To supercharge learning, look to play

https://nautil.us/to-supercharge-learning-look-to-play-292946/

by dnetesn • 3 years ago

211 101 3 years ago

hosh3• 3 years ago

I agree with this article, but this approach is incomplete.

Animals, including humans, instinctively play to learn, both in free play and guided play. They work particularly well when the kid is young. I don’t find “play” to have a negative connotation (in contrast to “work”). My hobbies as an adult often start with play.

However, there is something to be said about discipline. That also has some mixed connotations, so I will be clear. I am talking about discipline to mean the various inner psychology to focus, and sharpen one’s skills even through adversity. It includes what Angela Duckworth would call “grit”. Instilling this kind of discipline is not something I’d do at an early age, because it requires a sufficient level of mindfulness.

Discipline is how one can become truly great … but it is play that allows for a kind of creativity that allows one to generalize from a solid foundation. You need both to attain mastery.

frereubu• 3 years ago

I'm in general agreement, but I'd nuance it by saying that you need to take into account the underlying enthusiasm of the person. If there's something I need to get good at for my job but I find it very boring, then that's going to take a quite a bit of discipline. However, there are some other things in my life that I've had to extert almost not discipline to learn (and, IMNSHO get very good at) because I have an innate enjoyment of the subject.

hosh3• 3 years ago

I guess what you said needs to be said. It’s not really play if you make someone do it. For my son, a lot of it is redirecting and guiding the things he is already trying to do. (For example, my toddler takes his clothes off, so my wife and I would then have him put it in the laundry basket. He thinks it is fun).

As far as discipline goes, the value is being able to generate it from within. It’s a long grind, and it is not always fun.

brightlancer3• 3 years ago

For a pithy quote, I once read discipline defined as, "Eliminating the bad to make room for the good, and eliminating the good to make room for the great."

I think the conflation with "punishment" has made it very difficult to teach self-discipline to kids and young adults.

hosh3• 3 years ago

I learned “discipline” from the martial art world. Someone had pointed out to me that “discipline” shares the root word of “disciple”, so it is not really about punishment. With that meaning in mind, you don’t discipline a child so much as initiate a child into a discipline.

Related things I learned from the martial art world are, “don’t cheat yourself”, and the idea of gongfu — mastery accumulated over time. And to bring some perspective to this, I also learned from the martial art world that “play” is crucial to develop the creative aspect of mastery. Some teachers will tell students to “play” with an idea, instead of running through a drill.

4dayworkweek4u4• 3 years ago

Also... what "play" means depends on intelligence. Different types want to "play" totally different games.

zachruss92• 3 years ago

As a developer who struggles with attention at times, I found this article really interesting. It's cool to see that there are playful solutions being developed that can help kids with ADHD learn and develop important skills. I'm excited to see that video games like NeuroRacer and EndeavorRx are being recognized as tools for cognitive development. It's great to see that playful learning environments are being promoted as important for building skills like collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity. Overall, I think it's a positive step towards supporting people with different learning styles and differences.

fww• 3 years ago

For those interested in learning more about the link between Learning and Play, Project Zero from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education recently published a free e-book, “A Pedagogy of Play: Supporting playful learning in classrooms and schools.” It’s written as a guide to help bring playful learning into more traditional classroom settings.

https://www.popatplay.org/post/launching-a-pedagogy-of-play-...

rpastuszak• 3 years ago

If you’re interested in the subject you might enjoy reading my article dealing with procrastination, laziness and play: https://sonnet.io/posts/hummingbirds/

I don’t have ADHD but (for different reasons) I struggle with similar issues. I also run (free) coaching/ranting sessions for people with similar problems.

dchuk3• 3 years ago

Sort of related...

My wife is an educator (public 1st grade teacher in California). We just had the discussion that next year will likely be her last year in that profession. The stress is too high, support too low, kid's behavior issues are skyrocketing, parents are getting downright violent/threatening to the staff...it's just a fuckin mess. Many of her colleagues are leaving the profession. I expect there to be a growing deficit of teachers in the coming years.

We're hoping we can get her working on education materials/maybe tutoring as a side business during her sabbatical (maybe retirement)?

I bring this up because what I've been thinking about lately, is that with the recent explosion of Large Language Models and their inevitable rapid evolution, that to me it's pretty clear education needs to go down the path of AI-based, automatically customized and tuned and guided, computer based education for primary students. We're right around the corner from AI automatically generating highly interactive learning courses for children, that will fundamentally reshape the notion of classroom-based education.

The path to adoption will probably be a mess because of the bureaucracy in education in general, but maybe that means more people will explore private/home-based education paths combined with outlets for social interaction for their kids (maybe there will be a boom in youth sports?)

