If you don't believe that video games are good educational tools, look up Ananth Pai. I spent a few hours today watching TED videos on gamefication. One gamefication expert mentioned this guy named Ananth Pai. Mr. Pai is from India. He is a teacher in the U.S. and mostly teaches 3rd grade. His teaching record, based on tests scores of students, was just as crummy as most other U.S. teachers, until one day his 6th grade daughter suggested that his students might respond better if they were able to use Nintendo DS handheld consoles in the classroom for learning. Initially, he thought her suggestion was absurd, and even said that he would never allow that. Soon after though, he spent some time hanging out at BestBuy, asking children if they would like it if their classes used those game consoles for learning. They all said that they would like that a lot. So, Mr. Pai bought enough Nintendo DS consoles for his entire class (out of his own pockets, because the administration thought the idea was absurd). Eventually, he added desktop computers, and even XBox Kinect. His third grade class, which had started with math and reading skills below what is typically expected for a third grader, ended that school year with math and reading skills typically expected of students halfway through forth grade (they learned more than a grade and a half of material in one grade). His students' test scores improved by 2 to 5 times what was typical for the school. In addition, when those students moved on, they maintained their lead, even though the classes for later grades were not gamefied in any way.
This is one case of evidence that games are great learning tools. As I have mentioned before, Khan Academy has shown that children will even respond well to game-like reward systems, with no other game-like elements. Mr Pai's experience has caught the attention of several large corporations that regularly donate money to education, as well as education system officials for several states. Unfortunately, this buzz happened in 2011, and we still don't have a large scale gamefication of schools in the U.S. Why not? We have all sorts of evidence that this works, and the U.S. education system is becoming one of the worst in the world. Our government keeps trying to think of new ways to improve the education system, and in the process has managed to hobble it more successfully than it has ever been in the history of our country. Why do we keep trying new things, hoping they will work, when the answer is staring us in the face?
Most Americans that do believe video games can be useful learning tools think that educational games have to be designed to be educational to be effective. Up until today I believed that, to some degree. Games like World of WarCraft have great benefits for general education and brain development, but they just don't teach specific subjects very consistently. Some Wow players might get good at math from managing their imaginary in-game money. Others might get better reading skills from reading all of the storyline text presented when accepting quests, or from communicating with other players. Many players just ignore the difficult elements though. The game is designed so that this does not make it much more difficult, because otherwise it would not retain players very well. Most commercial games are designed so that players only have to learn what they want to learn from the game. Besides that, many of the mental benefits of these games are not easily quantifiable and while they are useful real life skills, they are just not considered important enough to dedicate school time to learning (spatial memory and mapping skills, for instance). It would be reasonable to assume, knowing only this, that games are good for general mental exercise and improvement, but not for learning specific subjects. Today I learned that this is totally wrong.
Mr Pai bought store shelf commercial games for his Nintendo DS consoles. He chose ones with obvious educational value, but not the kind of games that are specifically designed to teach 3rd graders math and reading. One of the games was a collection of simple brain games. These are intended to be mentally stimulating, but they were not designed to teach 3rd grade math. They were designed to be entertaining. One of these games casts the player in the role of a cashier. The player rings up items, then takes payment for them. The player must then count out the change for the payment. Players get points when they count out the correct change. Students in Mr. Pai's class would play this game and compete to see who could get the highest score. This is one of the many games they used to improve their math skills.
The reason that these games are so successful at teaching is that they are engaging. A typical classroom lecture is boring, especially to 3rd graders. With usually only one hour per day and a class of 30 students, a teacher can only devote 2 minutes of personal time per student, assuming that no lecture is given. A 30 minute lecture leaves only 1 minute per student. This is not enough time for meaningful one on one time with all of the students that need it. Engaging games encourage the students to learn on their own. This leaves more time for the teacher to spend with students that really need help. Mr. Pai also found that this eliminates the need for homework, giving the students more free time outside of class (though, nearly every study on the subject has found that more than 15 minutes per day of homework has no discernible benefits anyhow). Some students would even play some of the online games they used in class at home after school, for entertainment.
In summary, there is plenty of evidence that gamefication is superior to everything else that we have tried for improving our education system. The most effective learning games are not necessarily those designed specifically for learning. Games that are engaging help keep the interest of students. What we really need to do is find or make a bunch of games that are engaging and also happen to be educational, then use these game in our schools to teach our children. Based on the results of people like Ananth Pai, and Salman Khan of Khan Academy, our educational system could easily and quickly become one of the best in the world, instead of one of the worst, if we would embrace gamefication, instead of treating it like an absurd joke.
