledge is needed as fodder for abstraction; on the other hand, you don't want content acquisition to take place of learning thinking skills.
My learning experiences are somewhat similar. I took Calculus at 15-16, and Differential Equations and Numerical Methods and a bunch of other theoretical stuff in 16-20, and I could do the work, but... There was some kind of qualitative change in learning toward the late twenties, when theories started to make a more global sense for my life. I am somewhat at a loss of words to describe it. It seems that older people go through more changes of that sort, too, when learning becomes meaningful on deeper levels.
This issue of "free time" complicates the matter very much. Most people see my question in terms of "year time". Given two years, the teenager will make more progress than an adult. You formulated the difference: the teenager has more free time to devote to this learning. I am trying to shift focus "from years to hours". At what age would people need more man-hours to learn?
It makes sense: the differences in having or not having a reason to learn are quite important here. Adults tend to learn for a particular reason; children often learn, let's face it, for no particular reason other than some political curriculum decision. It is interesting in this regard to look at learning of more self-directed homeschoolers.
What you are saying is that learning is irreducibly complex. Then my question can be more meaningfully rephrased as, "Is age a contributing factor to the complexity of learning?"
Thank you for the article. The hyperglots I new personally said that it is a big experience to learn your second language, and still big and different experience to learn the third language, and then it "gets easy." It strangely reminded me of what mothers of many kids say. One kid turns your life upside-down (like first language acquisition does to babies), and the second kid is a big difference. With the third kid, you "have more children than hands" - similarly, many people comment that it's hard to learn a third language AND keep the second! And then, parents say, it's not much different if you have five or six children.
These sessions with the speech therapist were most FUN I had with various ways of learning a foreign language. Oscilloscope work of matching mouth movements and sounds to visuals somehow reminds me of the pleasant feeling you get playing "Dance Dance Revolution", where the visuals support rhythm and movement work. Military has also developed some good language learning techniques for spy training, I've been told :-)
It's interesting that several people commented on learning algebra through programming. This possibility may depend on learning or thinking style differences, and also on the kind of help people around the child provide.
Was your learning of the programming back at the age of 5 or 6 faster or slower than it is now?
Suppose a person reaches the needed capacity to do upper level math at some age, say 15 or 20. Will the ability to learn programming change with further aging?
Or maybe you can learn algebra in the course of learning these languages?
I've been working with frameworks using Piaget and social constructivist ideas together, such as enactivism. While children can't do "piagetian-sense abstraction" (formal operational, say) until later, there is surprisingly much they can do within familiar contexts, or while co-creating knowledge with adult helpers. Ideas such as "situated abstraction" explain part of it. Literature on adults learning math that I have seen so far was not developmental or even age-comparative, least of all comparing adults to children. Maybe this comparison is just "a wrong question" :-) If you know of relevant studies, I would love to look at them. Another issue here may be that adults and children rarely belong to the same communities of practice. I am studying homeschoolers as a multi-age learning community.
I took some speech therapy for foreigners learning English. What helped me learn to distinguish the sounds I could not previously tell apart was not listening to them, but LOOKING at their visual representations. For example, there is an oscilloscope of sorts that draws a "shape" of each sound. As you try to match the correct shape, you learn to distinguish sounds through the visual feedback, and not through your ears - they can't do the job initially. Another helpful visual tool is a diagram of your mouth position as you produce the sounds. You can compare the two positions, try to reproduce them, and through these actions eventually learn to hear the difference.
Learning a new language because it resolves a lot of the issues and difficulties encountered in an already known language or because it is necessary for the project one wishes to work on makes age irrelevant Obviously, you CAN learn new languages at any age over seven or so. But is age irrelevant? Does the ability to learn languages depend on age as a variable?
I don't know; I am trying to ask /.