Random Saturday morning daydreaming here, curious what others think.

tornato7• 3 years ago

LLMs have already done wonders for my own learning and I think it will have a huge effect in highschool education and beyond.

But below that level, the topics that are being taught are very standardized and have been studied to death, and there already exists a ton of interactive learning tools, toys, projects, and games. Teachers below middle-school level are mostly babysitting and trying to just get kids to learn the rules and pay attention.

I am concerned for the education of the next generation of kids. Stories like yours are all too common.

operatingthetan• 3 years ago

LLMs have already done wonders for my own learning and I think it will have a huge effect in highschool education and beyond.

Can you explain your process for using it? Is it done in a session or do you ask random questions throughout the day? Specific topics or general?

elefanten• 3 years ago

I’m only half-joking (maybe barely joking) when I say your comment made me think:

“The movement that wants to pause AI development should just tell school boards and DEI activists that AI will allow every child to learn at their own pace. Probably no faster way to put a total ban in motion than an appeal to toxic ‘anti-racism’ activism.”

l33t233372• 3 years ago

Alternatively, they should just tell school boards and state legislatures that AI will allow children to learn at their own pace. Probably no faster way to put a total ban in motion than an appeal to toxic “anti-wokeism’ activism.

onos• 3 years ago

Access to information has not been the bottleneck in education for some time. As you noted here behavior issues are. —> fail to see how AI will help.

tough• 3 years ago

Well you could feed an AI system with all videos from school, grades, and all metadata of each student, and have the Ai check for any bad behaviour and try to implement best course of action based on similar past cases

It beats a broken human system that barely works at some point, the problem is we unempowered the teachers, let's empower the machines to teach then

6438y44y4u• 3 years ago

I think you should talk with your wife more to be honest because I think you've missed the key elements of what she was telling you. I live in California myself and have a number of friends who are teachers at various grade levels. Your wife is spot on and AI is the last thing that's going to solve the issue. Children with behavioral problems (hint: 9.5/10 times it's their family's fault but you're not allowed to blame the parent as an educator) aren't going to cooperate with your automated learning. If they were a poorly performing student before, they also probably have a home situation that isn't going to be receptive to whatever pressure you try to apply on them to coerce their children. And even if you could find an angle to apply pressure from, what are you going to do if you discover that the solution is disproportionately necessary for certain minority groups? Now even if your solution works it's dead in the water because it's racist. The teachers aren't leaving because they lack solutions they are leaving because nothing effective is allowed and all the while they get to endure abuse from both parents and students. None of this is going to be solved by making it even easier to ignore school by replacing teachers.

Baeocystin3• 3 years ago

Have many teachers in my family. My only complaint with your statement is that 9.5 out of 10 is way too generous. The level of absolute bare basics decency and behavior is so bad that it's hard to believe.

james4k• 3 years ago

What are you thinking about when you say "nothing effective is allowed"?

naet2• 3 years ago

Not sure what you mean by solutions to education problems being "racist" and not allowed.... Also seems rude to assume you know better about this person's motivation for leaving teaching than they do.

I am a former California educator switched to software engineer. The reasons I switched careers is directly because education is underfunded and under supported by school administration and I didn't see a sustainable future for myself there. Many other brilliant teachers I knew have also left or are leaving because it isn't worth the effort and stress for bare minimum pay. Teachers aren't leaving because of the students, they're leaving because of the systems. You're severely overworked and underpaid, with no backup or support from the institution, in overly large class sizes, and have poor curriculums that teach to outdated standardized tests that you have to stick to so the school can try to bargain for more funding.

I think a good system of well funded schools and teachers can get almost any student to a good place if they're enrolled at an early enough age and properly educated. Unfortunately there are increasingly common situations where a student has been let down by the school system for years and ends up falling too far behind their grade level to catch back up, but that is a failing of the school system and not their race or home life. I know because I have first hand experience in those elementary or middle schools, they just aren't able to serve students well with what they have (low wages lead to inexperienced or uneducated teaching staff, overfilled classrooms leads to not enough individual attention, poor learning environments, etc).

dchuk3• 3 years ago

Sorry, I wasn't saying AI is the way to fix the issue, I think it's going to be the necessary response when everyone realizes no one wants to sign up for the shitty job of being a public school teacher.

__MatrixMan__2• 3 years ago

My wife is a teacher and she often notices that many behavioral problems are curriculum problems. If Jimmy suddenly starts pulling Susie's hair it's not because he wants to hurt her, it's because he wants to distract from the fact that for whatever reason he isn't prepared for what he's just been asked to do.

As for myself, I spent freshmen year stealing anything not bolted down and a few things that were. I was just bored and angry that the system wasn't treating me like it respected my potential. That was childish of me, but then again, I was a child.

A therapist recommended putting me in some advanced classes, and the behavior problems went away.

