Well, my blogging has been less than stellar this week. Between migraines, work, and a dodgy internet connection, I've managed to produce just one proper post. Not good enough in my opinion, but perhaps more realistic. I don't want to set any rules about my blog like saying that I will definitely do one post a day or three posts a week, or anything like that. At the same time, however, I feel that if I don't set a minimum, it could end up being weeks between posts, and I couldn't expect people to bother checking back here every day for one post every few weeks. So I just want to say that whilst I might not find the opportunity to post every day, I can assure you that I will make the effort to have something here for you to read every week. Knowing how much I like to rant, I expect there will be more than one post a week, but I'd rather set a standard of “one post a week, and any more are bonuses” than “One post a day, and if I don't manage that, it's a failure”.
Make sure to check back later today for a proper post. This time I’ll be discussing my ideas on how to teach with the use of games.
I feel that, over the years, I've got a lot out of playing computer games in addition to the intended entertainment factor. One game alone (Grim Fandango) helped me to extend my English vocabulary (I specifically remember hearing the word 'ostentatious' here for the first time), learn some basic Spanish phrases and vocabulary, and informed me about Mexican beliefs in relation to the afterlife and their celebration of The Day of the Dead. This, however, isn't a unique quality for a game. I have clear recollections of various bits of information I've learned from computer games. I've always thought of the things I've learned as mostly useless, but as I grow older (and hopefully wiser) I find myself being more and more aware of the value of this knowledge.
I've always been quite an interested person. I've always been curious about why things are the way they are, how things work, and how we got to this point in civilisation (the real one, not the game). The problem is that although I can be very interested in a given subject, I tend to need a little direction to get me started. With Grim Fandango, I simply wanted to play an interesting game that would be challenging but, most importantly, fun. It was a fun game with interesting characters and an exciting story, but the fringe benefit of playing was that it got me interested in The Day of the Dead festival and the beliefs surrounding it. Not only did I learn a lot from the game, but it whet my appetite, encouraging me to find more information on these beliefs. I've found computer games to be an incredibly powerful way to inspire learning, as well as being a resource to some extent.
Primary education
I mentioned simulators in my post last week. Many people know that pilots are trained in flight simulators, and some of you might be aware that some driving schools use driving simulators these days; but simulators are used for numerous things because, lets be honest, experience is much more useful than a lot of theory. You could spend months reading the instructions for your new mobile phone, but why bother? Most people keep the manual for reference and just get on with using the phone. Things stick in your head better when you've learned them yourself, and if they don't stick the first time, you will have at least had practice at figuring it out; making it easier to do it again. I never liked reading manuals, even for computer games. Games always come with a manual, but as far as I'm concerned, it's a reference guide, and I suspect that most people are the same. You check the manual on a drill because you want to make sure you don't put a hole through your leg, but mostly, learning is about doing.
Secondary education
Ignoring, for a moment, the information I've learned from games; I find it interesting to think of the skills I've learned. I can genuinely look at video games as having given me many opportunities to practice my lateral thinking, logic, management skills and strategies. I always find it interesting to watch other people play computer games. I think you can tell a lot about a person by how they act, and these behaviours can still be spotted when you watch someone playing a game. I am a perfectionist. I know most people who know me won't believe that but it's true. I've been known to be quite lazy, but in the past that has tended to result in me not finishing things. The things I actually finish, are done to a very high quality, and this became apparent in my gaming habits. If I messed up in a game, I would tend to reload a saved game from earlier and redo that section until I got the absolute best result possible. I learned where pitfalls were and was able to avoid them, as well as learning to spot them in the future. In contrast, I have a friend who also plays a lot of games, and when I watched him play the same games, it became apparent to me that there was a lot of his personality going into how he played the game. If something went wrong, he just pushed on. Even when things became desperate, he would continue playing until he achieved his goal. Obviously he would hit a dead end from time to time and he'd get a game over screen, but each scenario gave him more training. The interesting thing was that we were both learning, and both achieving the end goal; but I was amazed by the kind of insight that watching a person play games could give me. It has become even more apparent over the years that these interactions have become like practice for real life. I don't mean this in the sense of “I learned to drive from Grand Theft Auto” but that there are certain cognitive processes that can be honed through the use of computer simulations.
