Your brain is designed such that you need to explore and build mental models on your own. You’re not really designed to passively sit by and try to store received knowledge. There’s a time and a place for both of these activities, but in the normal course of events, we get it wrong: exploring, or “playing with,” the material should come before studying facts.
We seem to have a cultural tendency to put the cart before the horse: you struggle to shovel in information first and then hope to maybe use it later. That’s the basis of most formal education and corporate training. But the real world doesn’t work that way. For instance, imagine you were taking a dance class, only to find you had to pass a test on “dance facts” before actually dancing. Sounds absurd when I put it that way, doesn’t it? Seymour Papert thinks so.
Papert is perhaps the leading expert on using technology to create new ways of learning.[115] He invented the programming language Logo: a “toy” that children could play with and, in the playing, learn deep mathematical concepts. His early work with Logo led to the LEGO Mindstorms robotic toys, named for his hugely influential book, Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas [Pap93]. Papert worked with world-renowned Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget and also believed that real learning—the learning that sticks with you—comes from experience and cognition, not from explicit teaching or rote practice. Their approach is called constructivism: we build to learn, not learn to build.
He designed the Logo language expressly to provide an environment where children could learn math concepts via direct experience by commanding a virtual “turtle” to move around and trace patterns on a virtual canvas. The young, grade-school students learned geometry, trig, and even recursive algorithms. When kids got stuck on a problem, they were told to imagine themselves as the turtle and walk through their own instructions from the turtle’s perspective. By changing their viewpoint to that of the turtle, the students could leverage their existing real-world knowledge of walking, turning, and so on, to explore the microworld of the turtle. That’s an important point: structuring learning so that you can build on top of existing experience.
As I’m using it here, the first meaning of the word play is similar to what we’ve talked about earlier in the book, in the sense of non-goal-directed exploration. We’re not really designed to just receive information but rather to explore and build mental models on our own. We need to be able to poke at a problem, to explore it, or to “get used to it” (as we talked about back in Engage an R-mode to L-mode Flow). Playing with a problem doesn’t make the problem any easier, but it gets us closer to how we’re wired to learn.
Of course, in this sort of environment, you’ll make mistakes. As a student, you’re not being led down the garden path of the “one right answer” according to the curriculum. As in real life, there is no curriculum. You’ll make mistakes; it will get messy. But those messes give you exactly the kind of feedback you need.
Real life has no curriculum.
Mind maps get better the more you play with them (Visualize Insight with Mind Maps). With a mind map, looking for opportunities to annotate, decorate, and draw relationships helps you gain insight. This is an extension of that idea—a more active engagement, playing directly with the ideas or technology in question, not sure what you’ll find, but looking to see how you can extend them, relate them, and so on.
The second sense of the word play introduces a sense of whimsy, or dare I say, fun.
I was on a business trip last week, and the flight attendant gave a little twist to the usual boring preflight speech: the entire speech, including the canned, legally specified parts, was set in a Dr. Seuss--style rhyme. From proper use of the seat belt to the dire warnings about disabling the smoke detector in the lavatory[116] to proper handling of the oxygen masks and life rafts, it all rhymed in a well-orchestrated meter. And for a change, people actually listened to the announcement. It was a novel presentation and was very engaging—you listened closely to see where she was headed with the talk, anticipating the stress and rhyme.
Because it was fun, the presentation was much more effective. Normally, no one pays any attention to the standard talk. Everyone is busy reading the Airline Catalog of Useless Merchandise or already dozing off. But a fun speech changes the game.
Fun is OK.
One of the definitions of fun, according to my dictionary on the Mac, is “playful behavior.”
That doesn’t mean that it’s easy, non-business-like, or not effective. In fact, Papert notes that his students called their work fun because it was hard, not in spite of being hard. It’s hard fun: not so hard as to be insurmountable (and so not engaging) but challenging enough to maintain interest and progress at solving the problem domain.
Working with new material or solving a problem in a playful manner makes it more enjoyable, but it also makes it easier to learn. Don’t be afraid of fun.
Make a game of it—literally. Create flash cards, or invent a card or board game; use tinker-toys or Lego blocks to act out the scenario. For example, you could create a board game that simulates visitors to a website. Where do they go next when they land on a random square? What if they never pass Go or go to Home?
I mentioned using Lego blocks for design back in Chapter 4, Get in Your Right Mind for the same reason: the idea is to engage as much of your entire being in the learning process: verbal, visual, musical, numerical, gross-motor body movement, fine-motor finger movement, and so on. All of that helps you to really play with the material and learn it more effectively.
| Recipe 33 | Play more in order to learn more. |
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