Result of Giving Poor Households Computer Vouchers | Hacker News Reader

Result of Giving Poor Households Computer Vouchers

marginalrevolution.com

64 pointsmhb56 comments

I think parents have to actively and persistently encourage their children in valuable habits (e.g., reading, drawing, outdoor exercise, music practice, etc.) before the first computer games are allowed in the house. The computer games are very well designed indeed to be a time-consuming form of playful engagement. They rob time from the deliberate practice young people need to become expert in something valuable. Fortunately, my oldest son now likes to actually program, in a variety of languages, rather than spend much time playing childish computer games. And my second son likes to write creative fiction, although the computer games haven't lost their charm for him.

Games develop critical thinking skills. Problem solving would seem to be "something valuable."

Do you see chess/backgammon/go as something to be discouraged also?

Is it the medium you object to or the game playing itself?

Maybe it's that many "video games" tend not to have much in the way of problem solving. The latest race car or shooting game probably doesn't require much thinking at all. (And yes, there are games that do require thinking and should be applauded.)

Games develop critical thinking skills. Problem solving would seem to be "something valuable."

I agree with the general proposition that problem-solving skills are well worth developing. I also agree with the reply you have already received that how much problem-solving there really is in computer games depends on which game we are talking about. Games are like many other things in life--the calling of but a few, but good in moderation for many. I just don't like seeing learners let computer games, especially the computer games without much deep problem-solving, crowd out of their schedule other worthwhile activities.

Thanks for asking.

Scientific American 1859 http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=100-years-a...

A pernicious excitement to learn and play chess has spread all over the country, and numerous clubs for practicing this game have been formed in cities and villages. Why should we regret this? It may be asked. We answer, chess is a mere amusement of a very inferior character, which robs the mind of valuable time that might be devoted to nobler acquirements, while it affords no benefit whatever to the body

My parents were quite irresponsible, and let me waste my time playing video games and reading escapist fiction, instead of doing valuable effortful practice. When I went to MIT, I found that many of my classmates had been neglected in the same manner.

Reading "escapist fiction", as you call it, is probably one of the most valuable things you can do with your young mind.

Any discussion of education seems to bring up a whole raft of ideas about what does and does not effect the young mind, and in which direction.

Plato, who was rather more observant and intelligent than you or I, felt that young people would be best served by learning only valorous stories, which showed just and good men triumphing and so on. He felt that the basic components of education ought to be music and gymnastic; and that an overemphasis on music would produce an overly intellectual and sentimental adult (an overemphasis on gymnastic would produce a brute).

Views seem to have completely shifted, to the point that Plato's program strikes one as absurd. However, I am not aware of any breakthrough in our understanding of the nature of education: our modern ideas are based, like those of Plato, on an observation of society, and of children, and of education, all colored by our assumptions about what is and is not valuable.

When I tell people that I played video games and read novels, they are no doubt inclined to think that I must have become smart and capable thanks to the novels and despite the video games. Why do we think that way, and not in the opposite way - that I became smart by playing video games, and despite reading lots of books? When I solve a hard problem, it feels more like the feeling I have in Quake, when I'm holding the entire playing field in my head and keeping track of where my opponents could be, than like the feeling I have while reading a book.

Plato was certainly smarter than both of us put together, but he also lived in a very different cultural landscape than we do. What books were available to young people then? Not many, I'd wager. The lack of suitable mass publication mechanisms certainly reduced the importance of literature. And the vast majority of the authors that I would think of as "great" had not been born yet. It is debatable whether a landscape devoid of mass publication means would still produce a healthy supply of great literature.

Since the printing press, we've had an explosion of amazing literature produced and distributed throughout the world. Many of the greatest thinkers of the last three centuries left their thoughts behind for us to build on. As an added bonus, many of them left those thoughts in highly entertaining forms that entertain and delight as much as they instruct.

It would really be looking the gift horse in the mouth to the extreme, to demand that impractical scientific studies be conducted to "prove" that humanity's great books make your life better.

Of course, we may have a difference of definition here. By "escapist fiction" I assume you included most fictional works, including such masters as Gabriel Garcia Marques, Herman Hesse and Jorge Luis Borghes, who definitely have the ability to transport one outside of the real world into that of imagination.

Plato's (Socrates?) position derived from his belief that cultivating a moral republic meant eliminating fiction. See The Republic. I don't know if we're really supposed to take it seriously as prescriptive advice, but it's quite different than most other approaches.

