My 10 year-old learning Rage of Bahamut

One of hottest free games in the mobile space right now is called Rage of Bahamut. Unlike its name and graphics suggest, this is a card collecting and card battling game. There is no visible violence, blood, gore, or for that matter character animation. Based on that description, it is somewhat surprising that it has turned into such a phenomenon. But the success of it is not what I want to talk about. Instead I have learned a great deal from teaching my 10 year-old daughter to play it. My daughter is not an avid learner. The process of learning does not excite her. And so far I have yet to discover something that she desperately wanted to master. It has been quite difficult to find the opportunity to teach her how to learn.

I started the game a couple of months ago. She watched me played a few times and wanted to participate. The first thing she wanted to do was to help me poked the screen during questing. It was mechanical and un-rewarding mentally to say the least but it was a good bait. I also showed her the process of evolving (merging) cards and let her help me with it. With my old iPhone (no SIM card, just WiFi connection) in hand, she asked if she can have it installed on “her” iPhone. She took the bait!

One of the first thing I had to encourage her to do is to READ the screen. Every word, every sentence is there for a reason. Being a lazy learner, this was something she has to overcome. I have come to terms that nothing will encourage her more than a subject matter she’s interested in. Of course, the opposite is true. I had to hold myself back and let her read, comprehend, and understand at her own pace. I just had to make sure she actually read the pages rather than just clicking through the tutorial.

Since she had been watching me play, the easiest thing for her to master was questing. She accessed the function, poked poked poked, very self-evident, involving, and rewarding. With more cards, the next thing she mastered was evolving. She also learned how to improve the attributes, how to obtain friendship points on a periodic basis, among other things. In addition, she had learned some of the terminologies: “feeder cards”, “fully-evolved cards”, etc. With a proverbial bag of cards begging to be used and the questing/evolving starting to lose appeal (I’ve come to recognize these warning signs on whatever subject she got in and out of), she asked what to do next. BAIT!

With the basic mechanics mastered, now comes areas that are more cerebral. I introduced her to the rarity concept and how she can work on building her attack and defense cards. With a few premium card pack tickets, she got a hold of some rare cards and started to get excited. With the concept of evolving under her belt, I explained to her enhancing, leveling, and various more complex concepts that involved a great deal of math. The actual mathematics is actually not important but her grasping of the concepts were. (For those of you that knows the game, I explained to her the difference between 8-15, 6-11, 4-0, and potential outcomes.) Even though the gratification is not as instant, she started to understand.

I recommended her to focus on doing 6-11 on one card and she decided on a Holy Knight. Which card she chose really wasn’t that important. The fact that she had one and that she made the choice herself were. As she applied her feeders enhancing this card, her eyes lit up watching the card’s stats improving. Instant gratification at work! Somewhere along the line, the fact that she needs 6 of the same cards to-be-drawn randomly seemed to create an angst. BAIT! I then introduced her to trading. Using other cards she was not interested in, she was able to find trades from the marketplace and was able to get her hands on 3 Holy Knights, free! Knowing that nothing (except time) can stop her from achieving half of the 6-11 caused her to regain her excitement.

During our drive to meet a friend yesterday, she started to ask questions and I answered them. I’ve now observed her listening, comprehending, practicing, and asking questions. I sweetened the pot a bit more by telling her that 1) she and I now speaks a language that mommy doesn’t understand, and 2) if she listen in on my conversations with my gaming friends, she would start to understand what we are talking about. Evidently, access to exclusivity has a certain appeal also.

Today, she came into my cave and announced that she’s going to check the market and see if she can find a trade. After 5 minutes, she jumped into my view and cheered that she was successful and now have 4 Holy Knight cards. Again, apparent progress excited her. I told her, “I’m very proud of you of learning.” She replied with a puzzled look, “You are proud of me for learning a video game?!” Her mom (within earshot) promptly cracked up. And I said, “No, I’m proud of you for learning, period.” She was obviously amused.

