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> please tell me why playing with Legos is any more valuable than playing minecraft? First, it's important for children to use their hands to develop their cog

> please tell me why playing with Legos is any more valuable than playing minecraft? First, it's important for children to use their hands to develop their cognitive abilities. There is more in the world than just "pictures behind glass" to interact with and manipulating objects of various shapes, texture and weight is important. Secondly, playing Minecraft is great, but maybe that's not what the kids were rushing to do. If they were playing Candy Crush or reading Facebook they would benefit more from playing lego.

joshstrange 11y ago
First: is it? I think that manipulating 3D objects on a tablet can lead to a much greater understanding than paper ever can (see: 3D modeling, even on the computer it was hard to grasp sometimes) Secondly: This is a classroom where the teacher is in charge, just because you give kids iPads doesn't mean they rule the class now, give them the option of Lego or minecraft then and don't allow them to be on FB/CC...
FussyZeus 11y ago
Does everything need to be skill building and development oriented? I think a lot of the issues we've got right now with our youth are squarely on the fact that we're engineering their little lives from the delivery room to the end of high school. More importantly I don't believe that in person interaction is so critical. For many introverts like myself, forced F2F interaction in school was torture and did nothing but make me hate speaking publicly (which strangely, got a whole lot better once I was older, a little more confident, and actually understood what I was talking about). In short: They're kids. It sounds like this school went a little too far into iPad territory, but frankly I think those kids will likely get more value out of skills manipulating screens than they will get out of skills involving legos.
- relkor 11y ago
  > Does everything need to be skill building and development oriented? In short yes. There is a finite amout of time before you die, and that time is measured in years, not millenia . We spend ~12 years in school playing "general education" where basically we are conditioned to set times for work and hierchael authority. That is 15% of your entire expected lifespan, aka not time to spent lightly. Look at how quickly you learn new job skills and keep up with new technologies. Then look back at public school. Why does it take 12 years to move from addition to calculus? Why does it take 11 years to teach kids that chemistry is between atoms and to learn simple reactions are building blocks? Right now the amount of education that public school provides is laughable compared to how much you learn in a year on the job. What would it be like if you only took 8 years to get through primary and secondary? That is 10% more time added to your productive shelf life. Better yet, those years have been saved on the front end, where your brain is most agile and plastic. My personal feeling is that there is a lot of time wasted in the current public education model. When I was in school, I never percieved any A/B testing, or relentless optimization of coursework. Instead everything was the same as it had been 10-20 years ago. At least now I get the sense that now people are starting to look for a better local minimum in the process of knowledge transfer.
  - FussyZeus 11y ago
    I'm not saying out education system is perfect AT ALL, never would I say such a thing, I'm merely pointing out that the kids not chattering at each other about stupid bullshit and instead doing stupid bullshit on an iPad isn't the problem by a long way, and reversing the inclusion of said iPads will not fix anything either.
    - relkor 11y ago
      Fair enough, I agree with your point about the inclusion of said iPads. The only counterpoint that I would have would be to compare the capital efficiency of letting kids chatter about bullshit, which is free, to using expensive techinical portals to the same ends. I would be really interested to see the insurance policy on those iPads' assesment of expected lifespan, and then use that number to compute the expected value of using iPads specifically as a tablet in the classroom.

joshstrange 11y ago

First: is it? I think that manipulating 3D objects on a tablet can lead to a much greater understanding than paper ever can (see: 3D modeling, even on the computer it was hard to grasp sometimes) Secondly: This is a classroom where the teacher is in charge, just because you give kids iPads doesn't mean they rule the class now, give them the option of Lego or minecraft then and don't allow them to be on FB/CC...

FussyZeus 11y ago

Does everything need to be skill building and development oriented? I think a lot of the issues we've got right now with our youth are squarely on the fact that we're engineering their little lives from the delivery room to the end of high school. More importantly I don't believe that in person interaction is so critical. For many introverts like myself, forced F2F interaction in school was torture and did nothing but make me hate speaking publicly (which strangely, got a whole lot better once I was older, a little more confident, and actually understood what I was talking about). In short: They're kids. It sounds like this school went a little too far into iPad territory, but frankly I think those kids will likely get more value out of skills manipulating screens than they will get out of skills involving legos.

relkor 11y ago
> Does everything need to be skill building and development oriented? In short yes. There is a finite amout of time before you die, and that time is measured in years, not millenia . We spend ~12 years in school playing "general education" where basically we are conditioned to set times for work and hierchael authority. That is 15% of your entire expected lifespan, aka not time to spent lightly. Look at how quickly you learn new job skills and keep up with new technologies. Then look back at public school. Why does it take 12 years to move from addition to calculus? Why does it take 11 years to teach kids that chemistry is between atoms and to learn simple reactions are building blocks? Right now the amount of education that public school provides is laughable compared to how much you learn in a year on the job. What would it be like if you only took 8 years to get through primary and secondary? That is 10% more time added to your productive shelf life. Better yet, those years have been saved on the front end, where your brain is most agile and plastic. My personal feeling is that there is a lot of time wasted in the current public education model. When I was in school, I never percieved any A/B testing, or relentless optimization of coursework. Instead everything was the same as it had been 10-20 years ago. At least now I get the sense that now people are starting to look for a better local minimum in the process of knowledge transfer.
- FussyZeus 11y ago
  I'm not saying out education system is perfect AT ALL, never would I say such a thing, I'm merely pointing out that the kids not chattering at each other about stupid bullshit and instead doing stupid bullshit on an iPad isn't the problem by a long way, and reversing the inclusion of said iPads will not fix anything either.
  - relkor 11y ago
    Fair enough, I agree with your point about the inclusion of said iPads. The only counterpoint that I would have would be to compare the capital efficiency of letting kids chatter about bullshit, which is free, to using expensive techinical portals to the same ends. I would be really interested to see the insurance policy on those iPads' assesment of expected lifespan, and then use that number to compute the expected value of using iPads specifically as a tablet in the classroom.