Lord Rybec
Thursday, February 28, 2013
Wednesday, February 20, 2013
Video Game Stigma
In a speech, on August 8th, 1983, Ronald Regan said, "I recently learned something quite interesting about video games. Many young people have developed incredible hand, eye, and brain coordination in playing these games. The air force believes these kids will be our outstanding pilots should they fly our jets." Typically when a U.S. President says something, the people listen. In this case, however, they did not. Most Americans, even those who play them regularly, still see video games as valueless time wasters that are nothing more than meaningless entertainment. The hand eye coordination benefits of playing video games are the butt of many jokes. What researchers did not know when Regan made this statement, and what a vast majority of Americans still do not know, is that video games have far more benefits than just coordination.
Five or six years ago, I read an article in either Scientific American or Discover magazine. I cannot find a reference for the article because neither of those magazines' websites have decent search capability, and there are so many articles on the subject that even Google is no help. The author of this article was working on a research project on sensory benefits of certain sensory disabilities. It has been known for some time that people who are blind or deaf tend to have heightened ability in the other senses. This researcher wanted to find exactly how far these sensory benefits went, so he made some computer programs to test things like reflexes and coordination. He found that people with sensory disabilities performed significantly better on all of his tests than people without any sensory disabilities. Then one day, he decided to try the tests himself. He scored off the charts. His scores beat both the normal test subjects and the disabled ones, by a wide margin. After testing the other researchers he worked with, along with some other people, he found that the link was computer games. People who regularly played computer games consistently scored much higher than even people with sensory disabilities. This researcher ended up changing his research to find the effects of video games on the human brain. In his article, he compares playing video games to working out for the brain. Further research found that video games can improve social skills, mathematical skills, quick decision making skills, risk assessment skills, spatial memory skills, reflexes, physical and mental coordination, as well as any number of different types of problem solving skills, and many other skills.
Other recent research has found even more beneficial uses of games in general. A Deseret News article I recently read advocated the use of games for improving family life. The article cited research showing that playing games (including board and cards games, as well as video games) occupies the logical centers of our brains, which makes us less hesitant about discussing difficult subjects. In family settings, this can help keep discussions on controversial topics more civil and more likely to occur in the first place.
Jane McGonigal, a gaming advocate, has given several TED talks on how video games can improve society. Her focus is on family life improvement and building problem solving skills that will be useful for solving some of the world's most difficult problems. She recommends playing no less than 20 hours of games a week. She suggests that MMORPGs are especially good, because of the cooperative social interaction, but says that multiplayer games in person are even better. Ideally, she says that cooperative in-person games are the best, because they build teamwork skills and strengthen relationships. In one TED talk, she also explains and shows how turning a difficult task into a game can make it much easier, or at least less tedious and more engaging.
I also have some personal experience with the benefits of video games. Many years ago, I attended a youth group, where we played volleyball weekly. I noticed that most people who joined our games were not very coordinated when they started and often took many months to improve their skill. There were some people, however, that were very coordinated and could play well, without any prior experience. There were a few differences between those who could play well right off and those who could not. People with prior experience in other sports tended to be fairly good right off. There were some people though, that were good right off, but that had no real athletic experience. Most of these people were actually not very physically fit either. This was because they spent a lot of time playing video games. Somehow, they could play as well as some people with prior vollyball experience, even though they were unathletic, with no real experience in any sport. The benefits to coordination, reflexes, and quick decision making from playing video games were very clear.
A lot of research showing the beneficial effects of games is not limited to video games. Most games can have some beneficial effect, and different games have different beneficial effects. For instance, Tetris is great for basic problem solving, reflexes, coordination, and fast decision making, while Dungeons and Dragons is great for cooperative social skills, relationship building, advanced problem solving, and even basic mathematical skills. Video games tend to focus more on fast decision making, reflexes, coordination, while non-video games focus more on advanced problem solving, risk assessment, and social skills. Obviously some games cross boundaries, but there are some skills that do not cross boundaries well. In short, not all of the benefits of video games can be gained from non-video games, and not all of the benefits of non-video games can be gained from video games. For the full benefits, a variety of games and game types are important.
