Ceasar's Mind

If you’ve yet to watch Salman Kahn’s talk at TED, head over now and give it a watch- you won’t regret it.

Sal says a lot of insightful stuff here, so I’ll be revisiting his talk several times, but at the moment I want to comment on a small point that Sal makes.

Sal explains that one reason education is failing is because it passes students who don’t fully understand what they are being taught. Not just on a grade-to-grade basis, but lecture-to-lecture. A student might not fully understand a subject, get labeled a B student after the test, and then be expected to understand the next lecture which builds on what the student ought to know but doesn’t. Sal makes the analogy, it would be liking a father trying to teach his son to ride a bike, evaluating him after a week, seeing his son is having trouble maintaining his balance on left turns and noticing trouble with managing the brakes, and then handing his son a unicycle, and expecting his son to manage. It’s obviously faulty, it doesn’t work, and there’s a good reason this analogy doesn’t take place outside of schools.

If you don't know how to jump by now, you're fucked.

Personally, I’ve experienced this the hard way. As a game designer during high school, I once collaborated with a friend to produce a tactical puzzle game (called “Pinnacle”) where a team of five players had to coordinate their military units in order to defeat an AI opponent by utilizing a particular tactic. At one point, we made the decision to, rather than failing the players if they couldn’t figure out a level and making them try again, instead just push them through to the next level (the idea being, we wanted to make it more arcade-y and let players taste the entire game, rather than getting stuck and quitting). In theory, this could possibly work. If each level didn’t require an understanding of previous levels, this would be totally okay. Not being the case though, it (and the players) failed miserably, with players progressing to harder and harder levels despite having never learned the basics (which were often difficult to convey with one try). We quickly realized our mistake and reverted it, and learned firsthand why in Super Mario Bros and other professional games, you can’t just skip ahead nor does the designer push you forward- if you don’t understand the skills required to pass the current level, you’re experience with the next level is going to suck.

I’m not sure if the concept has a name, but if I had to call it something, I’d call it an educational gate. You can’t pass until you have the skills that will be expected of you on the other side of the gate. Most notably, these gates show up in the form of boss battles (although frankly, almost every instance, from the first Goomba in Mario, to random pits in Prince of Persia are technically all gates). Rather than trying to challenge the player, boss battles are typically designed to stop the player from progressing until he has achieved a certain level of mastery with a particular skill. (If you’ve ever tried you’re hand at one of the Legend of Zelda games, you know exactly what I mean.) In fact, I recall reading an article on Gamasutra that detailed a designers experiences with designing boss battles that did not test a player’s skills, and his explanation of how they sucked.

Frankly, I love this article because the contrast between exams and boss battles is ridiculous, despite them being analogous. I mean, okay, they both test us, but really, how much cooler would tests be if instead of just testing abstract concepts, all of the questions were connected to a central theme, that made us feel like we were really accomplishing something?

And furthermore, what if each lecture was a test in itself, that also made us feel like we were accomplishing something, while preparing us to take the exam? That’s how games work. Consider the scene below from Valve’s critically acclaimed Portal.

This scene made me cry.

In this particular scene in the game, the player must sacrifice his friend, the Companion Cube, in order to progress by dropping it in an incinerator. A relatively simple task, but it forces the player to understand how incinerators work.

Another incinerator, but this time, it's used to avenge the Companion Cube and destroy Glados, Portal's boss.

Later, an understanding of incinerators is required to defeat Glados, Portal’s boss. This is the only the tip of the iceberg though- the entirety of Portal, Super Mario Bros, Zelda, Metroid, and many other classics were designed using this pattern. In reality, games are hardly games at all- they’re more like extremely engaging classrooms. (Spoiler: Learning is actually fun.)

Really, schools have such a long way to go, having made virtually no progress in pedagogy despite game designers having illuminated the way since the 70s. Anyway, now you understand why I’m such a critic of education. It’s just too hard not to be when you see it consistently done wrong.

Continuing with Ken Bain’s What the Best College Teachers Do, another, perhaps intuitive but unrealized point, again has struck me in a way that makes me worry for my future success.

In a small paragraph on motivation, Bain mentions that students who are praised for being smart when they solve a problem as opposed to those who are praised in a way that acknowledges that they did something well, come to believe that intelligence is fixed. The implications are scary, particularly as an Ivy League student who received such praise throughout my life. Basically, students who are praised for being smart attribute the ability to solve a problem to their intelligence, and thus, when they find a problem they cannot solve, they become helpless. Furthermore, in accordance with their belief that intelligence is fixed, they avoid hard problems that they struggle with.

I think, unfortunately, I may have already fallen victim to such praise. While when I hear it now I think it’s BS, I largely have come to believe that intelligence is more or less fixed, and that I (and my peers) are elites (edit: I suppose actually, for all practical purposes, this is true, but only because of class). I don’t know about the avoiding hard problems so much- I’ve started a lot of coding projects intended to challenge myself, but I think in general I could be a lot smarter right now if I had chosen to try and tackle with a lot of difficult problems elsewhere as opposed to say, playing games on Kongregate, or making a game that really doesn’t require any new coding tricks to solve.

More importantly though, I am not alone. Regularly at Penn, they remind us that we are some of the brightest in the world. At Masterman, we again were often reminded that we were the best school in Philadelphia. And in grade school, among all my peers, I was practically daily reminded that I was the smartest in the room.

The barrage of praise needs to be stopped.

First off, there is a LOT to this, so I will probably revisit the topic later on when I find the time. But in the meantime, I want to talk about a connection I only recently made because of a book I am reading titled What the Best College Teachers Do by Ken Bain.

Anyway, it has been common knowledge to me for a while that when given extrinsic motivation to do something intrinsically motivating, people begin to rely on the extrinsic motivation to motivate them. Thus, when the extrinsic motivation is removed, people stop (or do less of it).

I believe I first read about this phenomenon in Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational when he described a daycare center in Israel that was frustrated with parents coming late to pick up their children. In response, the day center decided to make parents pay a fee if they were late picking their child up. To their astonishment, more parents started picking up their children late. (Ariely speculates this has to do with people not wanting to pick up their children anyway, and now having a way to do it without feeling guilty, as well as a new dynamic of money as opposed to one where parents feel a moral need to pick up their children when they’re supposed to.) Displeased with the results, the daycare center immediately repealed the fee, hoping to return to only a few parents being late- However, once again to their astonishment, the effect on the number of parents picking up their children late was extremely minimal.

Back to Bain. Bain points to a study where participants were asked to play with a puzzle, with one group being paid to play while the other group just were asked to play for free. The group that was paid to play stopped playing when the money stopped, while the group who went unpaid continued anyway.

Now, the striking part comes to when things really matters- notably, grades in school. While there are many, many, many reasons to dislike the concepts of grades and GPAs, one particularly striking one is, in combination with the results of the experiments above, is that when students no longer have a GPA to worry about, their interest in the subject will wither. (And remember, this persist all through our education, starting with stickers in elementary school!)

This is particularly worrisome. It means that educators are killing the very intellectual curiosity they hope to inspire. And particularly as a student in the system, I’m quite worried that MY interests will wither. (Perhaps this is why so many great minds have come out of a self-taught education, rather than one where everything is quantified?)

But consider even what this means in reference to the old maxim, “Find a job you love and you will never have to work a day in your life.” Ultimately, if you find that job and start being paid for it, you will no longer love it, and thus you will break the very maxim you had hoped to live by. (And the obvious implication to this is that when you elect to take courses for fun, and then start getting graded, you subsequently will lose you interest.)

I mean, this is probably one of the more minor problems that the state of education has today, but still, very striking, and very worrisome.