You throw a pebble into a pool, and the universe is not quite as it was before. — Maugham, The Blade

preface

As Internet +, AI+ and 5G+ become fashionable and policy-oriented, programming education has become hot. Gamified programming is often mentioned in these buzzwords.

I had a conversation with Mr. Zeng (one of the directors of CodeLab) about gamification programming the night before yesterday, and we had a lot of interesting points. This article will sort them out.

What is gamified programming?

Gamified programming

Today’s game programming, generally refers to a programming style of education, they are disguised as game programming practice, as the learners through a checkpoint, Ta will get a lot of little stars as a reward of small red flowers) (like class, learners if passed all the preset level, will think Ta to master the required programming knowledge. For example, think of Code.org, Codecombat…

Sounds quite like the online version of the school education, knowledge be broken up into A chapter in the textbook (level), each chapter set up some questions, to students through the examination, has collected enough small red flowers, after each test on the label of A, B, C grade, we can announce if Ta grasp the corresponding knowledge.

Any questions?

That doesn’t sound wrong.

Mitchel Resnick, of all people, came out in Kindergarten for Life and said, I don’t agree.

Mitchel Resnick starts with a TED talk by Sal Khan, the founder of Khan Academy.

During his speech, Khan responded to a question from Bill Gates by saying,

Khan Academy has introduced a series of game mechanics that allow learners to earn badges on the site, followed by possible regional leaderboards.

Depending on the posture, one day out of a country service trigonometric function first is also can look forward to.

Khan continued:

With badges and points, you can control thousands of students to go in the direction you want.

To be the number one player, brothers need to step up.

People believe in gamification of education. If children are motivated by points and badges when they play games, why not do the same with education? Aren’t they more motivated to learn? Just like when you play a game.

What? You doubt that? Have you forgotten how many nights you brushed Wang Zhaojun’s level from bronze to gold with dark circles under your eyes?

Mitchel Resnick continues:

Gamification, as a traditional educational wisdom, has been widely adopted. In classrooms, children are rewarded with stickers and stars; In each semester, they are rewarded with grades and certificates; At home, participate in today’s chores and win a picnic in the park on Saturday. The pioneers of behaviorism have demonstrated the power of offering rewards to encourage desired behavior. Their theories had a profound influence on management strategies in school classrooms and workplaces throughout the 20th century.

As we saw earlier, the similarities between gamified programming and schooling stem from the behaviorist theory above.

Mitchel Resnick moves on to his But section, noting that recent studies have raised questions about the long-term value of the behaviorist approach. Especially at creative events. Admittedly, rewards can be used to motivate people to change behavior in the short term, but the long-term effects are very different.

In His book Motivation: The Power of Simplicity, Daniel Pink describes the difference:

Rewards can have dramatic short-term effects, much like a caffeine jolt that keeps you working for a few more hours. But the effect is diminishing, and worse, it can reduce one’s motivation to continue a project for the long term.

Pinker discusses several studies that show limits on the use of rewards as stimuli. In a study conducted by Edward Deci, college students had to assemble blocks to solve puzzles. Deci divided the students into two groups: those who were paid for each puzzle they completed, and those who were given no bonus. As expected, students with money spent more time solving problems than students without money. The next day, the students were invited back to work on the problem, but this time none of them received any money. The result? Students who had received the money before were less likely to spend time solving the problems than those who had not received the money the first time; In other words, students who received money on the first day were less motivated than those who received no money at all.

Another study, by Mark Lepper and colleagues, gave certificates rather than cash to kindergarteners rather than college students, with similar results. Some of the children were given a certificate of excellence after drawing pictures on paper. Two weeks later, they invited the children to draw more pictures, but this time no certificates were provided. It turns out that the students who got the certificate the first time were less interested and spent less time drawing on the second test. Rewards are even less effective when creative activities are involved. When participants were asked to solve problems that required creative thinking, they took longer to solve them if they were paid to do so. It seems that the lure of rewards or bonuses Narrows people’s focus. Limit their creativity. Similarly, Teresa Amabile, a creative researcher, has analyzed the paintings and sculptures of artists and found that when artists are paid to create, their work is less creative, even when there are no limits on what they can produce.

So Mitchel Resnick concludes:

Gamification can be an effective strategy if your goal is to train someone to perform a specific task at a specific time. By turning tasks into games and offering points or other enticements as rewards, people learn tasks faster and more efficiently. But if your goal is to help people develop as creative thinkers and lifelong learners, you need a different strategy. Rather than offering extrinsic rewards, a better strategy is to tap into people’s intrinsic motivation, the desire to work on a problem/project that they find interesting or satisfying.