We need to get over this social stigma of video games. Admittedly, video games can be addictive, and like working out, if you do not use what you gain from it, it is worthless. I think, however, that eliminating the social stigma around video games would solve part of this problem. Many gamers feel isolated by this social stigma, so they spend most of their time playing video games, because at least on the games, they have friends who do not judge their hobby. Ironically, these gamers tend to be smarter than the people who judge them, and recent research has shown that many of them even have better social skills, because they work with other people solving in-game problems regularly (many MMORPGs are more social than workplaces or even bars). If our society did not push these gamers into isolation, they would probably spend less time playing games and more time working with other people to solve real world problems, and they would be extremely good at it, because of the problem solving skills gained playing games. Also, if society stopped pushing gamers into isolation, maybe more people would play games, and the average intelligence of our society would improve. If this happened, maybe all of these extremely difficult problems we are facing would not be so difficult anymore.
One thing we need to consider is what is really important in our society? Many schools and colleges place emphasis on certain types of games. These are sports, an athletic kind of game that does have some benefits in common with other types of games. The primary benefit of sports are all physical though. Sports improve our strength and endurance. They can also improve coordination to some degree, but they do not improve our mental function as much as games that challenge the mind (there is strong evidence that physical exercise does improve cognitive function, but only on a general level). This seems to indicate that our society values physical fitness more than mental fitness. Ironically, much of our media supports this theory. Also, ironically, the most important jobs are not ones where anyone cares about physical fitness. Some of the best paying and highest demand jobs are engineering jobs, where mental fitness is the only qualifying factor. Engineers are not muscular, skinny people with great bodies. They are extremely smart people with well developed minds. So, why are we not having more "sports" in schools and colleges that emphasize mental fitness? Some colleges, including MIT, have StarCraft 2 teams, but most traditional colleges have at least football, basketball, and volleyball teams, and many also include baseball and softball, but nothing to challenge the mind. These skills will be great for the fraction of a percent of students who become professional athletes, but for the rest of us the only benefit is better physical fitness, which could easily be achieved by walking or running to our classes instead of driving.
I would like to see more video games in schools. I don't mind if they are educational games, since this is really the goal, but they should also be engaging games, otherwise students will not want to play them and will get far less benefits from them. Also, while StarCraft 2 is a great competitive game and teaches a lot of useful skills, we need some cooperative games as well. Jane McGonigal recommends 20 hours of games per week. I do not think this should all occur in school (otherwise half of school time would be gaming), but even 2 or 3 hours a week would have beneficial effects. In elementary school students typically get an hour of recess per day (usually 30 minutes at a time), and an hour of lunch that includes some recess time after eating. This is more than enough physical activity to maintain good fitness (not to mention the PE classes that involve even more physical activity). What if, two days a week, that hour of recess was spent playing games instead? The students would still have the recess time during lunch for physical activity. The game time could begin and end with restroom breaks, so the students are not sitting still for too long at a time. If the games could be played in short intervals, they could be played during the normal 30 minute recess times, otherwise the school could schedule time differently for those days, to make the time 1 continuous hour. Highschools and colleges could offer game class time or extracurricular game time much like they currently offer sports. Note that I am not saying they should eliminate sports entirely, but I think that if sports are considered a valuable asset to students, games should be considered at least as valuable, since they offer more practical benefits than physical sports.
Also, games are usually cheaper than physical sports. For a given sport, schools or students often end up paying hundreds of dollars per student for equipment. Most schools already have a computer lab, and multiple students can use a computer if they are scheduled at different times (much like the same field can be used for multiple sports, as long as it is scheduled well), so computer costs are already covered. The best games for this sort of thing do not cost more than $60 per copy, and most cost substantially less, so even if each student needs their own copy, the per student cost for student specific equipment is not more than $60 per sport (and, for account based games like StarCraft 2, many students will already have their own account). Also, this is typically a one time cost, while physical sports often require new equipment regularly, as the old equipment wears out. New computers will only be needed if new game courses are added that require better computers, or if there are too many students and there are not enough computers to go around. Our society and our schools embrace extracurricular games that build skills that are not very relevant to our modern civilization, when they could be embracing games that build useful and relevant skills for much cheaper.
Focusing of physical sports and physical fitness is great if we are trying to raise a generation of construction workers, but what we really need are engineers and problem solvers. Games can help give us these. Games are to mental fitness as working out is to physical fitness. Since our current civilization needs mentally fit people much more than physically fit people, our culture needs to embrace gaming as a means of improving and progressing. If we can eliminate this video game stigma that our society has harbored for far too long, I believe that we can progress much faster and solve many of our most difficult problems much more easily.