I recently got back into playing sudoku. I think that many people assume that because it's a game played with numbers, it's a game about maths; but sudoku is a game of logic. I introduced my girlfriend to the game and she has taken it up very enthusiastically, but she isn't particularly good at it at the moment. This isn't at all because she's dumb (she's quite the contrary) but she clearly hasn't played as much sudoku and so she hasn't had the same practice in using that form of logic. It's an easy comparison for me to make and through this logic exercise I can practice using my brain in certain ways that are beneficial in life. I find much the same in computer games. I love adventure games, especially ones with environmental puzzles. I am concious of having grown up with fairly well developed lateral thinking skills which I feel can be at least partly attributed to computer games. Again, I recently introduced my girlfriend (who has hardly ever played any computer games) to one of these games, and again I have found the results very interesting. She is very good at getting the answers and more than capable of solving the puzzles herself, but I found that if I'm in the room when she's playing, she can't help but ask me what she needs to do. This makes for quite an interesting game play style because , to be honest, there's no reason why she wouldn't ask me for the answer; I do know it after all. I even found that when I left the room and came back some time later, she had looked up a website with the solutions to the puzzles. That to me is brilliant task oriented thinking. She got the answer and the result. What is to say that she hasn't learned anything from that? She sought the answer herself and was presumably able to understand how the solution worked, and so she learned something new.
BA(Hons)
There is plenty of educational software out there. There are simulators and games that are specifically intended to teach us things, but I definitely feel that even mainstream games have something to offer. Even if the only thing we get is a taste for a deeper knowledge of something that game introduced us to. Games and simulations can train us, and exercise our brains; but they can also give us things to take away and consider and develop. There is such an ocean of games to choose from and whilst some of them might find you with your pants rolled up splashing in the shallows, other will give you reason to dive in head first; and you might just be surprised how deep they can go.
Apologies for the lack of a proper blog post today. Having found a full day all to my self on Saturday, I decided to spend my free time doing nothing other than playing video games. More specifically I spent almost the entire day playing Sid Meier's Civilization 5. I now know why they put his name in the title; so you know who's name to curse when you realise you've spent so much time playing his game, that real civilization has passed you by. It's rare that I find the time to play games guilt free these days, so I think it went to my head a little. In fact it went to my head a lot because I had the world’s most excruciating migraine all day Sunday. It's not an excuse, but rather a reason for the lack of a proper blog post today. As an act of penance I will be posting today's post tonight, with normal service resuming on Wednesday.
Sid Meier: Those eyes; those beady, calculating little eyes
Here is something interesting that I read today: The first known flight simulator was developed in 1909 to help pilots learn to fly the Antoinette monoplane. Apparently some of the controls, more specifically the one concerned with controlling the roll of the plane, were slightly counterintuitive. The purpose of this was to give the pilot a chance to get used to controlling the plane before taking the real thing up into the air. Needless to say this saved the people building the planes a considerable amount of money that would have otherwise been spent on ads in the classifieds reading “Man wanted. Must have a head for heights. No fatties.” And if at this point you find yourself thinking “Surely Developing the world’s first flight simulator would be more expensive than a few more ads in the paper” think again. Take a look at what passed for a flight simulator in 1909.
"We admire your enthusiasm Frank, but this has got to be your shittiest parade float yet"
Compared to this; my shenanigans as a young boy, in which my brothers would push me down the garden in a box on a skateboard, look like astronaut training. If all this sounds just too ridiculous to believe, there is apparently a full-size model of this piece of high tech kit in the foyer of the Airbus Training Centre in Toulouse for you to check out at your convenience.
What does this have to do with anything? Well it’s like they say: Practice makes perfect. Simulation is a widely used method of teaching that has been around for a very long time, and I’m not just talking about barrels on seesaws here. Simulation is a natural part of how humans and animals learn to do things. Ever watched kittens play fighting? Lion cubs on the telly stalking each other in the grass? Or children playing house? These are all natural ways in which we learn to do the things we’re supposed to do (or in humans’ case, occasionally, expected to do). Some of it is instinct, some of it is imitation. As a child you might see your mum or dad talking into the phone, you might have a toy phone and so you do the same. You don’t know what the hell you’re doing but everyone else seems to be doing it, so it can’t be that weird. You even know that you have to start by mashing the keypad a few times because you’d just look stupid otherwise.By the time you’re old enough to be allowed to use the phone you will probably be told that the numbers you press are important and that they need to be input in a certain order, but other than that, you almost instinctively know how to use the phone. Some children talk to their toys or have imaginary friends. This isn’t antisocial; it’s practice (bare in mind the fact that I’m not a qualified child psychologist here. If your four year old child tells you he put Mr Fluffykins in the microwave because ‘Fred’ told him to, you should probably seek professional advice). Children use these games and role-plays to practice being a proper ‘grown-up’.
