-----Original Message----- From: John M. Zelle [mailto:john.zelle@wartburg.edu] Sent: Tuesday, December 07, 2004 4:55 PM To: edu-sig@python.org; Kirby Urner Subject: RE: RE: [Edu-sig] Acadmic gender gap (was Thoughts)

I hate to belabor this thread, as it seems a bit off topic, still I really feel that I've learned a lot. I just have to make one last response. See below.

I don't think we should be too concerned about the apparent off topic-ness. We've zoomed out from the specific Python course (whatever) and are exploring the broader terrain. But it's ridiculous to pretend that the zoomed-in particulars have no context. As educators, it's responsible and topical to at least brush with these threads.

I find this a dangerous attitude. You could just as easily say we agree that taking large amounts of LSD has effects on very young children. Whether that is "good" or "bad" can only be a politicized conclusion, as there is no objective criteria for what is good and bad.

I too find it somewhat dangerous (like life itself). Nor do I have any illusions that Arthur's protestations about please, no more studies, will be heeded. Science will barrel forward, come hell or high water, churning out studies on any and everything. So I expect these studies. My recommendation over on math-teach, where a similar thread came up in regard to global warming (similar in the sense of being so broad brush as to appear off topic), was to both read the science *and* study the political and ideological affiliations of the scientists who do it. I think we're more sophisticated about science these days: we know the funding sources are not irrelevant. My own prejudice is that "video game" is a very broad category and studies will need to start with a long preamble about what, exactly, they mean by it. You have coin-operated arcade games, often two-person, in the malls, in theaters. You have Xbox, Nintendo, the various game consoles that use a TV screen -- these are very similar to what's in the mall, in terms of hardware and software. But the interface is more general purpose (as you're able to play a wide variety of games, not just "car racing" or whatever). Then you have stuff that runs on a general purpose computer. However, even these categories don't go very far in defining the taxonomy. It's as complicated as a zoo. Do we want to study whether "animals" (in general) are good or bad for kids, or do we want to look at the various species, one at a time. A gorilla might not have quite the same effect as a zebra. At Les's house, there's a quite young child (younger than my daughter). She isn't strongly encouraged to play computer games -- maybe not at all (I've never seen her play one). She's out with the horses, learning to ride them. The game Les was playing is specifically aimed at an somewhat older demographic, as are many of these games. My post was aimed at one specific downside: the power of professionally designed games to encourage a young person from getting started. Ordinary mathematics may have a similarly dismaying impact: pick up something by Euler, and feel like you'll never be like that. Euler is the like Valve on steroids -- just too cool. Kirby

John writes -

I hate to belabor this thread, as it seems a bit off topic, still I really feel that I've learned a lot. I just have to make one last response. See below.

Kirby writes -

...

Arthur:

...

What that impact is, and whether is "good" or "bad", can only be a polticized conclusion - as there are no objective criteria for what is good and what is bad in this realm.

We are on our own.

Why is there such discomfort with that prospect?

I can live with it.

I find this a dangerous attitude. You could just as easily say we agree that taking large amounts of LSD has effects on very young children. Whether that is "good" or "bad" can only be a politicized conclusion, as there is no objective criteria for what is good and bad.

I'm sorry, but I can't accept that. If good scientific research does indeed establish that early exposure to video games and other electronic media causes loss of creativity, aggression, poor socialization, lack of concentration and contributes to academic failure, and if it is shown to be linked to a mental disorder (ADHD), then I cannot accept that as "good" in any stretch of the imagination.

John please don't sell me short here. I am 100% for good scientific research. And 100% for good mathematical understanding of the limits of mathematical reasoning, and a scientific understanding of the limits of scientific understanding. When you have the "creativity meter" perfected, let me know. To tie some threads together, the elaborately funded studies of the Alice group at a university no less prestigious than Carnegie Mellon, concluded - I am not going back to the document, but the phrase sticks in my mind, so I think I am quoting from it directly - "Typing is Hard". "Hard" is bad, apparently. Because "Typing is Hard" allows us to conclude that it is an impediment to learning. And learning environments need to avoid making students type. Alice does that. Science at work. Laura is apparently not taking advantage of these findings in her approach to teaching programming. Thank goodness. Art I'm not saying that the research at

this point is definitive, but it's damn scary. Please don't misinterpret; I'm not saying that every kid who plays video games is headed for trouble, that's not the way complex causation works. But if it's even one in 10 or 1 in 50, that's a significant issue.

Drinking alchohol during pregnancy has been linked to similar symptoms for the child. We try to discourage that. On the other hand, many parents are fighting tooth and nail to get more computers into early education. Why not wait? They can learn anything they need to learn about computers when they're in Junior High or later. It worked for most of us.

...

One aspect of today's video games that I think may be somewhat negative, is they just blow us away with their breakthrough sophistication. Some kid sitting in front of a Pygame console, manual open, just doesn't feel this is the cockpit of the same airplane, or even the same species of vehicle. "Tongue tied and twisted, just an earth-bound misfit, I" ('Learning to Fly', Momentary Lapse of Reason, Pink Floyd).

For example, over Thanksgiving, I spent a goodly amount of time watching over the shoulder of my friend Les as he deftly maneuvered his way through a totalitarian world run by weird creatures from another dimension, with some human big brother quisling doing the propaganda -- cold, Eastern European looking towns, humans queuing for trains that never arrive, shuffling, heads down, guards with electric truncheons, ready to beat you back if you try to cross one of their crowd control lines.

The physics in this game has been finely tuned. Les took me to an abandoned playground (no children, no sounds of fun). He picked up a cinder block and put it on one end of a see-saw, climbed an adjacent porch, and jumped on the other end of the see-saw. The cinder block flew up a little (it's heavy), and landed with a muffled thunk, kind of like the dead bodies do, elsewhere in this game. You can pick up just about any free object and throw it, sometimes with the aim to kill (several at once if you're good).

Of course this virtual world is not the creation of one lone wolf coder. This is Valve, one of the strongest coding shops in the world right now.

http://www.valvesoftware.com/ http://www.half-life2.com/

I think the workaround is to remind students that what we're up to is making "cave paintings" -- simplified homomorphisms (not isomorphisms) with several dimensions removed, and yet with enough intact analogies, enough realism, to impart the skills, heuristics, and habits of mind, that will serve the cave dweller well in future, as dimensions are added back.

So learn your PyGame and SDL, and you'll be that much closer to your career objective. And who knows, along the way you might code some decent and fun little open source freebies, like Frozen Bubble (a staple in Linux world).

Kirby

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