Lord Rybec
Five or six years ago, I read an article in either Scientific American or Discover magazine. I cannot find a reference for the article because neither of those magazines' websites have decent search capability, and there are so many articles on the subject that even Google is no help. The author of this article was working on a research project on sensory benefits of certain sensory disabilities. It has been known for some time that people who are blind or deaf tend to have heightened ability in the other senses. This researcher wanted to find exactly how far these sensory benefits went, so he made some computer programs to test things like reflexes and coordination. He found that people with sensory disabilities performed significantly better on all of his tests than people without any sensory disabilities. Then one day, he decided to try the tests himself. He scored off the charts. His scores beat both the normal test subjects and the disabled ones, by a wide margin. After testing the other researchers he worked with, along with some other people, he found that the link was computer games. People who regularly played computer games consistently scored much higher than even people with sensory disabilities. This researcher ended up changing his research to find the effects of video games on the human brain. In his article, he compares playing video games to working out for the brain. Further research found that video games can improve social skills, mathematical skills, quick decision making skills, risk assessment skills, spatial memory skills, reflexes, physical and mental coordination, as well as any number of different types of problem solving skills, and many other skills.
Other recent research has found even more beneficial uses of games in general. A Deseret News article I recently read advocated the use of games for improving family life. The article cited research showing that playing games (including board and cards games, as well as video games) occupies the logical centers of our brains, which makes us less hesitant about discussing difficult subjects. In family settings, this can help keep discussions on controversial topics more civil and more likely to occur in the first place.
Jane McGonigal, a gaming advocate, has given several TED talks on how video games can improve society. Her focus is on family life improvement and building problem solving skills that will be useful for solving some of the world's most difficult problems. She recommends playing no less than 20 hours of games a week. She suggests that MMORPGs are especially good, because of the cooperative social interaction, but says that multiplayer games in person are even better. Ideally, she says that cooperative in-person games are the best, because they build teamwork skills and strengthen relationships. In one TED talk, she also explains and shows how turning a difficult task into a game can make it much easier, or at least less tedious and more engaging.
I also have some personal experience with the benefits of video games. Many years ago, I attended a youth group, where we played volleyball weekly. I noticed that most people who joined our games were not very coordinated when they started and often took many months to improve their skill. There were some people, however, that were very coordinated and could play well, without any prior experience. There were a few differences between those who could play well right off and those who could not. People with prior experience in other sports tended to be fairly good right off. There were some people though, that were good right off, but that had no real athletic experience. Most of these people were actually not very physically fit either. This was because they spent a lot of time playing video games. Somehow, they could play as well as some people with prior vollyball experience, even though they were unathletic, with no real experience in any sport. The benefits to coordination, reflexes, and quick decision making from playing video games were very clear.
A lot of research showing the beneficial effects of games is not limited to video games. Most games can have some beneficial effect, and different games have different beneficial effects. For instance, Tetris is great for basic problem solving, reflexes, coordination, and fast decision making, while Dungeons and Dragons is great for cooperative social skills, relationship building, advanced problem solving, and even basic mathematical skills. Video games tend to focus more on fast decision making, reflexes, coordination, while non-video games focus more on advanced problem solving, risk assessment, and social skills. Obviously some games cross boundaries, but there are some skills that do not cross boundaries well. In short, not all of the benefits of video games can be gained from non-video games, and not all of the benefits of non-video games can be gained from video games. For the full benefits, a variety of games and game types are important.
We need to get over this social stigma of video games. Admittedly, video games can be addictive, and like working out, if you do not use what you gain from it, it is worthless. I think, however, that eliminating the social stigma around video games would solve part of this problem. Many gamers feel isolated by this social stigma, so they spend most of their time playing video games, because at least on the games, they have friends who do not judge their hobby. Ironically, these gamers tend to be smarter than the people who judge them, and recent research has shown that many of them even have better social skills, because they work with other people solving in-game problems regularly (many MMORPGs are more social than workplaces or even bars). If our society did not push these gamers into isolation, they would probably spend less time playing games and more time working with other people to solve real world problems, and they would be extremely good at it, because of the problem solving skills gained playing games. Also, if society stopped pushing gamers into isolation, maybe more people would play games, and the average intelligence of our society would improve. If this happened, maybe all of these extremely difficult problems we are facing would not be so difficult anymore.
