7 ms·

I can only talk from my own personal experience. When i was a kid my parents noticed that i was interested in computers. We couldn't afford a computer(that was

I can only talk from my own personal experience. When i was a kid my parents noticed that i was interested in computers. We couldn't afford a computer(that was 98 i think) So they sent me to computer courses once a week. I had a lot of fun. I played games, i played with paint and made cool word documents with weird fonts and colors and stuff like that. I also played a lot of duke nukem. There was a cheap internet club near my home and me and my friends went there to play. It was all really fun. We didn't learn allot, but it was fun. 2004 we could afford a decent machine and i spent my days just mesing around with XP. Exploring C:/windows/win32 exploring all the cool programs my friends gave me like winamp. It was so exiting. A year later i got internet and that was like a super charger. I learned to type really fast so i can chat and i learned to google effectively. Then i found this game Lock On: Modern Air Combat(its a flight sim). I was interested in jet plains and i started playing all day long. I used my computer only for games, or at least thats what my parents thought. The game stored allot of it's settings in configuration files and Lua scripts and xml files and you could modify those and change the gameplay drastically(the most weird thing i have seen was a flying aircraft carrier). Many of the textures were in files, so you could photoshop templates and have custom skins and i learned how to use photoshop that way, i learned how to search for other mods for the game and study them, there were allot of tools to mess around with the game and yet everybody around me thought i was wasting time. To play the game i learned allot about planes, physics and combat tactics(the game is a hardcore sim so you have to know these stuff) I started moding my hardware too. I made myself a throttle out of an old joystick and a control panel. So the moral of my story is you can give 1000 people a computer and even if only 4 people start doing great stuff with it, its better than no people. I think PG wrote in one of his essays about that. Something about stick gatherers and the difference in productivity if you give people a tool like a computer.

jauco 18y ago
So the moral of my story is you can give 1000 people a computer and even if only 4 people start doing great stuff with it, its better than no people. They did spend EUR 200 for each computer, so if it only helped 4 out of 1000 kids, then you're spending a _lot_ of money on them. Even more importantly, the research shows that overall, the kids performed worse on the measures that the researchers found important. So for those four kids that do start to perform better there would other kids that performed worse. (unless you measure success along different variables that weren't taken into account in this study, but then we can't really conclude anything until a new research is done)
serhei 18y ago
You've been roped into a constructivist education! In plain English, the people who make the OLPC are trying to nudge kids into doing something similar: specifically, while you just think you're playing with a cool toy, you're being encouraged to actually create things, and hence to think, and therefore to learn.

jauco 18y ago

So the moral of my story is you can give 1000 people a computer and even if only 4 people start doing great stuff with it, its better than no people. They did spend EUR 200 for each computer, so if it only helped 4 out of 1000 kids, then you're spending a _lot_ of money on them. Even more importantly, the research shows that overall, the kids performed worse on the measures that the researchers found important. So for those four kids that do start to perform better there would other kids that performed worse. (unless you measure success along different variables that weren't taken into account in this study, but then we can't really conclude anything until a new research is done)

serhei 18y ago

You've been roped into a constructivist education! In plain English, the people who make the OLPC are trying to nudge kids into doing something similar: specifically, while you just think you're playing with a cool toy, you're being encouraged to actually create things, and hence to think, and therefore to learn.