Chapter 16 4. The fun of learning from games

When the MIT Media Lab first ran the LEGO/logo experiment in 1989, Hannigan Elementary School children in pre-kindergarten through sixth grade demonstrated the results of the experiment in front of LEGO administrators, academics, and the news media.An eager hostess from a national network presses a kid under flashing lights: Is the format more than just a fun game?She wanted to force a typical, quick-witted, audience-engaging sentence out of the 8-year-old's mouth. The child was visibly petrified.In the end, when the hostess asked the question three times and the spotlight became more and more popular, the sweaty and angry child stared blankly at the camera and said, "Yes, it's fun, just play It's too much of a brain."

Seymour Papert is an expert on this kind of "play with your head."He noticed early on that the notion of being "good" at a language was odd, since any 5-year-old could learn German in Germany, Italian in Italy, or Japanese in Japan.Although we seem to lose this natural ability to learn language as we get older, we cannot deny that we all had it as children. Papert suggested that when we use computers as an educational tool, we can think of it as if we are using computers to create a country called "Maih1and", for example, where children We can learn mathematics as we learn languages.While "Mathematical Paradise" may be an odd concept from a geopolitical standpoint, it absolutely makes sense when it comes to computers.In fact, modern computer simulation technology has been able to create a "microworld" (microworld), in which children can explore extremely complex principles while playing games.

In the LEGO/Logo experimental class of Hannigan Elementary School, a 6-year-old boy piled up a pile of notebooks on the table, put a motor on the top of the building block, and connected the motor to his computer with two wires. Then type out a one-line program on the computer to control the switch of the motor.When he turned on the motor, the blocks vibrated, so he attached a booster to the motor, but for some reason (possibly due to a mishandling) it was misplaced.This time when he started the motor again, the blocks vibrated even more, not only were they jumping around on the table, but they were literally falling apart. — This kind of trick is not absolutely bad all the time — using a few rubber bands to tie the blocks together).

Then he noticed that if he turned the booster clockwise with the motor, the pile would first twist to the right and then move in any direction.If he had the motor turn the booster counterclockwise, the blocks would first twist to the left and then move in any direction.Finally, he decided to install a few photovoltaic cells under the blocks, and then placed the blocks on the black lines he had scribbled on a large piece of paper. He designed a more complicated program on the computer and started the motor.When you see the black line, the photocell will stop the motor and restart it. If the motor turns clockwise when restarting, the building block will turn right, and if it turns counterclockwise, the building block will turn left, and finally return to the black line.The result was a collection of moving blocks that wriggled along that scribbled black line.

The kid became a hero, and teachers and classmates wanted to know how he had invented the device, analyzed his experiment from many different angles, and asked him all kinds of questions.This little moment of brilliance taught him something very important: the joy of learning.In our society, there may be far fewer students with learning disabilities than we think, but there are far more teaching environments with disabilities than we think.Computers can change all that because they can help us better understand children with very different learning and cognitive styles. Most American kids don't know how the Baltic states are different from the Baltic states, who the Visigoths are, or what time Louis XIV lived.So what?Why are these things so important?Do you know if Reno is west or east of Los Angeles?

Countries like France, South Korea, and Japan pay a high price for instilling knowledge in the minds of young people, and by the time these young people reach university, they are almost dead.For the next 4 years, they felt as if they were being forced to climb after a marathon when they were breathless. In the 1960s, most of the pioneers of computers and education advocated a clumsy teaching method of continuous rehearsal, using computers in one-on-one teaching, and letting the user control the progress, so as to teach the same pile of scary knowledge more effectively .Now that multimedia is all the rage, there is another group of people who are interested in making cars and believe in the benefits of practice. They think they can transplant the magic of video games into education, and instill more and more ideas into children's minds with higher efficiency. Information.

On April 11, 1970, Papert gave a seminar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology entitled "Teaching Children to Think." At the meeting, he proposed to use the computer as an engine, so that children can learn to teach others through the use of computers, and learn from teaching others.For almost 15 years, this extremely simple idea has been circling in his mind, but it was not until the advent of the personal computer that it was finally realized.Today, when one-third of American households own a personal computer, the time for it to show its talents really comes. A very important part of learning is of course self-teaching - but there must be good teachers and good teaching methods. One of the main measures is whether education can guide children to explore the unknown, master learning methods, and find the way forward.Before the advent of computers, teaching methods were limited to the use of audio-visual equipment and remote teaching through television. These methods only strengthened the initiative of teachers and the passivity of students.Building a do-it-yourself computer changed that dramatically. Suddenly, learning by doing became a rule, not an exception.Since we can now simulate almost anything with computers, we no longer need to dissect frogs to understand their anatomy.Instead, we can let children design their own frogs, create an animal that behaves like a frog, modify its behavior, simulate its muscles, and play different games on this simulated frog.