One thing we need to consider is what is really important in our society? Many schools and colleges place emphasis on certain types of games. These are sports, an athletic kind of game that does have some benefits in common with other types of games. The primary benefit of sports are all physical though. Sports improve our strength and endurance. They can also improve coordination to some degree, but they do not improve our mental function as much as games that challenge the mind (there is strong evidence that physical exercise does improve cognitive function, but only on a general level). This seems to indicate that our society values physical fitness more than mental fitness. Ironically, much of our media supports this theory. Also, ironically, the most important jobs are not ones where anyone cares about physical fitness. Some of the best paying and highest demand jobs are engineering jobs, where mental fitness is the only qualifying factor. Engineers are not muscular, skinny people with great bodies. They are extremely smart people with well developed minds. So, why are we not having more "sports" in schools and colleges that emphasize mental fitness? Some colleges, including MIT, have StarCraft 2 teams, but most traditional colleges have at least football, basketball, and volleyball teams, and many also include baseball and softball, but nothing to challenge the mind. These skills will be great for the fraction of a percent of students who become professional athletes, but for the rest of us the only benefit is better physical fitness, which could easily be achieved by walking or running to our classes instead of driving.
I would like to see more video games in schools. I don't mind if they are educational games, since this is really the goal, but they should also be engaging games, otherwise students will not want to play them and will get far less benefits from them. Also, while StarCraft 2 is a great competitive game and teaches a lot of useful skills, we need some cooperative games as well. Jane McGonigal recommends 20 hours of games per week. I do not think this should all occur in school (otherwise half of school time would be gaming), but even 2 or 3 hours a week would have beneficial effects. In elementary school students typically get an hour of recess per day (usually 30 minutes at a time), and an hour of lunch that includes some recess time after eating. This is more than enough physical activity to maintain good fitness (not to mention the PE classes that involve even more physical activity). What if, two days a week, that hour of recess was spent playing games instead? The students would still have the recess time during lunch for physical activity. The game time could begin and end with restroom breaks, so the students are not sitting still for too long at a time. If the games could be played in short intervals, they could be played during the normal 30 minute recess times, otherwise the school could schedule time differently for those days, to make the time 1 continuous hour. Highschools and colleges could offer game class time or extracurricular game time much like they currently offer sports. Note that I am not saying they should eliminate sports entirely, but I think that if sports are considered a valuable asset to students, games should be considered at least as valuable, since they offer more practical benefits than physical sports.
Also, games are usually cheaper than physical sports. For a given sport, schools or students often end up paying hundreds of dollars per student for equipment. Most schools already have a computer lab, and multiple students can use a computer if they are scheduled at different times (much like the same field can be used for multiple sports, as long as it is scheduled well), so computer costs are already covered. The best games for this sort of thing do not cost more than $60 per copy, and most cost substantially less, so even if each student needs their own copy, the per student cost for student specific equipment is not more than $60 per sport (and, for account based games like StarCraft 2, many students will already have their own account). Also, this is typically a one time cost, while physical sports often require new equipment regularly, as the old equipment wears out. New computers will only be needed if new game courses are added that require better computers, or if there are too many students and there are not enough computers to go around. Our society and our schools embrace extracurricular games that build skills that are not very relevant to our modern civilization, when they could be embracing games that build useful and relevant skills for much cheaper.
Focusing of physical sports and physical fitness is great if we are trying to raise a generation of construction workers, but what we really need are engineers and problem solvers. Games can help give us these. Games are to mental fitness as working out is to physical fitness. Since our current civilization needs mentally fit people much more than physically fit people, our culture needs to embrace gaming as a means of improving and progressing. If we can eliminate this video game stigma that our society has harbored for far too long, I believe that we can progress much faster and solve many of our most difficult problems much more easily.
Lord Rybec
Friday, February 8, 2013
Home School
I may have mentioned this before, but we plan on homeschooling our children. I have some experience with this, because I was homeschooled from 6th grade on. My mom chose to take me out of public school because I was failing 6th grade. Now, you might think this was because I was stupid or lazy. I was in the Talented and Gifted program, so I was definitely not stupid. I was not really lazy either (ok, maybe a little). The problem was the system. I learn very fast. In a normal classroom, the teacher repeats a lot of stuff and then assigns homework intended partially to test knowledge, but mostly to reiterate everything taught. The result is a teaching method that relies on repeatedly telling the students the same things until it sticks. Well, for me it stuck the first time, and then I got bored. I found that if I finished assignments early, I was given more work to do, because the teacher didn't know what else to do with me. This made the boredom even worse. Consequently, I just quit doing the work. Halfway through 6th grade, I was in the Talented and Gifted program, but I was failing all of my classes miserably. So, my mom pulled me out of public school, bought a 2 inch thick workbook that covered all of the material for 6th grade, and made me do it in less than half a school year. It was hard. I was doing 10 pages a day in that book that was designed for 3 to 5 pages a day. I also really enjoyed it, because I could often get all of my 10 pages done by lunch time, and no one gave me more work to do.