Beyond the realms of imitation, we have an even more powerful simulator at our disposal: our brain. People daydream all the time. We fantasise about things we’d like to say or do with members of the opposite sex, having lots of money, or a big house, or fantasise about pushing that loudmouth prick on his blackberry off the station platform into the path of the 815 to Southport. Whilst each of these fantasies looks at a larger goal; they contain smaller, more everyday scenarios, such as how you might smooth talk your boss into giving you that raise, or how to resist pushing that loudmouth prick on his blackberry off the station platform into the path of the 815 to Southport. Still not satisfied with that, Mother Nature has seen fit to install an automated simulation cycle in the form of dreams. It’s still near impossible to explain in any certain terms exactly how dreams work and why we evolved to have them (or why the divine being that picked us from his nose gave them to us), but one theory that has caught my attention is the idea that at least some dreams are a way of training us to deal with situations that may arise in our waking lives.
As adults, we simulate situations in our dreams often. If something is worrying you, such as an upcoming job interview, you might find yourself running through that situation in a dream. It’s not uncommon for these things to feed back negatively. If you have low expectations for the job interview you might find things going horribly wrong in the dream, far worse than might be reasonably expected. These nightmares, however, might spur you on to prepare even more vigorously for your interview and ultimately aid you in getting the job (if you don’t have a mental breakdown first). Even if you end up with the old ‘naked in front of an audience’ situation you can at least go to the interview knowing that, as long as you’ve double checked you’re wearing your pants, things can’t get that bad.
The mind’s power to provide us with a safe environment in which to simulate various scenarios has led to some people using it as a way of learning actions through meditation and lucid dreaming. It’s around here that things all start to get a little hokey, and despite my own interest in this area of self improvement, I feel I’m better off skipping it here.
Whatever you think of dreams, it’s hard to ignore the impact they can have on our waking lives, and their application as a natural simulator makes a lot of sense. And even if you don’t think much of this mental training, it’s hard to ignore the benefits of learning through simulators. Simulators continue to be used as effective learning tools in many walks of life, and whether it’s in your head or on your computer, chances are that you learn from one on a daily basis.
There are generally a huge number of things I would like to talk about on any given day, which would be fine if it weren’t for the fact that they are often all connected. This means that when I come to writing my blog, I’m never quite sure where to start. The problem is that whilst I could simply pick one small area and discuss that, it would make for an exceptionally short post; and writing about everything would make for a very long, albeit engrossing, book. For that reason, you may find that I’ll often discuss many things in detail whilst skimming over others rather quickly, so I’d just like to extend an invitation to anyone reading this blog (I know you’re out there, the stats page tells me so) to question me on any of the subjects I’ve been writing about. You might want me to elaborate on something I’ve written, or perhaps cover something I connected to past subject that I’ve neglected to mention. As always, general comments are welcome and if you’d like to debate any of the points made in my blog feel free to say something in the comments section.
Something I’ve mentioned in previous posts is the affective context model. I have explained parts of this in relation to the effect of emotions on memory, but haven’t fully explained all aspects of how it is seen to work. In my defence, I have told you to watch this video on affective context before now, and if you haven’t it’s your own fault for being lazy (it’s less than ten minutes long and really is quite interesting), but I won’t hold it against you. One thing discussed in the video is the difference between ‘push learning’ and ‘pull learning’.
Push learning is the kind of learning we’re used to experiencing in formal education and is based on the idea of providing a student with the necessary theory to perform a certain task so that they might be less likely to fail at said task. This is a tried and tested form of teaching that has been proven time and again to be almost invariably worthless. Think how often you might tell a child not to touch a hot oven or pan and then find them almost immediately going to do just that. You can say don’t go in there, or don’t do that, or don’t eat those, or don’t poke that; but in the end people need to understand why. I recall a story about my brother who, whilst on a school trip to a farm, was warned about the electric fences around the farm and told not to touch them or he would be electrocuted. He then proceeded to run straight for the nearest fence, arms outstretched, to discover what this ‘electrocuted’ felt like. He didn’t like it. Admittedly he was very young at the time (4 or 5 years old maybe) but that’s not to say adults don’t do the same thing.
As an adult we have a better understanding of the world, but that comes from our experiences throughout life. I know not to stick my finger in a plug socket because I’ll be electrocuted, and although I’ve never experienced that level of electrocution, I have experienced smaller electric shocks that allow me to imagine the possible magnitude of such a shock. Let me pose his hypothetical situation: If Ricky Hatton walked up to you in the street and punched you in the face, what would you do? Hit him back? Run away? Cry? Well I can’t say this with any authority but I’m not ashamed to admit that, were I in that situation, I imagine I would most likely to be struggling to regain consciousness. Maybe you’ve been punched before, maybe you’ve been punched really hard, but have you ever had a world class boxer smash his bare fist into your head? I doubt it. You would have no frame of reference and so my advice of “Don’t go out there, Ricky Hatton will punch you in the head” could well be ignored with the thought that you might just be able to walk away with a bit of a bruise.
