Education Bookcast

In recent episodes, we have been discussing games and play, and their relevance to education, as well as to an improved understanding of human psychology. In this episode, I approach some central questions of the field: What is a game? What is a toy? What is play? What is fun? It is by their very naturalness that play, fun, and games are hard to define. We can sense what they are, and that's exactly what makes them hard to put them into words. Jesse Schell surveys the literature and puts together the ideas and definitions of many thinkers to come up with his own favourite definitions. Jesse Schell's book The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses is a thick, exhaustive tome on a complex subject. There's no way I could do his book justice in a single episode - it would need to be a quadruple-bill at least. But I wanted to introduce my audience to his book, and what better way to do it than through the fundamental questions of the field? Enjoy the episode.

This is a continuation of the episode on Minds on Fire by Mark Carnes. The main idea of this part of the episode is the effects that Reacting to the Past, and role-play in general, have on the "self", i.e. the psychological construct of our selves. Enjoy the episode.

Last episode, we looked at the various ways in which games can both improve our theoretical understanding of human psychology and of learning, and also at how they can be used practically to improve people's lives. In this episode, I want to discuss a particular practical application of games, and that is in so-called Reacting to the Past. Reacting to the Past is a type of live role-playing game where each participant plays a character from a particular historical time and place. For example, the setting may be the French revolution, and players would take the roles of King Louis XVI, Lafayette, Robespierre, and others. Each player's (secret) objective is in line with what those personages wanted to happen historically - for example, Louis XVI's aim is to crush the revolution and preserve the monarchy, whereas Robespierre aims to overthrow the monarchy, institute universal male suffrage, and end slavery in French colonies. On every conceivable measure, Reacting to the Past games have been shown scientifically

This episode serves two purposes. On the one hand, I want to go over some more ideas from Jane McGonigal's book, as it is so rich in fresh and original ideas (they're fresh to me, anyway). On the other hand, I would like to go through a pointed criticism of the book entitled Jane McGonigal's Mind is Broken written by Edward Champion. Given how much I got from her book, I am surprised that there are people who are so strongly against it. I think it is good to go through it in the name of balance, though I can't pretend that I share Edward Champion's opinion, or believe that his piece is particularly well argued. Enjoy the episode.  

Jane McGonigal is a game designer who believes that, in many ways, games bring out the best in people. The reason for their popularity, she claims, is that they satisfy fundamental human needs. This leads, for example, to the highly insightful and completely counterintuitive notion that a big reason for people playing games is that it makes them feel productive. She peppers her book with reality "fixes" - comparisons of games with reality, where games come out on top, and lead the way to a better future. Here is a full list of those fixes. Unnecessary obstacles: Compared with games, reality is too easy. Games challenge us with voluntary obstacles and help us put our personal strengths to better use. Emotional activation: Compared with games, reality is depressing. Games focus our energy, with relentless optimism, on something we're good at and enjoy. More satisfying work: Compared with games, reality is unproductive. Games give us clearer missions and more satisfying, hands-on work. Better hope of success: C

Malke Rosenfeld is the creator of Math in your Feet, a program to teach students mathematical concepts through the medium of dance. (Really!) She does school workshops and teacher trainings, and now has a new book, Math on the Move, describing her approach and the theory behind it. We talk about interdisciplinary learning, embodied learning, liking vs. hating maths, and attitudes to "alternative" teaching methods. Malke herself, like many people, never really "got" maths while she was at school. After getting involved in the percussive dance scene, she one day woke up to the possibility that "surely there's math in this". From there, she went on to develop her unusual, and potentially controversial, but certainly fun, pedagogy. She draws on the ideas of Seymour Papert from his book Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas, and on modern neurological research showing the extent to which we think through our bodies, and have to understand things in many ways for them to really sink in. Enjoy the epis

Today we have an interview with Sargy Letuchy, a public school teacher from Chicago, who has produced some materials to help other teachers with standards-based learning. The Visual Edge is a workbook of graphic organisers for K-12 teachers in the United States. Along the way, we also discuss some other pertinent education topics. Enjoy the episode.