Why do you think so? From my personal experience only, it was one of the most harmful things I've done to myself.

Very simply, it develops your imagination, which is required for various somewhat useful activities such as creative and lateral thinking or, in fact, most forms of problem solving.

Why do you feel it was harmful? Also, what kind of fiction do you read? Would you be willing to give it another try if I suggested something that's actually good?

That is certainly true - but on the other side, if you do it too much (and kids/teenagers tend to overindulge in everything they find good), it can lead to under-development of important social skills, losing focus on actual studies/work, and in more extreme cases, complete disengagement from the real world.

I've read tons of great 'escapist' books when I was a teenager (it all started with Lord of the Rings consumed ecstatically in 3 days of almost non-stop reading when I was 13). However, before I started doing that, I was really into technology/hacking/programming, and at the same time sports/social interactions. Then after a while, it was books/D&D/Magic the Gathering and almost nothing else.

Of course, everything is good in moderation and harmful if you overindulge, but by its nature, escapist fiction is incredibly easy to get into and hard to get out.

I think if you have a choice between getting addicted to Russian Literature versus getting addicted to World of Warcraft, one will be a lot more beneficial to you than the other...

"I spent every waking hour of my years 12-14 reading all of Dostoievsky, Tolstoi and Chekhov back to back over and over again"

"I spent every waking hour of my years 12-14 playing World of Warcraft."

Honest question because I can't tell. Sarcasm?

You can tell because he went to MIT.

Preliminary note to onlookers, which I don't think is necessary for the author of the parent comment: nothing I write below will be sarcastic. I will try my best to write a friendly reply to an interesting post.

Thanks for joining issue with me so specifically. Because I happened to be reading Stumbling on Happiness (recommended to HN by another participant recently) last evening, I thought first of all about what kind of evidence we are talking about here. Many parents (I am one of them) are curious about the issue of what the independent variable of how young people spend their free time does to the dependent variable of which colleges admit which college applicants. I was reminded by my reading last night that to draw a statistically sound conclusion about whether this or that pattern of spending time at high school improves admission chances we would have to look at:

1) students who spend their time according to plan A, and were admitted to their favorite college,

2) students who spent their time contrary to plan A, and were admitted to their favorite college,

3) students who spend their time according to plan A, and were NOT admitted to their favorite college,

4) students who spent their time contrary to plan A, and were NOT admitted to their favorite college.

I express no opinion on what is most expedient for admission to MIT, as a general rule. I also don't know whether or not there have been any recent changes in MIT admission policy under the current admissions dean. As an anecdote, I know several of the recent admitted students to my town from the last few years, and my observation is that their parents "actively and persistently encourage their children in valuable habits (e.g., reading, drawing, outdoor exercise, music practice, etc.)," as I wrote in the grandparent post. But I acknowledge that I haven't done the statistical work outlined in this comment to show that that is the most expedient admission path for any college.

I did a quick look at your previous posts and get the impression--please correct me if I'm wrong--that you may already have completed your undergraduate studies. Do you mind saying in some kind of general way what else may have appeared on the face of your application form that would tend to look like a good fit to MIT, as contrasted with the various applicants in your application year who were not admitted to MIT?

Whether admission to MIT is the sole best criterion for how a young person spends the teenage years I'll leave open as an issue that this comment is not about. I acknowledge that admission to MIT is a worthy goal because it opens up opportunities to be in some great learning environments while an undergraduate student. (Anecdote: one of the local students I know who was admitted to MIT a couple of years ago disappointed her dad terribly by enrolling at Harvard rather than MIT. I have no opinion about whether Harvard or MIT is a better place to major in physics, but her dad evidently does. The dad is a great local physics teacher, which is one of the capacities in which I know his family.)

When I did my quick look at your previous posts I saw a couple comments on education

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1021238

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=602439

that I find interesting. (I remember lurking in the discussion of the new introductory CS course at MIT, which was interesting all around.) Education policy has long been an interest of mine, so I'm always eager to hear points of view on that subject. (The essays on pg's website about education are what drew me to Hacker News.)

I got into MIT by doing very well at math competitions, mostly. I also wrote a good application essay, which followed a certain kind of idea which is admired at MIT - the ideal of the "passionate" young person, who is a sort of intellectual go-getter. This doesn't actually reflect my personality, but at the time I was somewhat dazzled by the MIT mythology, and I'm pretty good at writing in character.