While playing together is rewarding in a certain way, I think I’ve gained more by observing her learning behavior. People often complain about certain activities are addicting, including gaming. What I found is that other activities like studying, school, etc. are not addicting because they don’t have the correct mechanisms in place. They are not appealing to a child’s (or even an adult’s) learning cycle:

Interest spawns focus, focus spawns learning opportunity, learning opportunity spawns chance for accomplishment, fast turn around in accomplishment (a.k.a. instant gratification, no, it is not always a bad thing) spawns reinforcement, reinforcement caused mastery, mastery leads to boredom (a cliff), complexity steers people away from the cliff and create additional interests. And the cycle repeats. I hear from time to time that parents are amazed how quickly their children can master complex gaming concepts and complex gaming mechanics. My take is that children actually have very high capacity for learning but if the mechanisms are not in place or if the complexity isn’t there, they lose interests quickly.

Looking at how complicated this game actually is, I think I can squeeze a few more weeks of teaching/learning out of it.

From Education To Teaching To Technolgy To Learning

I just returned from volunteering from http://blogs.ksbe.edu/edtechconference2012/. Last time this conference was held was back in . I am not an educator myself. But as one who work for an educational institution and as a parent of a child who participated in one daily, I did not expect education as a system to have changed much. I was right and I was wrong.

Back in 2008… actually, let’s recap what the world was like in 2008. The world-wide economic crisis just started to rear its ugly head. Kosovo declares independence from Serbia. 69,000 people were killed after an earthquake in China. China hosted the Olympics. Somalia pirates hijack multiple ships. SpaceX Falcon 1 successfully conducterd the first private space flight. The Large Hadron Collider is officially inaugurated. Obama was elected as the U.S. President. Back in 2008, our education system was as it was 100 years ago. Educators have just started to look at the Web 2.0 world. 4 years later in 2012, many world, economics, and technology events had happened. To put it in perspective, Apple’s iPad came into existence for the masses about 2 years ago (in April 2010). Our education system is as it was 104 years ago. I was right, not much has changed.

But as I listen to speaker after speaker, discussing and talking about how the world has changed, I’m forced to acknowledged that things are indeed different than 4 years ago. It is actually more accurate to say that I’m forced to acknowledged that what were once novelty ideas have started to take hold among the educators. So I was wrong as well.

Instead of concerning about Facebook, texting, web 2.0, iPhone, and a hundred other technological inventions, many educators have adopted them and incorporated them into their world. But more importantly, many have see passed the technologies themselves and re-focused on the ultimate purpose: Learning. Note that I did not say “teaching”. As I converse with the teachers and the speakers in the conference, there is a distinct acknowledgement, as least among them, that teachers are no longer information authority whose purpose was to pass on factual knowledge to the next generation. Instead, they all realized that the likes of Google can provide more accurate, more up-to-date facts than they can faster. Their roles have changed from teachers of facts to teachers of learning. Many schools, cirriculums, teaching methods, experiments (or not) has been teaching our children how to learn. The results are often startling and encouraging. Students benefiting from these changes participated at a higher level, they are more motivated, and produced better work. The teachers merely provide guidance and facilitation.

Unfortunately, what hasn’t change is the education system. Most students are still measured by whether they have acquired pieces of facts and whether they can answer questions based on memroizing those facts. Our system is still not measuring whether our children are capable of learning on their own, whether they can collaborate, whether they can research and judge what they found, and whether they help each other grow. At the same time, the same system continue to measure our teachers on whether they have successfully taught facts to their students instead of measuring whether they have “taught” our children the necessary skills to become life-long learners.

As much as I am discouraged by the state of our education system, I have hope. If we can observe changes in individual teachers’ views and approaches in a few years, we may yet witness ground shattering changes to this system within our life time.