When the game is in the information, especially when the game is in the abstract theme, the information carrier presents a richer connotation. I still remember when my son was in third grade, the teacher told me sadly that he couldn't add and subtract two- or three-digit numbers. I thought, this is really weird, when we played Monopoly at home, he was always the banker, and he seemed to have a knack for working with numbers. Therefore, I suggest that teachers try not to treat the numbers in the questions as simple numbers, but to convert them into money when giving addition problems.Lo and behold, he suddenly became enlightened, able to mentally add and subtract three-digit numbers, and even higher ones.The reason is that this pile of abstract and meaningless numbers has now become money, which can be used to buy roads, build hotels and pay tolls.

Computer-controlled LEGO goes a step further, allowing kids to animate physical constructs with behavioral abilities.Current LEGO research at the Media Lab also includes a prototype of a computer embedded in a building block, presenting more flexibility and opportunities for Papert's structuralism, as well as building-to-building communication and new way to explore parallel processing research. Today, kids using LEGO/Logo will learn the same principles of physics and logic that you and I learned in college.Much intriguing evidence and careful testing suggests that this structuralist approach is a rich learning tool for different cognitive and behavioral styles.In fact, many children who are considered to have learning disabilities thrive in this structured learning environment.Urchins on the Information Highway When I was at boarding school in Switzerland, it was so far away from home that me and some other kids couldn't go home for autumn break, but we were able to take part in a crazy treasure hunt.

The headmaster of the school was a Swiss general (he was in the reserves, like most Swiss soldiers), who was both strategic and charismatic.He organized a five-day tour of the country, divided the children into teams of four children, ranging in age from 12 to 16, and handed out a total of 100 Swiss francs ($23.50 at the time). and a 5-day rail pass. Each team gets different clues, and then goes out to travel around, and can score points as long as they complete tasks along the way. Don't underestimate this game.Sometimes we'd have to go to a certain latitude and longitude in the middle of the night, and a helicopter would drop out of the sky and drop a 1/4-inch, tangled tape, giving us the following in Urdu. A task: Find a way to catch a live pig and bring it to a designated place, where we will get a phone number (to find out the phone number, we have to solve a complicated number riddle first, The puzzle is the dates of 7 obscure events, put together the last digits of each of the 7 dates, and that is the phone number we will dial).

These kinds of challenges have always fascinated me, and, with all due respect to my braggadocio, my team won this game—I always believed we would.Because that experience was so impressive to me, I made the same arrangement for my son on his 14th birthday.Since there were no American troops at my disposal, I arranged only a one-day expedition to Boston for my son and the rest of his class, also dividing them into small groups, only allowing them to carry a fixed amount of money and an unlimited card. Subway ticket.I spent weeks arranging clues: greeting hotel receptionists, hiding clues under park benches, locations that had to be found by solving phone number puzzles.As you can probably guess, kids who do well in school don't necessarily win—in fact, the opposite is often the case.There is always a big difference between street urchins and "bright" students. For example, at one point during a scavenger hunt I arranged, a crossword puzzle had to be solved in order to find one of the clues.The average bright student will rush to the library to find information, or call their smart friends for advice. Street urchins went around asking passers-by in the subway. As a result, they not only found the answer faster, but they also moved from point A to point B while asking, traveled more distance, and scored more points in the game . A child today has the opportunity to be a street urchin on the Internet.Online, "children can hear each other but not see each other".Ironically, reading and writing are both skills that pay off greatly on the web. Children communicate by reading and writing, not just by completing abstract and simulation games.Don't misinterpret what I'm advocating as opposing the development of intelligence or disdain for abstract reasoning. On the contrary, the Internet provides people with new media to explore knowledge and meaning.Scavenger Hunts on the Internet I have mild insomnia, often waking up at 3am and killing an hour on the computer before going back to sleep.Once I was falling asleep in front of the computer when I received an e-mail from a guy named Michael Schriger.The sender politely introduced himself as a sophomore and wondered if he could drop by the Media Lab when he came to MIT later that week.I suggested he drop in on my Friday class on Bits Are Bits and assigned him a student guide.I also made a copy of our correspondence to two other colleagues, and they both agreed to meet with him.Ridiculously, they mistook him for the famous columnist Michael Shrigi, who added an e after his name. When I finally meet Schriger, his father is with him.His father explained to me that Schriger met all kinds of people on the Internet, and that Schriger saw the Internet as I saw a treasure hunt.What surprised Schriger's father the most was that no matter whether these people were Nobel Prize winners or senior corporate executives, they seemed to be able to find time to answer Schriger's questions.The reason is that it's so easy to reply on a computer, and (at least for now) most people aren't overwhelmed by a flood of e-mails for no reason. If things go on like this, more and more people will be able to invest time and wisdom in the Internet, and the Internet will also become a network for human beings to exchange knowledge and help each other.The AARP's 30 million members, for example, hold untapped collective experiences.With just a few keystrokes, such a wealth of knowledge and wisdom is available to young people.The generation gap was greatly narrowed in an instant.