By the end of my time at MIT, I'd moved towards a fairly radical point of view about education, and about many other institutions in society. I think that the established structures of society - educational, scientific, political, or economic - tend to be highly conservative, in the sense that they defend a conventional view of what is 'scientific' or 'educational' and so on. In this way they devalue diversity.

I personally don't think it is possible to develop the awesome potential of the human mind by following a 'program' of any sort. The defining characteristic of the mind is its ability to adapt, and to incorporate new ideas and new points of view into a more thorough conception of reality. This implies that one will progress most by constantly challenging what one has previously believed. But this kind of path can not be planned out in advance: at most one can try to have as wide a base of experience as possible, and to resist the urge to dismiss the 'outlandish' too quickly.

In short, I think the primary characteristic of curricular education is its conservative opposition to diversity; while the most basic ingredient in intellectual progress is exactly that diversity. This view was reflected in my time at MIT - MIT has a rather strong curricular structure, and I found it frustrating in the extreme (I was frequently depressed while at MIT). For example, MIT teaches analytic philosophy, neoclassical economics, rational-choice political science: these are all echoes of the same narrow, scientistic outlook. Continental philosophy and heterodox economics follow a more tentative, experimental approach to knowledge, but they would fit poorly with MIT culture.

As for whether it is a good thing for a young person to go to MIT, I suppose that depends on your view of a good life. If a good life is doing well at one boring, pointless task in order to be given a still more boring, more pointless task, then MIT is an excellent choice. An MIT education is genuinely rigorous (more-so than Harvard), and an MIT graduate can move onto graduate studies with confidence. From there, who knows? You may even win a Nobel Prize.

If you want to achieve intellectual excellence, in a traditional human sense that would be understood by the ancient Greeks, I would look elsewhere. I get the sense that continental Europe is less fully colonized by one-dimensional thinking, although I can't entirely confirm this.

I have a philosophical question or two I'd like to ask you, but this would be a poor venue for it. I'd love to email; if you have time to chat, then drop me your address here or at mquander@gmail.com.

As someone who had an Apple II+ in the living room when he was 11 years old, I can attest that getting a computer strongly motivates a kid to play games and acquire games. I can also attest that this often leads to tinkering with computers and seeking to write your own computer games.

The OLPC folks had this right. Kids are going to chat and play games on their new machines, but if you make it easy to stumble on the programming environment and source code, you're also going to enable a lot of tinkering and genuine learning.

The Apple II seemed to be exquisitely designed for this. Its command line was pretty much a prompt to the Basic interpreter.

When I was young my Dad got us an Atari 400 with the BASIC cartridge. He then told me I could "program" the computer to solve my math problems. Learned a lot, didn't save any time. :)

-- on the game front the 400 version of Pac-Man looked like the arcade game, not the plumber tools the 2600 version looked like.

A different take: How much "homework" can you do on a computer? In college and high school the only homework I did on the computer was typing (and later with access to the internet, researching papers). I gamed a lot more.

It's really a condemnation of computers in education. You really can't do that much homework.

Obviously today anything you want to know and learn is available online.

So as a reference tool the computer is unbeatable. However, as a learning tool does the computer (much like the TV before) remains underutilized?

> It's really a condemnation of computers in education.

I've never understood this whole computers-in-classrooms push. I can't see how it would help kids learn reading, 'riting, or 'rithmatic better than the traditional methods. Like you say, it's a great reference tool. But if my school library didn't have any reference books (the World Book Encyclopedia, back in my day), the only impact to my learning would have been that research papers were harder to write. (Man, I hated those things. And those stupid note cards)

The best educational boost a computer can give is in the area of using computers and programming computers.

Measuring the effect of computers on homework presented primarily on dead-tree media makes no sense.

Alan Kay and also the OLPC folks had this right: the biggest opportunity computers give to expand a young person's mind lies in tinkering with computers.

Given the current fears (Chemistry Set = Terrorists), I wish simulators were much more available. The current iPod touch, iPhones, Android, and iPads would be good toys to have school bought simulators.

I've got to say, thinking back on my own K-12 education, almost the entirety of which I had access to a computer at home, I don't think I did a whole lot of homework on it, and I definitely played a lot of computer games. Additionally, if the teachers weren't giving out assignments that required the use of the computer, which seems unlikely if not everyone has access to a computer, then the computer won't be used for homework. Obviously, that wasn't the goal of the program, and I"d be interested in hearing more about the "increase in computer proficiency and perhaps some improvement in a cognitive test."