Plants vs Zombies and Revelation on Computer Games and Young Minds

I have been a gamer for 30+ years since the Apple II days. Come to think of it, I started right at around my daughter’s age now. While the 30 years span differentiated our experiences by monochrome vs color, keyboard vs touch, Apple II vs Apple iPad, 8-bit vs 24-bit, and so on so forth, the fact remains that my mother and her mother thought nothing ever good comes out of computer games.

One of our favorites in recent months is Plants vs Zombies (PvZ). As a seasoned gamer, I learned the basics, learned the nuiances about each play piece, each zombie, and how they interact, my mind quickly build up various tactics and strategies. All the while balancing the strength of the economy, defense, and offense.

My daughter had been watching me play over the past weeks. It wasn’t until today when she started to play herself did I realized how little she actually learned via observation. While she is aware that each play piece and enemy does different thing, she did not recognize that there are 3 areas that requires balance. It wasn’t until she started playing did she have the a-ha moment.
As I discussed with my wife on this observation, we noticed a parallel just this past 2 months. As she started 4th grade, her work load has significantly increased. It wasn’t until she experienced the pressure of not having enough time, and then the relieve of managing her time correctly did she learned what she needed to do. My only conclusion is that resource management can only be learned experientially, not by theory or observation. This may explain why even graduates of Finance have poor personal financial skills.

Many prevalent genres of computer games, notably real time strategies (RTS) and role playing games (RPG) among others have strong emphasis on gameplay based on limited resources and forcing gamers to make intelligent and educated decisions. Gamers who are accustomed to this type of constraints often learn new games very quickly. If theirs and my gaming experience are any indication, this type of skill is transferrable. And if it can be transferred from one gaming experience to another, it could very well be transferrable from gaming to real life. It will definitely be interesting to observe how my daughter handle limited resources (time, allowance, etc.) in real life as she grows up.

As she continues to play PvZ, she encountered more difficult levels that require the pieces to start in a certain way and be changed to a different layout later. This is where I came to my second revelation. The ability to visualize a future state and the ability to plan a series of actions to achieve that future is not innate. Instead, these are skills that must be learned, practiced, and honed. As I coach her on how to build the initial stage and then progress to slowly replacing the pieces with better ones (and in the process destroying the old pieces), I can sense the hesitation in her. It wasn’t until the 3rd or 4th iteration did she came to accept the mechanics. Let’s hold that thought for a minute.

This leads to my third revelation: change is not just a difficult thing in the work place. New management, new philosophy, new process, new software, even new forms can be difficult for all of us. Change is also a difficult thing for a 9 year old playing a computer game as the tactic shifts from build-win to build-destroy-rebuilt-destroy-ebuilt-win. The funny thing was that as I came to recognize the parallel between what she was experiencing and what we were taught about change management at work, I started to apply some of those techniques on her. I show her how I do it. Then I let her be in control and I walk her through how to do it. Then I let her do it herself and only give advice when asked. Then she successfully conquer the level herself without assistance. And you know, it worked.

Now back to the second revelation on visualization and planning. After about 40 levels, she encountered a series that she does not comprehend (for those of you that plays PvZ, it was the roof levels with the bungee zombie). This time, instead of showing her what to do, I explain to her how one of the key pieces work (the umbrella plant), opened up Excel and drew a grid and help her plant out what pieces to put where. She went back to the level and executed it flawlessly. As she finished, she came back and said, “I want to plan the next level!” As an IT manager, it was music to my ear. And she was just playing a game. If this experience (and others alike) is transferrable, computer games would have turned her into a planner for the rest of her life. … Okay, I can dream, can’t I?

I have always believed that gaming experiences, like any life experiences, do things to our brain and not all of them bad. Let’s see if it proves true over time.

Changing Education Paradigms by Ken Robinson (via TED)

http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_changing_education_paradigms.html

TED Talks: Diana Laufenberg: How to learn? From mistakes

Diana Laufenberg: How to learn? From mistakes

When it is not appropriate, it is NOT appropriate

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2009/0217092samsung1.html

Briefly, a 14 year old student was arrested.  She refused to stop texting in class.  When school security was called, she hid her phone and denied that she has one.  Police was called and a female officer frisked her and found the phone.  She was charged with disorderly conduct.