So push learning is when we’re taught, in school, how to work out the length of one side of scalene triangle before we even know what we’ll need that information for. The only place this form of learning takes place is in schools and is a result of a system in which a learning establishment is expected to churn out students to specification. Like a production line. And not even a Six Sigma production line.
Pull learning on the other hand is the way in which we naturally learn. This is about providing the affective context or reason for something before you teach the method. As a baby you see food, you want food, but you don’t have the necessary language to communicate that. You reach for your food and mum says “do you want your food?” before giving you what you want. This process is repeated and with each variation of the sentence one word is consistently used until you learn that ‘food’ means that tasty stuff you put in your mouth to fuel the poop machine. This is something that is observable and proves the value of affective context. In fact, this is such an effective method of learning language that it is the basis of the Rosetta Stone series of language software. You can see their explanation of this on their website here. This way of learning is constant throughout our lives and we will always remember things better if we can understand why we need to know them. A common example of this is when you are introduced to a new person. How often have you found yourself in a situation where you have just been introduced to someone only to forget their name almost immediately? This is most likely down to the fact that your brain basically doesn’t know why it needs to remember that information, and you might find yourself thinking the same thing. “Who is this guy? What is he talking about? I don’t care about the mating habits of the common earth worm. Maybe I can fake a heart attack and he’ll just get bored and leave.” On the other hand if your friend came to you and said “I know a guy who is a [insert your dream job here]. He might be able to give you some pointers on how to get a job in the industry” You suddenly have an affective context, a reason to remember this person. In this case you may learn the person’s name before you’ve even met them.
In the past the pull method has been used to teach in the form of apprenticeships where an apprentice would be expected to perform and observe, first hand, different aspects of a job. It was only after performing and observing this job for some time (and failing in the process) that they would gain an affective context for the theory that would then be taught to them. People need to know why they are learning something for them to be able to take it on board.
One last example: When I was 9 years old, I found an enthusiasm for playing the piano. I played a few irritating and repetitive little ditties that I’d made up by pressing random keys, and a couple of short tunes that other members of my family had been willing to show me, including the first few bars of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. My mum, wanting to encourage this, asked her friend to give me a few lessons (about half a dozen). She was a qualified piano teacher and, as I suppose she might have always done, she began by teaching me the scales. Fair enough, when you’ve never played a piano properly before, you can appreciate the value of knowing the scales at least. Plus they sounded very melodic compared to most of what I’d been playing. Despite this, my favourite piece was still the Moonlight Sonata and I was keen to learn how to play it. I noticed that my mum’s friend had the sheet music for this and I asked her if she would teach me how to play it. I was told that it was too complex for me and that my hands wouldn’t be able to stretch enough to reach all the notes. I argued that I could already play the first few bars, but it wasn’t good enough and, despite all my attempts to increase my hand span to be able to play the piece (my left hand span is still over a centimetre larger than my right), she ultimately never taught me to play the Moonlight Sonata. I know, boo hoo me. I got bored of the simple beginner tunes I was playing and eventually gave up.
Some years later, when I was about sixteen, I saw a boy playing the piano. He was playing a boogie song and it sounded awesome. I wished that I could play that and felt like I’d made a big mistake by giving up my piano playing. When I got home I decided to see what I could remember. I could remember my scales at least. Armed with that base and a renewed sense of enthusiasm I began playing again. This time I taught myself. I learned to play by ear, listening to music and simply figuring out how to play it myself. I realised how to construct chords from the scales I’d learned and suddenly I was almost playing proper tunes. After a little bit of encouragement from my mum, I was convinced to take up some more lessons, but this time I took a different route. I was terrible at reading music and found that side of the whole thing very boring, but I had a knack for improvisation. So I took up Jazz piano lessons. The Jazz exams involved playing the beginning and ends of songs as written in the book, but the middle section was improvised. Now I was playing things I wanted to play. This teacher was much more open to my musical choices and allowed me to play whatever I wanted, including the Moonlight Sonata. It took some time, since I had to learn the sheet music off by heart (I still couldn’t read it fast enough), but I did learn to play the first movement of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. My teacher noted the fact that for someone who hadn’t even completed their grade 1 exam yet, it was pretty impressive to see me play at a grade 5 level. I eventually got my jazz piano grade 1 certificate with a distinction but gave up the lessons when I had to move away.
Over the years, I may have forgotten how to play specific pieces, but I’ve never forgotten how to play the piano, I’ve never forgotten how to play my scales, or find chords, or play a tune I’ve heard. That, to me, is the power of affective context.
