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November 2003

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Re: [Edu-sig] The trackball reality
by Laura Creighton Nov. 1, 2003

Nov. 1, 2003

One of the reasons that games are effective at teaching is that they provide 'teaching that is training' as opposed to 'teaching that is education'. And training is a very effective way to learn. Somewhere along the line, for class reasons as much as anything else, and in response to the undeniable truth that rote-learning is very boring, 'teaching' moved up-scale and decided that it should be in the business of 'educating' children, not training them. This was based on the untested belief that if you packed students with more theory, and with the reasons behind what was so was so, they would become better problem solvers, and become better citizens who were more accustomed to making informed decisions and a whole lot of other very good things. And stacked up against an educational system where children were trained to get the correct answers without every understanduing why, it was a useful corrective. The problem is that educating/training need not be an either/or proposition. Good teaching does both. A good many things are not understood 'better' by people who understand the theory than people who have done it a thousand times. The best authority on midieval French dances may be an 80 year old man in a wheelchair, but you hire somebody else to teach you how to dance them .... Indeed, for many subjects, like programming, it is hard to measure how the theory is improving the result, because the people who most 'get it' generally take their new enthuthiasm for the new cool theories you have taught them over to a computer, where they write code, and basically train themselves. When you are talking to children, you also often find that they are much more motivated by 'wanting to do something' rather than 'wanting to understand something'. This has two implications. First of all, if you actually want to train something into your students, by making them practice it over and over, a game may be a better way to structure a drill. This is especially true if you have enough computers around that the students can simultaneously drill themselves. You can pack a lot of drill into a short amount of time. I would suggest, however, if you do this to have the children work in pairs, and rotate the pairs. Otherwise, school can become pretty lonely, and children can get the idea that what is most important is how they score, which has bad effects in developing their skills in teamwork, and, at worst can mean that a substantual part of your class, who are as expected, 'getting the wrong answers' when they are training, get the idea that they are failures, because what they are doing so resembles a test where they are expected to know the answers. Second of all, if you want to teach children to program, teaching them how to write games is often very successful. But remember that their focus may still be on the doing, and not on the understanding. One of the best lessons I ever got was from a 12 or 13 year old boy. He had decided to write classes of mixins and make his characters, monsters, and objects inherit from whichever set he needed to get the functionality he wanted. So He mades these incredible monsters that inherited from 16 or so classes, and ran into trouble because a monster 'opening his mouth' is different from 'opening a door to another room' is different from 'opening a treasure box' is different from 'opening your backpack'. Or checking to see if the window is open .... After a long frustrating time when I tried to explain how name resolution worked, and how multiple inheritance works, and how parsing works, I went on, and on, and on, and he still didn't understand he finally shouted at me ... 'LOOK. I don't _want_ to understand what I am doing! I JUST WANT TO BE ABLE TO DO IT!' Which I think was absolutely marvellous. And he was, indeed, one of the people who really craved the hands-on experience. He only wanted theory if he could see how it would help him write better code. The rest of the time he was impatient to get back to writing code, so teaching him was a matter of drawing the implications between what I was saying, and 'bigger, badder, monsters' and 'even nastier traps'. So I don't think that the games advocates have it all wrong. On the other hand, it is hard for me to see how a trackball figures -- except for one really cool AMIGA game I saw where you had to roll a marbel around an area and make it reach certain points. I am sure that you could get a hands on experience of certain Physics problems in mechanics that way. I just got back from Paris where I went to the Science Museum -- Cité of Industry, I think it was called. It is a participatory museum, and the kids seemed to like it just fine. I was quite impressed with the 3-6 yhear old section where they got hard hats, and flourescent vests, and got to work kid-sized mine equipment. It looked like a lot of fun. But when we got to the sections for adults, I was unhappy to see that there was almost no historical context for what was being shown. It is nice to show the names of the discoverers of varous laws, but when they did this, and what they were looking for at the time, and some historical background would have been appreciated. In general I would appreciate an educaitonal approach that was believed that the job of teaching was to 'teach kids to do things' and less one that believed they are open pots that you have to stuff with facts. Games can be used both ways, of course. Laura

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