While we like to call out the 2.0 revolution in education, the usage of technology, that our kids are digital natives, and we need to adapt, yadda yadda yadda, one thing we still need to emphasize is that there are appropriate times to do appropriate things.  I think this is something we shall NEVER have to hesitate about.

Hypocrisy?  Far from it.  Doing the appropriate things at the appropriate times is a behavioral issue, so is learning to not do inappropriate things at inappropriate times.  In the 2.0 world, we said we should stop being the information authority.  In the 2.0 world, we said we should instead teach our kids how to learn, how to find information, how to filter information, how to engage in the online world, how to behave in the online world, and how to protect themselves in the online world.  We never said technology is the be all end all.  In fact, we emphasize the opposite.  Just because the technology is there doesn’t mean it will deliver what’s right or be used correctly.  In the 2.0 world, our job is to teach what is the appropriate things to do, even more so than before.

As we teach our children how to doing things right, the *when* is an essential topic.  If it is rude to talk while others are talking, why is it not rude to text?  Old school?  Not at all.  We school younger people the same thing when we are on Skype or Ventrillo.  Technology or not, it IS still rude to talk while others are talking.  The fundamentals of our moral yardstick has not change, only the medium, the vehicle of delivery, and the speed at which communication occurs.  What was right, is still right in the 2.0 world.  Likewise, what was wrong is still wrong and should never be encouraged.

This is a point that our children must learn.

Who is “educating” our kids? Who is our kids learning from?

Little girl (she’s 6) had half day yesterday so my wife dropped her off at the office after school.  Of course, she was shy at first but then she opened up, start talking to people, sharing candies, etc.  If you were to meet a child for the first time, what do you say?

The 4 most asked questions are:

“Hi there, what’s your name?”

“How old are you?”

“No school today?”

“Where do you go to school?”

No surprise there.  Everyone who has kids and/or knows how to interact with children ask those questions.  They all recognize how important it is to engage a child quickly with a conversation that they can participate it.  When no other context is present (like a movie play on TV or a cartoon character at the mall, you probably start with questions about the child him/herself.  What was surprising to me was quite a few people do not seem to … know how…

The most surprising 1st question to her was, “Is that your daddy?”

Now that’s someone who does not know about kids…. and this person works for the school…

I’ve been thinking about all day.  Shouldn’t there be a rule of some sort that people who work in a school should know about kids?  I wouldn’t goto a butcher who doesn’t know about meat.  You wouldn’t goto a banker who is going bankrupt himself.  Why would anyone goto a computer person who doesn’t use a computer at home? 

Sure we can argue all day about only the teachers interact with the kids but in the end, everyone that works for a school make choices and decisions that ultimately affect the children.  “Knowing” the theory of education is far from knowing how to make choices for children.  Isn’t this the same reason why people worry about a commander-in-chief who has never been in the military?  Theory is no substitute for practice.  Every teacher can tell you that.

Pulling back a bit.  Who are the teachers teaching our kids?  Who are the administrators running our schools?  Who are the school board members making policies and decisions for school districts?  Who are these people working for Department of Education executing these policies and decisions?  Do all of these people know kids?

Some might argue that knowing kids is not necessary because education is the subject, not kids.  I would argue that they are flip sides of the same coin.  Theory is nothing when it cannot be put into practice.  It is too common that we separate the theory and the practice of a subject, academic-ize (I think I’m making up words) the theory and call it a discipline.  While we surround this new discipline with college degrees, PhDs, academic “experts”, conferences, and publications, we push the practice part of the subject to the way side and ignore it.  We talk about education but not pay attention to the kids.

Is that not the chasm we are facing?  I like to ask the questions:

Why are we emphasizing on educating?  Educating is about the teacher teaching.  The focus is on the teacher, the methodology, the theory, and what have you.