Depending on what counts as knowing a language, I speak anything between 7 and 12 languages, namely: English, Polish, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, French, Russian, and Persian well; Hungarian to a lesser extent; and Georgian, Armenian, Lithuanian, and Tibetan in the past, now mostly forgotten. Besides this, I have some knowledge of classical languages (Latin, classical Chinese, and ancient Greek); one constructed language (Esperanto); and there are a couple more languages that I've had a smaller amount of exposure to (Turkish and Maltese). I think that my experiences may be worth sharing to a general audience interested in education, and in teaching and learning languages in particular. First, I recount my story. How did I get from bilingual child to adult polyglot? Secondly, I talk about my methods for learning, Finally, I share some lessons learned from my experiences. This episode does not make use of references or scientific studies, but just relates my personal experience. It is a case study that gives a

In this episode, I review a paper from the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) about language learning and teaching. The key insights are eleven: Mature adults can learn a foreign language well enough through intensive language study to do things in the language (almost) as well as native speakers. "Language-learning aptitude" varies among individuals and affects their classroom learning success (but at least some aspects of aptitude can be learned). There is no "one right way" to teach (or learn) languages, nor is there a single "right" syllabus. Time on task and the intensity of the learning experience appear crucial. Learners' existing knowledge about *language* affects their learning. A learner's prior experience with learning (languages or other skills) also affects classroom learning. The importance of "automaticity" in building learner skill and confidence in speaking and reading a language is more important than has been recognised by the second language acquisition field since the 1980s. Learners may no

I wanted to share some things I learned from my trip to the US this summer, and what my own experience of running maths circles has been like so far. This episode includes: Discussion of the Summer Math Circle Institute; Tips and techniques learned from the Institute; My own experiences of running maths circles; Potatoes with added sugar; What you should and shouldn't assume about students; Why Math Circles (sometimes) work; Why Bloom's Taxonomy is upside-down; and The role of the teacher in having a vision for the students in his/her care. Enjoy the episode.

Interview with Robert Kaplan, co-author of Out of the Labyrinth (the book we looked at in the previous episode), co-founder of The Math Circle, and the man behind the Summer Math Circle Institute course (which I attended this summer).  Robert Kaplan tells of his colourful background, his experiences starting and running The Math Circle, and the recent explosion of interest and growth in maths circles in the favelas of Brazil. Enjoy the episode.

This is a book that I have more of a connection with than many of the others I cover on the podcast. I first bought a book by these authors when I was 17, and didn't read it until literally ten years later. It was a fascinating recreational maths book. I then discovered that they were involved in alternative maths education, and that they had even set up an organisation for this called The Math Circle. This book relates their experiences of running Math Circles, their philosophy and approach to maths and maths education, and some pointers as to how to set up a Math Circle of your own. Two questions may come to mind. Firstly, what is a Math Circle? Robert Kaplan summarises it as "a conversation, among equals, about math". Secondly, has there been any education or psychology research on maths circles and their effectiveness? I have been looking for this for a long time, and have asked a lot of people deeply involved in the scene, but I am yet to find out about any studies done about them. So, short answer, appa

Have a go at some of these: An athlete's best time to run a mile is 4 minutes and 10 seconds. How long would it take him to run 5 miles? It takes one orchestra one hour to play a symphony. How long would it take two orchestras to play a symphony? On a ship, there are 13 goats and 12 sheep. How old is the captain? Among schoolchildren, the most common answers to these questions are: 20 minutes and 50 seconds; half an hour; and 25 years old. Hence the title: where are these thoughtless, silly answers coming from? The bizarre and somewhat frightening thing is that this is a well-attested finding in many different countries and schools. School students predominantly seem to think that anything involving calculation, in the classroom at least, is a matter of doing a simple arithmetic operation on the numbers given, without any kind of sense-checking or thinking about the real situation behind the numbers.  This strange phenomenon demands explanation, not to mention fixing. In this episode, we look at several artic

Dr Amanda Serenevy is a mathematician and mathematics educator, focussing on outreach through the medium of Math Circles, and on teacher training. This episode appears as number "27+" because the previous episode, Consider the Circle, was about how Amanda rescued a young girl from a terrible time with maths at school.  She is the founder and director of Riverbend Community Math Centre in South Bend, Indiana, which works to improve mathematics education within the local community. She runs teacher training courses throughout the year, both to help teachers with their pedagogy, and with their knowledge of maths itself. She also has many local children and young people come to her Math Centre to engage in mathematical activities, the most prominent of these being Math Circles. In summer, she is the main organiser of the Summer Math Circle Institute at the University of Notre Dame, which is a course for learning how to run Math Circles, and is the place where I met her. She also finds time to spend almost two mon

