4 ms·

Yes! Let us give children the world's worst UX, and then mock them for its inevitable failure! This worksheet is from the school of thought which sees educatio

Yes! Let us give children the world's worst UX, and then mock them for its inevitable failure! This worksheet is from the school of thought which sees education as a way to train you to be a better person, and by "better person" I mean "a mindless and compliant drone for some corporate or government bureaucracy".

BoorishBears 5y ago
I don't know how you could oveethink this that badly. It's about reading instructions all the way through if you're going to follow them. If you throw out the instructions that's cool too, but sometimes reading all the instructions instead of discovering them as you go will help things go easier. You might catch intent behind previous instructions that makes them easier to follow.
- fennecfoxen 5y ago
  > It's about reading instructions all the way through if you're going to follow them. Sometimes understanding the entire process is important. When this is important, it behooves the designer of the form to draw attention to the fact, to make it easy to do the right thing, and hard to do the wrong thing. This, however, is the precise opposite of what the Following Instructions Quiz genre seeks to accomplish. It would be one thing if teachers consistently used it to apologize for the inane bureaucracy that students will experience later in life. Perhaps this is a lesson students need -- but it's seldom so affirming; the message, rather, is that interacting with this quiz in a natural way is a flaw, you are flawed for doing so, and you would be better if you were a paperwork robot. Conform. Obey. Follow instructions. Many schools systems have this as an explicit goal, and others do it somewhat implicitly. Songs like We don't need no education didn't spring up out of nowhere.
- Mountain_Skies 5y ago
  An English teacher did this to us. The first big problem is about half of the students knew about the trick because friends in one of her earlier classes told us about it. So half the class got 100% not for reading the instructions but for having friends willing to go against the spirit of the task. The second problem was that it was intentionally formatted to look like the instructions were the paragraph at the top of the page and everything below were tasks. The teacher had a huge grin on her face about the whole thing, apparently happy that she was able to outsmart a group (well, half a group) of children. A classroom relationship between the teacher and students should be built on trust and fairness, both of which she damaged that day.

BoorishBears 5y ago

I don't know how you could oveethink this that badly. It's about reading instructions all the way through if you're going to follow them. If you throw out the instructions that's cool too, but sometimes reading all the instructions instead of discovering them as you go will help things go easier. You might catch intent behind previous instructions that makes them easier to follow.

fennecfoxen 5y ago
> It's about reading instructions all the way through if you're going to follow them. Sometimes understanding the entire process is important. When this is important, it behooves the designer of the form to draw attention to the fact, to make it easy to do the right thing, and hard to do the wrong thing. This, however, is the precise opposite of what the Following Instructions Quiz genre seeks to accomplish. It would be one thing if teachers consistently used it to apologize for the inane bureaucracy that students will experience later in life. Perhaps this is a lesson students need -- but it's seldom so affirming; the message, rather, is that interacting with this quiz in a natural way is a flaw, you are flawed for doing so, and you would be better if you were a paperwork robot. Conform. Obey. Follow instructions. Many schools systems have this as an explicit goal, and others do it somewhat implicitly. Songs like We don't need no education didn't spring up out of nowhere.
Mountain_Skies 5y ago
An English teacher did this to us. The first big problem is about half of the students knew about the trick because friends in one of her earlier classes told us about it. So half the class got 100% not for reading the instructions but for having friends willing to go against the spirit of the task. The second problem was that it was intentionally formatted to look like the instructions were the paragraph at the top of the page and everything below were tasks. The teacher had a huge grin on her face about the whole thing, apparently happy that she was able to outsmart a group (well, half a group) of children. A classroom relationship between the teacher and students should be built on trust and fairness, both of which she damaged that day.