Reinventing Explanation
michaelnielsen.org
michaelnielsen.org
IMHO what unlocks understanding is use not emotion. I can "kind of" understand a mathematical or programming concept by reading or demonstration but only through active use in dozens of exercises or practical experience do I really come to understand it. This is what matters about the Brett Victor example he shows - it proposes environments for people to use and play with concepts which IMHO is much more significant factor in understanding.
Maybe the author is only talking about the motivation to understand. To take his example of topics with the depth of QM then such an investment of time and effort is just so vast that there has to be something self-motivating about the topic itself for someone to excel.
Its the reward of the topic in-itself that has sustained abstract topics like math and I find "ways to make the topic more appealing" almost always doomed to failure. If people are not inclined to substantial abstract thought then putting it in a frilly dress isn't going to change much. What makes these topics special to me is the loss of self as your mind becomes infused with abstract concepts. Its the elegance that becomes exciting and takes you deeper from curiosity and wonder. I don't need a game to understand a programming concept, programming itself is already my preferred game.
Finally, I would say that emotional connections are a distraction from achieving such flow mental states of understanding. If I feel I have something to lose by not understanding, if I might be shamed or under some other emotional pressure, it will interfere, not encourage my understanding.
"What an individual can learn, and how he learns it, depends on what models he has available. This raises, recursively, the question of how he learned these models. Thus the “laws of learning” must be about how intellectual structures grow out of one another and about how, in the process, they acquire both logical and emotional form."
It is also worth reading Papert's colleague Marvin Minsky's book, The Emotion Machine. It makes quite a more interesting study of emotion as the foundation of understanding[1].
I can clarify that I don't doubt emotion is integral to cognition and I think its commonly understood the role of a good teacher is to help a student find a sense of wonder, fascination and excitement about a topic.
What I do doubt is that adding an unrelated emotional context like a gamified incentive or a movie plot around the explanation of an abstract topic will fundamentally improve understanding. I think its superficial and can even dilute the relationship one needs to build with the topic itself.
To interpret the author more generously, it would be a worthy goal for learning tools to build the right sort of emotional connections like the old St. Exupery quote:
> If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea
I agree that game-ification and tangential devices will not directly improve understanding of a topic, if at all.
I grew up playing many edutainment games which were nothing but boring classroom textbooks, with animated characters and sound effects. Strangely though, the fond memories of some of those characters has, I like to think, gave me positive associations with the actual subject matter, and has led to study of it later in life. More importantly, as you say, it could have diluted my interest or caused a negative association just as well.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Simpson%27s_paradox_contin...
> Over the long run, humanity will no doubt build more powerful new patterns of explanation into our media platforms, permanently changing and expanding what we mean by explanation. We're only just beginning to explore these possibilities, but it will be exciting to see what happens in the decades ahead as we reinvent explanation.
this
> A second problem with educational games lies in the word "educational". The most important fact about compulsory schooling is that students do not -- indeed, cannot -- choose to attend. Instead, they are required to attend, for what society deems "their own good". This is true even in the most enlightened schools. A student in such a coercive environment does not have full responsibility for their own learning. And, in my opinion, it is not possible to do serious intellectual work without full responsibility for your own learning. Put another way, I believe that compulsory schools, by their nature, are places where serious intellectual work cannot occur.
True. For many students, schools are prisons. Given this context, the quality of the teaching material is more important. If I were in prison, I'd wish for good books...
> what would happen if we put the resources and talent of a major video game or movie studio toward creating great explanations, rather than pure entertainment products?
It's called the Khan Academy ;)
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My take on this is that we should aim for lowest common denominator: a system based around HTML (like standalone .html files or .epub) with JavaScript enabled (for MathJax and scripting canvas/svg interactives). Content written in this system will be renderable on most pixel-based devices (for interactive exploratory learning) and with a toLaTeX() method should also be printable (for analytical learning).
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Here's my attempt at the kidney studies' Simpson paradox in text. For large kidney stones Treatment A helped 55 people out of 80, while Treatment B helped 192 out of 263, in two separate studies. For small kidney stones treatment A helped 234 people out of 270, while Treatment B helped 81 out of 87, in the same two studies.
We shouldn't really compare the statistics from the two trials since they were performed on different patients. Nevertheless, since both studies had 350 patients in total, we can say that Treatment A is better since it helped a total of 289 patients on that trial which is > than the 273 saved by Treatment B.
Treatment A Treatment B
Large kidney stones 69% (55 / 80) 73% (192 / 263)
Small kidney stones 87% (234 / 270) 93% (81 / 87)
All patients 83% (289 / 350) 78% (273 / 350) Glass of Water Tylenol
Migraine 69% (55 / 80) 73% (192 / 263)
Headache 87% (234 / 270) 93% (81 / 87)
All patients 83% (289 / 350) 78% (273 / 350)
I think the handwavey explanation here is that the studies failed to run over a representative sample of the population, which is what makes the results difficult to compare between them. All other things being equal, Treatment B really is better; but not all other things were equal between the two aggregates, so the overall percentage is misleading. When statisticians 'control' for some variable, it's this kind of wierdness that they're trying to squeeze out.
Stopped reading the article afterwards, because if it already overhypes greatly at this early point in the article, what am I to expect at later points?