For these reasons I think that the adaptability of an AI generated curriculum might solve some of those behavior problems.

Then there are the other problems. Like maybe the student needs glasses to see the board or feels unsafe for some reason or is too busy working to feed their siblings. For those, we're going to need humans in the loop and compassion in the policies.

thequadehunter• 3 years ago

I agree with this. My mom is a 1st grade teacher for almost 40 years now. She tells me that she can tell whether a kid will be successful based on interactions with their parents. If their parents are a lost cause, the kid will be in most cases too.

4dayworkweek4u4• 3 years ago

Thank you for being real! Getting sick of these NPCs on here...

xphilter• 3 years ago

We need less tech and more humans in education. All the things in your first paragraph are true problems, but the solution is 15 kids per class and discipline in the class room not AI.

Metacelsus• 3 years ago

So, basically the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer.

everydayentropy• 3 years ago

Socialization is far more important than any other skill that a child learns in primary and even secondary education.

I don't see ever see the wide adoption of an AI homeschooling solution coming to fruition due to this fact.

MichaelZuo• 3 years ago

I'd say that even applies to most tertiary (undergrad) education too. Unless the student is committed to becoming a pure math researcher or similar.

brightlancer3• 3 years ago

Eh? Homeschooling is a very social activity. I'd argue it's more pro-social than government schools: homeschooled students are learning/ working in more communal environments (e.g. the family home), they spend far less time on busy work, and they tend to have more free time which is then spent on group extracurricular activities.

While many families did jump on homeschooling because of inexpensive computers, online courses and tutors, government schools jumped on online courses, assignments, instructors, etc. even when there is a teacher and two dozen classmates in the room. Government schools are far less pro-social, IME.

To whatever extent AI drives down the cost, it will accelerate the movement toward homeschooling, but I don't see it reducing the prosocial aspects of homeschooling, while it likely will in government schools.

germinalphrase• 3 years ago

I went on sabbatical last June and have since joined a small tech consultancy (and consider myself retired from teaching after about ten years at the high school level). I have all sorts of strong feelings about this transition, but it was the right choice for my family. I hope your wife is able to come to a good place with it all.

To your daydreaming:

I believe there will be a roll for AI tools in education, but they will not be replacements for in-person instruction. They will assist teachers in being better educators.

Unlike many professions where workers operate in concert with digital tools to unlock value that would be otherwise impossible to achieve, classrooms are essentially analog. The toolset I would like to build would start by mediating instruction with an assessment generation/proctoring tool that builds assessments in real time based on the lesson’s instructional content & conversational cues without significant curation required by the instructor (i.e. the system listens to the lesson as it unfolds and continuously generates/refines appropriate assessment content; the instructor should be able to complete a final curation and distribution of the assessment to students within a typical one to three minute instructional task/conversational break/etc).

Right now, we spend billions of dollars on standardized testing (with all the inherent issues of that high stakes, non-longitudinal format), and while the same content is being regularly assessed by classroom instructors, we broadly don’t accept those results as trustworthy. Such a system as I’m considering could inject that trust into classroom assessments, allow for more frequent/high quality/low effort assessments - and provide a beachhead for building additional purpose built assistive tools for instructors.

AI would likely provide utility to this tool, but the functional value cannot be separated from the fluid, branching path conversations of high quality in-person instruction.

bmitc• 3 years ago

is that with the recent explosion of Large Language Models and their inevitable rapid evolution, that to me it's pretty clear education needs to go down the path of AI-based, automatically customized and tuned and guided, computer based education for primary students

Do you mind expanding on why that's clear? At even a first pass by ignoring the "AI" part and focusing on the computer-based approach, it is known and has been shown that screens are detrimental to cognitive development. As in detrimental to brain development and processes, not just learning.

We're right around the corner from AI automatically generating highly interactive learning courses for children, that will fundamentally reshape the notion of classroom-based education.

How is it going to do this any better than humans? Part of the existing problem is that teachers can teach incorrect information. (I know your wife is a teacher. My mom was a teacher.) With auto-generated learning, what will be the check that the information is correct, following guidelines, not introducing biases and -isms, and not breaking laws and regulations? And I see this approach as doubling down on treating kids as automatons rather than teaching them critical and creative thinking.

The problems with education are multifaceted. Teachers are underpaid and overly managed with managed and standardized curriculums. Families do not have the proper support structures. Thus, schools are babysitters and sources of food for many. Social media is amplifying the worst parts of humanity and eating society from the inside out. We have an extremist/terrorist party insistent on not properly finding education and social support structures and destroying human rights.

It's unfathomable to me how machine learning based, auto-generated content somehow "solves" education without addressing these problems.