We are not homeschooling our children so they will enjoy it, though I do hope that they will. We are homeschooling our children because we believe that we can give them a superior education to what the public school system offers. I recognize that this is not a claim that all parents can make. Some are not educated enough themselves to teach others (or have forgotten too much and do not have an easy time remembering or relearning it). Others just are not good teachers, regardless of education. My wife and I are fairly well educated and experience with our three children indicates that we are fairly good at teaching as well. Given this, I think that we will be successful at homeschooling our children.
Now, what I want to discuss is my goals for homeschooling our children, as well as some of the methods we intend to use to accomplish this.
First, I am working on teaching our 3 year old daughter to read. If you have read studies on learning to read, you probably know that the absolute minimum recommended age for starting is 4 years old. Potential consequences of starting too early include the child believing that reading is just too hard for them, which can make it very difficult to teach them to read when they are ready. I have a decent solution to this problem though. We are using the Distar method as presented in the book, "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons." The first lesson teaches the child to associate the letters "m" and "s" with their sounds (among a few other things). Once a week, for maybe 15 minutes, I sit my daughter down, and we work on this. We have not even made it past the first page, because she still has trouble remembering which sound goes with which letter. We will continue to do this until she can consistently remember the sounds, then we will move ahead a little bit more. Because the lessons are short, she does not get frustrated or bored. Typically a lesson ends when she is no longer interested. At 3 years old, a short attention span for this sort of learning is normal, and trying to overcome it is likely to harm the child's ability to learn (by making them hate learning). The nice thing about this method is that now I don't have to try to judge when she is ready to learn to read. As she becomes ready, she will start to catch on better and will be able to sit still and learn for longer. These early short lessons are probably helping prepare her brain to read. She has also become much better at pronouncing words correctly since we started this, so there are additional benefits. (Note that this may not work for all children. Different children do learn better with different learning techniques. This is another reason we are homeschooling. Public schools cannot tailor learning models to each individual student. Parents can.)
Second, a major goal for our children's learning is problem solving. I am a computer programmer, and problem solving is my job. As a college student, I see a lot of other students have difficulty learning to program computers. The main reason is that they have poor problem solving skills. Instead of trying to find information on their own, they ask professors or other students, or they just struggle. o Often the answers are obvious to me, even for questions that I have no experience with, but they don't have the self confidence to trust what they know, and they don't even consider that they can find it themselves without help. Problem solving may seem like something that is only really useful for engineering fields. In reality, problem solving is a skill that can be used everyday in normal life. What happens when you realize that you don't have enough money to pay the bills this month? Many people just default on some payment or other. A lot of vehicles get repossessed because of this. Try searching "can't afford my loan payments" on Google. The first hit (that is not an advertisement) gives a long list of ways to handle student loans when you cannot afford them, including deferment and negotiating a better payment schedule. If you replaced "loan" with "car" you would find information dealing specifically with car loans. What you would learn is that no one wants to repossess your car or house. They would much rather the money you owe them, and typically they are willing to work with you if you are having trouble with finances. The most basic problem solving skill is admitting you have a problem and asking for help, and many people do not have this skill. Better though, decent problem solving skills would enable people to make good budgeting decisions and come up with a financial plan to avoid this problem all together. Truly good problem solving skills can help people to avoid unnecessary debt entirely and devise a financial plan to minimize the length and interest of necessary debt. This kind of problem solving will make any employee a better employee, even in unskilled labor like fast food. Of course, it is fairly obvious (given the massive failure of many large businesses in the last decade) that even CEOs and other business leaders could do with better problem solving skills. I think that the two most important skills I can teach my children are reading and problem solving. With these skills and decent internet access, they can learn anything else they will ever need.