Did the game bother you?

Mitchel Resnick is no Yang Yong Shin, does not believe that games have original sin, and has no prejudice against games.

Mitchel Resnick’s objection to gamification of education is not against games per se, but against the abuse of rewards in the design of gamification projects in education today, which was supported by past behaviorism.

Mitchel Resnick is not against the spirit of play. On page 121 of Kindergarten for Life, Mitchel Resnick begins to talk about the precious spirit of play. Quotes from a bunch of interesting discussions about games:

• We do not stop playing because we are old, we grow old because we stop playing. – George Bernard shaw

• Play is a child’s job. — Jean Piaget

• You can learn more about a man in an hour than you can in a year of talking to him. — — – Plato

• Toys and games are a prelude to important ideas. — Charles Ames

• More than any other activity, play gives children control over the outside world. — Bruno Bettelheim

Mitchel Resnick continues:

Games are a combination of curiosity, imagination and experimentation.

sceptics

Mitchel Resnick’s critique of the gamification of education (passing stars /100 red flowers) is as cynical as a sceptic.

Advocates of gamification in education will protest: “It’s always easy to be a skeptic, to disrupt and attack the established order, but the question is how to be a better solution, how to be a builder.”

Mitchel Resnick and his teacher Seymour Papert were far better at being constructive than destructive.

Indeed, I have always thought that the attack on the existing irrational order is as important as construction itself.

Before giving constructive advice from Mitchel Resnick and Seymour Papert, let’s try to answer the following questions:

• What is a game?
• What is programming?
• Is it possible for them to marry? If possible, how?

What is a game?

It’s not easy to define a game.

Wittgenstein was probably the first philosopher to try to define play (I’m a big fan of his), writing in his major book, Philosophical Studies, later in his life:

Take a look at… Those activities we call games. I mean chess, cards, ball games, Olympic Games and so on. What do they have in common? – don’t say: there must be something they share, otherwise they wouldn’t be called a “game”, but to observe and confirm whether there is something they all Shared – because if you look at them, you won’t see something they share, and see some similar, only a few relations as well as the whole series of similarities and relations. … The upshot of this investigation is that we see a complex network of partially overlapping and intersecting similarities… I can think of no better expression for this kind of similarity than “family resemblance”; 21. For the various similarities between members of a family: physique, facial features, eye colour, gait, temper, and so on, all partially overlap and cross in the same way. I would say that “games” constitute a family. (Philosophical Studies,P66 — 67)

Wittgenstein began by proposing several elements of play, such as play, rules and competition, but later found that none of these properly defined games.

Thus, wittgenstein used games as an example of how language, like games, does not have a single nature that can be discovered and elucidated by a holistic theory.

I totally agree with him when he says that games are a family of things, and precise definitions are impossible.

But there have been many attempts to define games throughout history, many of them very interesting.

For example. Bernard Suits defines games as:

A game is a voluntary challenge to face unnecessary obstacles.

Thomas Holca is all for it.

Kevin Maroney, who won a Hugo Award for best Interactive video game in 2008, said:

Games are a form of entertainment with purpose and structure.

I would also like to mention Mitchel Resnick’s observation that the essence of games is to play.

In contrast to games, the definition of a video game is pretty clear. According to Wikipedia, a video game is:

An interactive program that simulates (or abstracts) hypothetical human behavior according to a logical pattern (sequence of calculations) based on the computing power of a computer.

Very nice definition! In this definition, a game is a human-computer interaction program. The graphical interface also seems to fit the game’s definition perfectly, with files and folders supposedly on the desktop, with a trash can next to them!

It fits our image of the computer pioneers of the 1960s, who pioneered most of the human-computer interaction we use today, but who gave the impression of playing. Alan Kay is now 80 years old and seems to continue to make children’s toys.

What is programming?

What is programming? The question is never more than what is a game? Easier to answer. Anyone who answers this question recklessly can expect to be blacklisted on Zhihu.

My two favorite related answers to this question come from SICP (Construction and Interpretation of Computer programs) and Mindstorms.

In the preface to the first edition SICP said:

We hope to establish that a computer language is not only a way for computers to perform operations, but more importantly, a novel formalized medium for expressing ideas about methodology. Programs must therefore be written to be read by humans and, occasionally, executed by computers. Second, we believe that, at this level, the most basic material is not the grammar of a particular programming language, nor the clever algorithms that efficiently compute a function, nor the mathematical analysis of algorithms or the essential basis of computation, but rather techniques that can be used to control the intellectual complexity of large software systems.

