[Edu-sig] The trackball reality

[Laura Creighton]

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