Why are we not emphasizing on learning?  Learning is about the kids learning.  The focus should be on the kids, what they are learning, how best to provide them an environment where they can learn, and what we do to support them… not the teachers, not the administrators, not the school boards, and not DoE.

George Lucas on education

http://weblogg-ed.com/2008/the-change-will-happen/

“We need to get kids asking ‘why does that happen?’ as opposed to ‘why am I learning this?’”  I think that sums up my childhood.  I was old school British style as far as education is concerned.  For most of my K-13 life, school occupied a tremendous amount of time.  Beside the 8-9 classes a day, a dozen pieces of homework were meant to keep kids like me busy and out of trouble as much as “educating” us.  There were very few things that I truely enjoy learning.  To most of them, I asked that question myself, “Why would I need to know that?”

I’m content with my answers for English, Chinese, and math.  But I could never understand why I need physics, chemistry, geography, biology, world history, etc.  Even though they served me well in college (as in not having to study much since I learned this stuff), they never really did “helped” me in any way I can recall in life.  I guess being able to answer some “Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader?” questions doesn’t count.  We can all recite the mantra of needing to be well-rounded.  But what does that really means?

Recently little girl was playing “Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader?” on my Xbox 360.  She is 1st grade and I didn’t really think she’d get too far.  But she enjoyed it so I let her.  She came across a history question that she doesn’t know.  Well, since I don’t either, we went online.  As I read through the wiki and what not, trying to distill to the essence of the civil war era, I realized that if she doesn’t have the background, she would never have been able to comprehen this stuff.

And it dawned on me…. Sometimes it is not about the tool or teach the tool.  Sometimes it really is about the materials and that learning the materials themselves is the goal….. Hmmmm, have to rethink my position on the current state of education….

Smart Table hands-on by kids

http://www.engadget.com/photos/smart-table-hands-on/1115045/

World of Warcraft as an education tool

http://www.livescience.com/technology/081003-school-games.html

Every time I discuss this topic, whether with peers who agree or with those who don’t, I always felt the need to establish my “qualifications”.  For those that question my knowing of the game, I have 5 level 70 characters.  Before I left the game, I raid 2-3 nights a week and run instances almost every night on the other nights.  With that out of the way, I can offer my personal observations.

What the article mentioned is spot on.  While the game itself has some peripheral values in teaching teamwork, leadership, etc., the meat of it is in enticing willing participant in the exercise of critical thinking, critical writing, and critical reading.  For those that are unaware, imagine everything you write is reviewed by peers.  That book report that you cranked out in the last 2 days of summer holiday; That white paper that you cranked out on the plane on your way to the customer; That financial statement that you “put” together from memory; Imagine all of them are scrutinized by everyone to care to read it.  The peer pressure, the stress of being wrong, and the will to win an argument all lead to the desired effect.

From my own observation, it is not the subject that matters.  Instead, it is the peer pressure that matters.  In a seminar earlier this year hosted by the school, a couple of teachers presented their findings (and positive results) along the same line.  They weren’t using any games but used blogs to host student’s homework.  The fact that everything each student wrote is open to “public” scrutiny forced them to think through what they want to say, craft their words carefully, and read others posts with the same critical eyes. 

While a class (or even a school) is a relatively friendly (and moderated) environment, the forums in World of Warcraft is not friendly.  The peer pressure is even greater when a poorly constructed post will cause oneself to be ridiculed for weeks to come.  The stress of having your thoughts or opinions picked apart is so great that one might even compare it to academic research paper.

The one thing that WoW has that other subjects might not is that kids are naturally drawn to it.  No one can argue with any subject that has 10 million subscribers.  While having student engage in discussion in the “wild” might not be a good idea, teacher guided discussions in school-based forums fit the bill.  In fact, it really doesn’t matter what game it is, as long as the students are interested, discussions should be encouraged.