Personally, I know that access to computers and computer science classes in high school probably had a much larger impact on my interest and aptitude in computer science.

Perhaps the program would be more effective by bringing computers into school at an earlier age (combined with useful curriculum). I remember playing Oregon Trail in computer class in elementary school (early nineties) and thinking back, I really wish the instructor had shown us (me) a command prompt and some Fortran or BASIC.

I found Oregon Trail educational when I was young, but maybe in different ways than the game's authors intended. In the early versions of the game, you had to purchase food, clothing, and what not. I recall the prices of these changed as you went to various forts.

The obvious way to win the game was to buy a negative amount of clothing when the cost of clothing was high - the game performed no numerical checks when purchasing items. You could survive the journey between two forts with a negative amount of clothing, and when visiting the subsequent fort you could purchase all the goods you would need for the entire journey.

It was just trying to teach you about short-selling and credit default swaps.

I remember typing in the code for SpeedScript (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpeedScript) to be able to write papers.

Reminds me of the program planned by the great Rod Blagojevich here in Illinois (and made famous in Freakonomics) to send one book each month to the homes of low-income families based on a prior study which found that there was a very high correlation between kids having books in the home and their performing well at school.

Idiot politician gets causality backwards; film at 11.

Not surprisingly, with all that game playing going on, the authors find that the voucher program actually resulted in a decline in grades

This is a little surprising, actually. The study showed the amount of homework done is pretty much constant across both groups, and I'd expect that to be the main influence on grades, not what they do in their leisure time. One has to wonder what the non-game-playing students were doing in their spare time that increased their grades, or what aspect of the games is hurting grades.

I believe that graph is about the time spent on the computer doing homework, so it's possible the increased computer game playing took away from non-computer homework.

I took a look at the paper, and that is not an unreasonable explanation... It seems that the increased computer use did indeed reduce the time spent doing non-computer homework a bit, although the data is quite noisy and may not be statistically significant; TV viewing was similarly impacted. But what really took a hit was time spent reading recreationally. I can't help wonder what influence the reading had on grades relative to the homework.

Another thing in the paper that I found somewhat surprising was that slightly different parental rules had markedly different effects:

Interestingly, we find evidence that the presence of parental rules regarding homework mitigate some of the negative effects of winning a computer voucher without affecting the gains to computer skills and cognitive ability. On the other hand, the presence of rules regarding computer use reduce the positive impacts on computer skills without improving academic achievement.

http://www.columbia.edu/~cp2124/papers/computer.pdf

Also, there is a disturbing bit on the labels of the graphs: the word everyday. Even if I used my computer for homework a lot, it is feasible I don't have homework to do everyday, but there are always games....

My first computer had a broken cassette drive, so the only thing I could do with it is program it, and I had to write a new program every day.

On the other hand, before I got the computer, I used to hang around at a friend's house and program on his, even though he did have games that worked.

I think a happy medium might be some kind of Smalltalk system with a handful of very basic games, to serve as some motivation to those not as empowered by "READY." as I was, but with an open architecture so that everything can be tinkered with. That, and versioning or forking so things can easily be brought back to a working state.

What is the message (or "punch line") that is supposedly clear here?

It seems poor households have higher computer ownership percentage than even the richest in this study, wich seems odd.

It also appears that while the poor have much higher ownership levels, they proportionately play less video games (though it's hard to judge from the graphs, note the scale changes from ownership proportion going up to 100%, to play ever day proportion only going up to 40%).

I've read several other studies which claim introducing computers in homes or schools is actually counter-productive if not done right but the rich/poor thing seems just to confuse this issue, and I'm really not sure what point is being made here.

Is he against computers or vouchers?

I believe the graphs are all post-voucher numbers. In other words, those below the red line are the ones who qualified for the vouchers, thus the jumps in ownership. The punchline is that while computer games increased substantially because of the program, using computers for homework did not.

I considered that, but since we don't have the pre-voucher numbers, how do we know if it increased or not?

It all seem to rest on there being a discontinuity between those that are nearly the same level of income but some get a voucher and some don't but, strangely, the ownership level decreases as you approach the line, then increases again.

The very poorest, with the highest computer ownership, appear to have the highest computer study time too.

Quite possibly it's just quirks in the trendlines caused by small sample size or something. I would imagine the original paper has more numbers and information on methods, but sadly it looks like it's behind a paywall.