That brings me to everything else. First, for the problem solving skills, learning basic computer programming should really help with the basic problem solving. If any of them are interested in more advanced programming, I will teach them, but I won't force them to learn beyond the basics. This will probably be their first big problem solving training. Their writing/English training will also involve problem solving, once they get to learning grammar. My plan for this is to give them either a weekly or biweekly (once every two weeks) subject (typically of their choice, but I might sneak subjects like history into this if they don't choose them on their own) that they have to write a short paper on. I will expect them to do the research on their own with minimal help (after some tutoring in using various resources, like the internet and the library). Really, this will work with pretty much any research subject, including history, geography, sociology, and such.
For math, I plan to use Khan Academy. I may use Khan Academy for some other subjects as well (it does have a little bit of history and will probably have much more by the time my children are old enough to need it). Khan Academy has a fairly complete set of mathematics learning tools for all math through high school and a bunch more college level math. The videos make great lectures (that can be watched multiple times as needed; better than public school, where if you miss it the first time, you are out of luck), the exercises are very good, the coaching system will allow us to keep track of our children's progress and give individual tutoring where needed, and the reward system helps keep it fun for the students (and has encouraged certain 5th graders to become proficient at some of the college level math).
In addition to these, I think Freerice.com would be a good supplement for a number of subjects (not to mention that for each correctly answered question, they donate 10 grains of rice to feeding people in 3rd world countries, which may help teach charity to some degree). Freerice.com covers some subjects that Khan Academy does not and that are not best taught in a classroom setting (vocabulary, for instance).
My ultimate hope is that we can teach our children to be capable of learning anything they need to, without needing the babysitting often found in public school classrooms. I also hope that easy access to information will help them to be interested in (and study) a broad range of subjects, so they will have a well rounded education. If my goals are met, they will have a better, more rounded education, than the average high school graduate and may even be more educated in a number of subjects than the average college graduate.
I have a good learning model and curriculum in mind. I need to do a little bit more research on what subjects are good to start teaching when, before I document it. I'll write an article outlining these once I have documented it. One major part of it will be giving the student a lot of choice in what to learn and when. What I am thinking is that I need to come up with a list of subjects for each grade, along with a number of "credits" needed in each subject to finish that grade. The student then will submit a proposal for each credit, on what to learn to earn the credit. So, for American History, one credit might be earned by studying and writing a report on the Civil War, and another might be earned by doing the same for the design and creation of the U.S. Constitution. Of course, there will probably be a few specifics that are mandatory, but instead of scheduling them for a specific unit, we will leave it up to the student, so long as it gets done by whatever deadline it has (probably end of school year, or graduation). Anyhow, more information on this when I have it documented.
Lord Rybec
We are not homeschooling our children so they will enjoy it, though I do hope that they will. We are homeschooling our children because we believe that we can give them a superior education to what the public school system offers. I recognize that this is not a claim that all parents can make. Some are not educated enough themselves to teach others (or have forgotten too much and do not have an easy time remembering or relearning it). Others just are not good teachers, regardless of education. My wife and I are fairly well educated and experience with our three children indicates that we are fairly good at teaching as well. Given this, I think that we will be successful at homeschooling our children.
Now, what I want to discuss is my goals for homeschooling our children, as well as some of the methods we intend to use to accomplish this.
First, I am working on teaching our 3 year old daughter to read. If you have read studies on learning to read, you probably know that the absolute minimum recommended age for starting is 4 years old. Potential consequences of starting too early include the child believing that reading is just too hard for them, which can make it very difficult to teach them to read when they are ready. I have a decent solution to this problem though. We are using the Distar method as presented in the book, "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons." The first lesson teaches the child to associate the letters "m" and "s" with their sounds (among a few other things). Once a week, for maybe 15 minutes, I sit my daughter down, and we work on this. We have not even made it past the first page, because she still has trouble remembering which sound goes with which letter. We will continue to do this until she can consistently remember the sounds, then we will move ahead a little bit more. Because the lessons are short, she does not get frustrated or bored. Typically a lesson ends when she is no longer interested. At 3 years old, a short attention span for this sort of learning is normal, and trying to overcome it is likely to harm the child's ability to learn (by making them hate learning). The nice thing about this method is that now I don't have to try to judge when she is ready to learn to read. As she becomes ready, she will start to catch on better and will be able to sit still and learn for longer. These early short lessons are probably helping prepare her brain to read. She has also become much better at pronouncing words correctly since we started this, so there are additional benefits. (Note that this may not work for all children. Different children do learn better with different learning techniques. This is another reason we are homeschooling. Public schools cannot tailor learning models to each individual student. Parents can.)