A very short episode about an article written by a young girl concerning her experiences with maths. At school, she is faced daily with the same worksheet, always refusing to do it. Her teachers continue to give her the sheet every day for months, keeping her out of the normal classroom. She becomes resentful and angry at maths and at school, and continues her protest of inaction. When she discovers Math Circles, a different approach to maths education, then she stops feeling neglected and starts, gradually, to engage. With time she not only gains confidence in the maths she is "supposed" to know, but also discovers mathematics as a field full of things to explore - and things she is capable of exploring. Having gained confidence and understanding from Math Circles, she eventually graduates from high school and enrols in university. (A happy ending, one presumes.) We will be talking a good deal about Math Circles, so this little story makes a good anecdotal introduction to their potential benefits. It sounds

What do you think of mathematics? Is it: a sterile tool for accounting? boring, mindless, and annoying stuff your teacher makes you do? an anarchic, psychedelic adventure? If you answered 1., mathematician and teacher Paul Lockhart vehemently disagrees with you. If you answered 2., then Lockhart understands your plight. If you answered 3., then you really know what maths is. A Mathematician's Lament is a short book all about misconceptions, and how the system propagates them into an insurmountable monster hiding the true nature of a cherished art form. Kids in school hate maths lessons. Why? Because they're not really doing maths! They're engaging in a hollow imitation of it (if they're engaged at all), where memorising formulae takes the place of imagination and reasoning.  He starts us off with a parable about a musician, and another about a painter. Imagine if everyone thought that music was those little marks made on the page of music books, or that painting a fence is the epitome of what it means to be

Over the past century, women have been gaining rights and prejudice against women has declined. Although many would argue that there's still a way to go, the progress is undeniable. Why, then, do men still outperform women in a number of intellectual domains? In this episode, we look at several articles that try to answer this question for one cognitive domain in particular: chess. Chess is a good domain to test for a number of reasons: There is little subjectivity or ambiguity in deciding who is a better chess player. In chess, you either win or you lose (or draw), and there's no arguing about it. This isn't the same in most other domains, such as art, literature, music, or scientific research. In chess, it's what you know, not who you know. You don't need to have a professional network or be well-liked to win chess tournaments. You just have to play the game. This is different to other domains, where your career can depend on the judgements of others, and women or other groups may suffer from the effects o

I write a little blurb like this for every episode, but I feel that some books hardly need any introduction. This is one such example. Malcolm Gladwell is one of the most celebrated journalists and writers of the early 21st century, and his book Outliers caused a splash in people's thinking about success. Why? One answer is that it popularised the idea of the so-called "10,000 hour rule", initially discovered by K. Anders Ericsson, concerning how much "deliberate practice" it takes to become a world-class expert in any field. "Popularised" is the key word here, as several others were writing the same thing, but when Gladwell writes, everybody reads. And, for the most part, everybody believes. (So another answer to "why did the book cause a splash?" would be "because it's Gladwell, and he's famous, and everybody likes him.") The strange thing is, the 10,000 hour rule makes up a minority of what he writes about in his book, but people seem to often forget the rest of the ideas. Since we've already seen the powe

"Follow your passion" is bad advice. It seems an almost blasphemous thing to say. And yet in this book, Cal Newport argues that it is, indeed, generally a bad idea to try to base a career on a pre-existing passion. Firstly, as blunt and uninspiring as it may sound, most people don't *have* a passion to begin with. Hence the need to "find yourself" or figure out what you want to do with your life. People who do have a passion are usually passionate about something that can't provide them with a career, such as supporting a local sports team. Secondly, passions are usually the *result* of a successful career due to the build-up of skills that allow for more interesting jobs, rather than something that people start with. Having higher quality skills that are in high demand means that you can "trade them in" for a job which is in high demand. To think that you can go in to a field and get an exciting job right away is rather naive, and the entry-level positions don't tend to be the sorts of things that inspire pe

With The Talent Code, we have another perspective on the development of expertise. Daniel Coyle looks at "talent hotbeds" in music, sport, and academics in order to piece together a theory of how people get good at things. In the process, he discovers different types of teachers, necessary for different stages in the process of achieving mastery.