SICP said again:

Computer science is not a science, and its importance has little to do with computers. The computer revolution is a revolution in how we think and how we express our thinking.

Here’s What Mindstorms says about programming:

Isn’t programming about telling a computer a language it can “understand”? And isn’t learning a language one of the things kids do best? . When children program computers, they begin to explore their own ways of thinking by teaching the computer how to think. It’s an unusual experience that even many adults struggle with — thinking about thinking, turning children into experts in epistemology.

In SICP and Mindstorms’ exposition of programming and computers, we see programming as a tool for enhancing human cognition.

Of course, what they mean by programming has nothing to do with programming in general. Programming education in general (and most programming education today) focuses on memorizing grammar, memorizing algorithms, and scoring points. This is just a 21st century version of traditional school math education. You are unlikely to learn more from it than you would from today’s traditional subjects.

As Seymour Papert says in Mindstorms:

My vision is not to perfect the existing order; My idea runs counter to the existing system.

Is it possible to combine games and programming

In the discussion above, we saw that the definitions and boundaries of both games and programming are vague and broad. There is no sign that they contradict or conflict in any way.

Since there is no obvious conflict, how can the two be combined?

How to combine

Seymour Papert and Mitchel Resnick, both builders and constructivists, have provided excellent answers, and I believe they are among the best so far.

Building a new continent

Seymour Papert believes that the combination of the two is to construct land– a real learning atmosphere, like staying in France to learn French, rather than receiving unnatural foreign language training in an American school classroom.

A successful learning model is the way a child learns to speak, so we should aim to create a learning environment that is not deliberately organized. The classroom, in my view, is nothing more than an artificial and inefficient learning environment; It exists only because informal Settings do not solve educational problems in a few basic areas of knowledge: writing, grammar, or school math. I think the existence of computers can change this situation, it can change the learning environment outside the classroom;

Seymour Papert built Logo himself as a Mathland, his henchman Alan Kay built EToys (I wrote an article about it), Bret built Dynamicland (see my previous translation :” The next big thing “is a room), CodeLab built Neverland.

The lesson Seymour Papert left behind was to abandon the classroom mode of knowledge transfer in programming education (100 points reward small red flowers, memorize the knowledge points to beat the strange) and build a more real land, a land where talking to computers should be as natural as speaking French in France. Today’s programming games, by contrast, are very contrived and contrived, very close to John’s. Dewey attacked school education.

If you like, go to Dynamicland or Neverland(we are in Guangzhou) to experience the difference between land and classroom.

Building a playground

Mitchel Resnick sees playground as the result of the marriage of game spirit and programming

It can be seen that Mitchel Resnick is deeply influenced by Seymour Papert. Playground can be regarded as a modest version of Land, which emphasizes openness.

Mitchel Resnick points out that there are two models for programming and the spirit of play: a baby pen and a playground.

A baby pen is a restrictive environment. In a real baby pen, a child’s room for movement is limited and exploration is limited. They can play with toys in the enclosure, but they have limited scope. The baby pen is a metaphor for a child’s lack of freedom to experiment, lack of autonomy to explore, and lack of opportunities to develop creative adventures.

Playgrounds give children more space to move, explore, experiment and collaborate. If you watch children in an amusement park, you will find them playing their own games. In this process, the child will grow into a creative thinker. With funfair style games, it’s important to let kids decide what to make and how to make it.

Minecraft (Minecraft) and Scratch are great examples of playgrounds (as are EToys and Game Builder).

A modern version of Land and Playground

I agree with Seymour Papert and Mitchel Resnick on everything, and in fact, everything I think about programming and education comes from them.

But NOW I want to make a further deduction: with the rise of Internet of things and AI (performance improvement, cost reduction), we can build more exciting land and playground, in reality! Instead of simulating on a computer screen, we superimpose calculations on reality. Treat reality as a real creative environment.

Dynamicland and CodeLab Neverland are currently exploring this direction, and Toio has recently joined the ranks.

For those who are more interested in this topic, please read: Spatial programming, Physical computing and Escape rooms.

reference

• Mindstorms
• Code of war
• Lifelong kindergarten
• Ludwig Wittgenstein
• Oxford Literacy: Wittgenstein
• Study on the philosophy
• The code of
• Wikipedia game
• Wikipedia video Games
• The human-computer interaction
• Spatial programming, physical computing and escape rooms
• Gamification of education
• Etoys Study Notes: Interoperate with Scratch
• Mathland – Seymour Papert