Second, a major goal for our children's learning is problem solving. I am a computer programmer, and problem solving is my job. As a college student, I see a lot of other students have difficulty learning to program computers. The main reason is that they have poor problem solving skills. Instead of trying to find information on their own, they ask professors or other students, or they just struggle. o Often the answers are obvious to me, even for questions that I have no experience with, but they don't have the self confidence to trust what they know, and they don't even consider that they can find it themselves without help. Problem solving may seem like something that is only really useful for engineering fields. In reality, problem solving is a skill that can be used everyday in normal life. What happens when you realize that you don't have enough money to pay the bills this month? Many people just default on some payment or other. A lot of vehicles get repossessed because of this. Try searching "can't afford my loan payments" on Google. The first hit (that is not an advertisement) gives a long list of ways to handle student loans when you cannot afford them, including deferment and negotiating a better payment schedule. If you replaced "loan" with "car" you would find information dealing specifically with car loans. What you would learn is that no one wants to repossess your car or house. They would much rather the money you owe them, and typically they are willing to work with you if you are having trouble with finances. The most basic problem solving skill is admitting you have a problem and asking for help, and many people do not have this skill. Better though, decent problem solving skills would enable people to make good budgeting decisions and come up with a financial plan to avoid this problem all together. Truly good problem solving skills can help people to avoid unnecessary debt entirely and devise a financial plan to minimize the length and interest of necessary debt. This kind of problem solving will make any employee a better employee, even in unskilled labor like fast food. Of course, it is fairly obvious (given the massive failure of many large businesses in the last decade) that even CEOs and other business leaders could do with better problem solving skills. I think that the two most important skills I can teach my children are reading and problem solving. With these skills and decent internet access, they can learn anything else they will ever need.
That brings me to everything else. First, for the problem solving skills, learning basic computer programming should really help with the basic problem solving. If any of them are interested in more advanced programming, I will teach them, but I won't force them to learn beyond the basics. This will probably be their first big problem solving training. Their writing/English training will also involve problem solving, once they get to learning grammar. My plan for this is to give them either a weekly or biweekly (once every two weeks) subject (typically of their choice, but I might sneak subjects like history into this if they don't choose them on their own) that they have to write a short paper on. I will expect them to do the research on their own with minimal help (after some tutoring in using various resources, like the internet and the library). Really, this will work with pretty much any research subject, including history, geography, sociology, and such.
For math, I plan to use Khan Academy. I may use Khan Academy for some other subjects as well (it does have a little bit of history and will probably have much more by the time my children are old enough to need it). Khan Academy has a fairly complete set of mathematics learning tools for all math through high school and a bunch more college level math. The videos make great lectures (that can be watched multiple times as needed; better than public school, where if you miss it the first time, you are out of luck), the exercises are very good, the coaching system will allow us to keep track of our children's progress and give individual tutoring where needed, and the reward system helps keep it fun for the students (and has encouraged certain 5th graders to become proficient at some of the college level math).
In addition to these, I think Freerice.com would be a good supplement for a number of subjects (not to mention that for each correctly answered question, they donate 10 grains of rice to feeding people in 3rd world countries, which may help teach charity to some degree). Freerice.com covers some subjects that Khan Academy does not and that are not best taught in a classroom setting (vocabulary, for instance).
My ultimate hope is that we can teach our children to be capable of learning anything they need to, without needing the babysitting often found in public school classrooms. I also hope that easy access to information will help them to be interested in (and study) a broad range of subjects, so they will have a well rounded education. If my goals are met, they will have a better, more rounded education, than the average high school graduate and may even be more educated in a number of subjects than the average college graduate.
I have a good learning model and curriculum in mind. I need to do a little bit more research on what subjects are good to start teaching when, before I document it. I'll write an article outlining these once I have documented it. One major part of it will be giving the student a lot of choice in what to learn and when. What I am thinking is that I need to come up with a list of subjects for each grade, along with a number of "credits" needed in each subject to finish that grade. The student then will submit a proposal for each credit, on what to learn to earn the credit. So, for American History, one credit might be earned by studying and writing a report on the Civil War, and another might be earned by doing the same for the design and creation of the U.S. Constitution. Of course, there will probably be a few specifics that are mandatory, but instead of scheduling them for a specific unit, we will leave it up to the student, so long as it gets done by whatever deadline it has (probably end of school year, or graduation). Anyhow, more information on this when I have it documented.
Lord Rybec
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