Video On How the Education System Kills Creativity

[gm5k]

if you've got 20 minutes to spare, check this out.

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html

thoughts? I thought he had great points and some pretty damn funny jokes as well :toast

[PM5K]

Hey, it's my brother GM5K!

[gm5k]

Hey, it's my brother GM5K!

pm5k!!! :toast

one of my favorite sigs on the site :downspin:

[koriwhat]

fags

[baseline bum]

People can laugh and point their fingers at teaching kids things like dance being gay, but some of the greatest thinkers in the world were so because they could use their physical intuition and not just logical constructs (like equations) and visual constructions. If you read Einstein's work he would always try to picture how gravity in curved spacetime would feel, what he'd feel and see riding a bolt of lightning, and so on (though this point of view might have killed him with quantum theory, which he pretty much disregarded even though he created the field with his 1905 paper on the photoelectric effect).

I remember this really interesting experiment Alan Kay (professor of Computer Science at UCLA and creator of both object-oriented programming and the GUI-operating system) did where he got kids to try to program a computer to draw a circle. The little kids were by far the best at it, because they walked, then turned, then walked, then turned, and so on to make a circle, effectively solving the differential equation dx/dt = -y, dy/dt = x in time (the solution is x=cos(t), y=sin(t), the equation of a circle of radius 1 centered at the origin). More specifically, they were doing dx = -y dt, dy = x dt with their bodies, and then translating it into the programming language. I think this group of kids was less than 10 years old, and was so successful because they thought of the problem in purely physical terms.

I think the next group was kids between 10 and 12 or so, and their solution was to plot a bunch of points a distance of 1 from the origin. They still did way better than the HS age kids though, who were thinking logic (i.e., equations) was the best way to approach the problem, and they were trying to find (x,y) with x^2+y^2 = 1.

Of the three groups, Kay noted the little kids programmed the most accurate circles, the 10-12 year-olds the next most accurate, and the HS kids couldn't even plot bad ones in general.

Professor Kay has some really nasty things to say about our educational system and about how all they seem to want to teach is the logical view of the world. He was kind of written off as a quack early on, but his research with kids and with tying computers to muscular movements (instead of written commands) are the main reason you have simple to use computers like Macs and Windows boxes now.

Here's maybe the most fascinating talk I have ever seen related to education, given by Kay in the context of his work with user interface design on computers:

http://webcast.berkeley.edu/course_details_new.php?seriesid=2008-D-26263&semesterid=2008-D

If you want to watch this incredible talk, go to the video lectures for Fri, Sep 12 (user interfaces I) and Mon, Sep 15 (user interfaces II).

[gm5k]

fags

should I be insulted or honored? :lol

thanks for the ideas and link, BB :toast