Learning from an Extra Life

One of the books Earl loaned me to read this summer is David Bennahum’s Extra Life, his account of how computers influenced his education and childhood. It’s a very good book, and I’ll point you to Earl’s fuller review of it for the details. But there’s a point Bennahum makes a few times, when he’s discussing his early school years when he wasn’t really striving to excel academically but was putting a lot of attention into games and computer programming, and I wanted to highlight some passages.

On Big Trak, a toy truck that could be programmed to move along a predetermined path:

Here was a form of responsibility, of active participation, thinking, and analysis that crept into my time with Big Trak. The process was instinctively modular, a breaking apart of goals into subgoals, building back up to the whole from the smallest unit of problem solving. The act of laying out graph paper, modeling a room, and associating each square with a unit of distance meant I had to measure the room first and then think about what scale to use. Each square served as the smallest unit of measurement and gained meaning by pulling back, much as dots in a newspaper photograph or television screen fuse together when looked at from a suitable distance. I used a lot of math to make Big Trak work. At school I consistently received Cs in math, yet at home I eagerly applied principles of arithemetic and geometry. What made these laborious tasks worthwhile was the experience of making a finished product that happened to be thrilling to a ten-year-old. (32-33)

And a few pages later, on his summer spent playing Dungeons and Dragons with a group of friends:

The games we played began to alter my abilities. Up to then my analytic activities were limited to theoretical exercises in math or science class, like seeing what happened to plants when we stuck them in a closet with no light (they turned white and drooped, or pointed to the seam of the door if any light came through). Now, of our own free will, we were taking on problems – math, probability, mapping, the mechanics of which were rarely called upon for most ten-year-olds. More subtly still, we were doing a special kind of problem solving, what some might call systems analysis. (37)

Bennahum eventually graduated from Harvard, but his academic turnaround can be traced to the fact that there were things he wanted to accomplish in his non-school life, and he had to develop certain skills in order to accomplish them. This is not to say that formal education is unimportant, but I think it does say something about the need to get students engaged in that process. “Why do we have to know this?” is still one of the deadliest questions a teacher can bump into. People like Bennahum show how teachers can find answers to it. (Indeed, I really recommend the chapters where he talks about his high school computer teacher, and the teacher-led but cooperative culture he created.)

About Dave Thomer

Born and raised in Philadelphia. Studied philosophy at Fordham University in the Bronx, where I made many great friends and met my wonderful wife. We moved back to Philadelphia, where I studied philosophy some more and became a teacher. Online and off, I'm looking for ways that we can be better citizens and build stronger communities.

July 2, 2006 @ 10:01 am

Special Order Speeches