My wife studies multi-modal literacy as part of her PhD studies. She was, at one point, staunchly against letting our young daughter play too many computer games, but as a result of her studies has done a complete 180. We monitor what our daughter is exposed to, for the most part, but we find that introducing her to games that stretch her skills in literacy, music, logic, etc. has been really beneficial. The result? She was reading at 3 years old and reading well by 4 years old. She just turned 5 and is into chapter books. Is this result completely due to her game playing? No. But the games have definitely helped.

tl;dr version: in my opinion, based on experience, the right kind of games will help literacy development

Would you mind giving an example of the right kind of game?

Most of the Nintendo DS games involve a lot of text. One example of a game that she played quite a bit recently is Fossil Fighters. The Nintendo DS games pretty much all assume you can read, though, so it's not hard to find ones that develop literacy. She used to play the Leapster quite a bit. There are many educational games for the Leapster. They develop skills that lead to reading, but they don't assume you can read. The browser-based games are hit and miss.

A perfect example of the dangers of differently sized graphs. The graphs were clearly sized to imply that the increased use was almost all gaming, as they sized them to line up nearly perfectly with the 10-hour charts. Note that the computer-voucher side has roughly 2 hours more non-game, non-homework use, and that in both, the majority of the time is still non-gaming and non-homeworking.

What was it used for there? Browsing? Youtubing is not so useful, but there'd definitely be some educational-browsing, and that's not testable in the classroom. Giving someone a tool doesn't guarantee they'll use it properly, but some do, and they're the ones who are more likely to try get out of poverty, instead of getting stuck where they are.

As to the decline in grades, I'd definitely argue that an improvement in a cognitive test - usually based around learning skills, not whatever is taught in class (typically rote memorization) - is far more valuable in the long run. The ability to learn is invaluable and persistent, they'll probably forget most of what was in the classes at that time anyway.

Scaled size comparison of the two voucher-charts: http://img687.imageshack.us/img687/9271/clearedup.gif

When I was at school I seem to remember that we weren't allowed to use computers for most homework in order to encourage developing handwriting skills etc...

Not that it helped, my handwriting is atrocious! That's mainly because in the past 10 years or so I've hardly written a thing which wasn't meant to be read by anyone other than myself.

yeah, me to. I wonder what I would have been able to achieve if I did something useful during the handwriting drills that ate 4-8 hours of my week.

hell, after all that work, at this point, I can't even read my own handwriting.

I can do better.

My third grade teacher was a lovely woman but very old-fashioned, and at the time very few people had a personal computer. When I handed in my first paper, typed up using a word-processing program, she refused to accept it.

Why? Because she was convinced "the computer wrote the paper for me." I tried to explain to her that computers as portrayed by the media (this was 1985) and computers in fact were quite different, but she was firm. So I spent the rest of the semester typing up my papers and then re-copying them by hand to hand in.

It's funny to think that twenty five years later, the computer STILL can't write my papers.

The effect of giving computer vouchers to poor people in Romania is that they go to places that will exchange the vouchers for money, and then lie on the questionnaire about what they're doing with the computers.

This leaves quite a lot of questions...

Were the homework assignments of a type were using a computer to prepare them would actually help? Did the computers include the appropriate software that was needed to do the homework? Had the homework to be submitted in paper form and did the computers come with printers?

I found a copy of the paper here:

http://www.columbia.edu/~cp2124/papers/computer.pdf

The homework assignments are not described, but given that many students do not have computers, it is reasonable to assume that the assignments at least did not require computers. The computer vouchers came with free "educational software", but few households installed it, and essentially no one spent time using educational software, in either group. Printers are not mentioned.

I could not get to the original study, but the article seems to be cherry-picking data. What was the time-line of the study? Is this a short term or long term effect? Perhaps homework isn't the only thing that counts? Also, what was the availability to broadband/internet access?

Source article http://blogs.worthpublishers.com/seetheinvisiblehand/2010/03...

While I am generally opposed to government welfare programs, playing computer games back in my day meant futzing with Extended Memory Managers, IRQs and Hex Editors.

Perhaps, but sadly your day is no longer today and, by and large, that is no longer the case.

Good point that I forgot to mention ;) .

Probably more valuable would have been the statistic of computer use devoted to educational activities (browsing wikipedia, learning how to program, etc.).

Comparing "time spent doing homework" to "time spent playing games" is silly. There is a constant amount of homework (once you're done, you're done) and nearly unlimited amount of time to play games.

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