I think any parent should immediately withdraw their kid from a school that adopts these "AI". We can already see failures of forced technology in schools, such as PowerPoint and Chromebooks in schools. The myopic forcing of teachers to use PowerPoint was one of the many things that made my mom retire early from teaching.

jonahrd• 3 years ago

I believe this idea somewhat stems from American exceptionalism. Our country is so exceptional that it must require exceptional solutions.

There are many countries out there (Finland, France) that don't have this crisis in education and are not grasping for radical solutions. They are just incrementally improving the systems in place.

Why would the US need a completely different solution?

gameman1445• 3 years ago

Why would the US need a completely different solution?

One reason is that the US is substantially more ethnically and culturally heterogenous than Finland or France. This means that a one-size-fits-all approach is much more likely to work over there than in the US.

schneems• 3 years ago

Large language models do are no “A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer” they are stochastic parrots and don’t even parrot facts reliably.

I teach 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade kids to code. Mostly code.org does the work of introducing code through play but the value of the teacher is in classroom management. Specific to programming, the value I bring is debugging experience and empathy. Instead of saying “you fix your problem like this” I focus on trying to understand/empathize with why the problem was made to begin with and then using that info to guide them to the correct fix.

jiggywiggy• 3 years ago

There are hands all over the Himalayans rocks. I saw many in Kham. In Tibetan tradition it's a sign of meditative accomplishment to leave ones handprint in the rocks (and melt the ice). Hard to believe, but the hands are everywhere. Even if the stone is old hard to date the handprint itself. Ice melting has been studied and proven.

crawfordcomeaux• 3 years ago

Here are some webinar videos for deathclowning methodology, which is meant for playing with anything, especially the taboo.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=gn-85vl-t5s

https://youtube.com/watch?v=yruvppEhBW0

https://youtube.com/watch?v=WxPfCufFNZ8

oytis2• 3 years ago

As Plato famously said, “You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.”

Is it a self-referential example of play?

kbelder• 3 years ago

Typo. He meant "Play-dough"

4dayworkweek4u4• 3 years ago

It's a fake quote... look it up.

oytis2• 3 years ago

I mean, it's pretty obviously fake, even without looking up. This article is a good example of where GPT would do better I think.

NoZebra120vClip• 3 years ago

When I was in the 5th grade or so, I had a Commodore VIC-20, then a C=64. These were, respectively, the second and third machines I learned to program in BASIC.

One of my completed achievements was a sort of "typing tutor" game. I suppose I modeled it upon the game on my Casio calculator watch, and Missile Command. In my game, letters would fall from the sky, and pressing the correct key would destroy the letter and save Earth.

My father belittled it because it was a game and so, it couldn't be serious learning. Well Dad, I seriously learned some BASIC in order to get to a finished product and do a literal tape-out.

  Raspberry Pi entered the chat

andrei_says_• 3 years ago

The school system’s idea of making learning a serious thing is the very thing that disrupts the main function of the supercharged learning machines that children are.

If we look at children’s play until 100 years ago it’s all learning and prep for life in different forms - forming social, motor, observation, improvisational etc skills.

The gaming industry has hijacked this for its profit loop but ultimately games are about learning new skills and excelling at them.

Force feeding anything makes it super unfun.

nutanc• 3 years ago

Learning by playing is the holy grail. This means that you will have fun and at the same time you develop a skill. What I have found is that play happens in different environments. For most kids now, these environments are virtual.

One of the best example of playing through learning for my kid was him learning the multiplication tables playing Roblox[1]

[1] https://www.roblox.com/games/10489578087/Multiplication-Game

DANmode• 3 years ago

Mario Teaches Typing checking in here with more anecdotal evidence.

ssd532• 3 years ago

This is awesome. Is there any way in Roblox we can whitelist games? The problem with allowing Roblox is kids go there and do all sorts of other addictive games and activities and forget what they were there for.

gumby• 3 years ago

It seems quite strange to me that schools in California seem to have eliminated recess (breaks for unstructured play outside). The rigid Gradgrinds have sabotaged their own efforts.

the__alchemist• 3 years ago

Relevant Jblow video on video games and education: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWFScmtiC44

Spoiler: He thinks Zachtronics games (Spacechem, Shenzio IO, Opus Magnum etc) do this very well. The point is they're not explicitly educational games about specific topics, but they teach problem-solving skills in an engaging way.

khazhoux• 3 years ago

As Plato famously said, “You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.”

Not only is this not a quote from Plato's writings, it doesn't even bear a passing resemblance to anything from Plato.

ChocMontePy• 3 years ago

Good post on the quote:

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/07/30/hour-play/

amadeuspagel• 3 years ago

“You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.”

That was actually Winston Churchill, not Plato: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/07/30/hour-play/

To supercharge learning, look to play

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