Category: TED Talk Tuesdays

Fold it: Solve Problems for Science and Change the World

Kelly Tenkely1 Comment on Fold it: Solve Problems for Science and Change the World3422 views

What it is: Fold it is a puzzle game based on science that helps change the world.  Download the Fold It game and puzzles for free and contribute to the understanding of protein folding and amino acids. By playing this game, students take part in actually contributing to science.  The implications of the Fold It game are huge, playing this game helps scientists better understand protein structure prediction and protein design.  This means that by playing a little puzzle game, your students are contributing to better understanding of the role proteins play in diseases such as HIV, cancer, and Alzheimers, and even bio fuel technology.  Scientists collect data from the game to find out if humans pattern recognition abilities and puzzle solving abilities make them more efficient than computers at pattern folding tasks.  If it turns out that humans are more efficient, human strategies can be applied to computers to make the process even faster.

How to integrate Fold It into the classroom: If your students are currently learning about cells, proteins, amino acid, and biological make up, Fold It is an incredible way for them to really understand all of these working parts, while contributing to science.  The puzzle and pattern nature of this game should appeal to a wide range of students…who doesn’t enjoy a good exercise in pattern recognition and problem solving?  On the about page, your students can read the background “briefing” about the game and the science that they are contributing to by playing the game. There is also a Fold It wiki with great links for more in-depth learning and understanding.   Not only will your students be learning important science concepts (I’m talking the building blocks of life here!), they will also be actually contributing to science by playing.  How cool is that?!  There is a large collection of puzzles with new puzzles being released and completed puzzles expiring. Don’t know anything about biology? No problem, you can play the game without understanding the biology concepts behind it (although for me, knowing the background of what I am looking at makes it that much cooler!).  Check out the blog where you can read the results of how the game play has affected real science.

Tips: The idea of building games to impact the real world is incredible to me, the first time I had considered this was when I watched this TED talk by Jane McGonigal.  If you haven’t seen it yet it is worth a watch!  You can read my original post about this TED talk here.

Please leave a comment and share how you are using Fold It in your classroom.

TED Talk Tuesday: Games and Fun

Kelly Tenkely6 Comments on TED Talk Tuesday: Games and Fun5294 views

In today’s TED Talk Tuesday, Jane McGonigal offers the premise that games (video games) can change the world in meaningful and positive ways.

She builds her case convincingly.  I am currently reading Daniel Pink’s book Drive.  There are some similar ties between the two ideas.  Blissful productivity, we are more productive when we do things that we have to work at, and think about. When we have some direction and there is meaning behind it.

The principles learned through gaming can be used to solve real world problems. I can’t help but wonder what implications this line of thought has for education. How can we change the daily school “game” so that students don’t just sit on the sidelines, but experience “epic wins”.  We all want to know that what we do matters and matters deeply.  Games give us this feeling that what we are doing is having an important effect.

Learning should be an act of play.  It seems to me that if we can tell a difference between learning and play we aren’t doing one of the right.  Consider babies in any species, how do they learn to do life?  Through play.

I’m not sure that I can envision what this looks like in the practical sense in the school setting. But I think that McGonigal has something here. What do you think, what could games and fun do for education?  How can we use from what we know about games to change education and, in doing so, change the world?

TED Talk Tuesday: Tom Wujec Build a Tower, Build a Team

Kelly Tenkely4 Comments on TED Talk Tuesday: Tom Wujec Build a Tower, Build a Team2899 views

The group that consistently fails at the marshmallow task: recent graduates of business school.
Business students are trained to find the single right plan and then execute it. The problem with this strategy is that they wait for the last minute to add their marshmallow to the top of the structure and when their plan fails, it is a crisis.
The group that consistently succeeds at the marshmallow task: recent graduates of kindergarten.
Kindergarten students start with a model and they build successive prototypes of their structure. They always keep their marshmallow on top. They have multiple opportunities to refine their structure until it is working. With each version of the prototype, students are getting instant feedback about what works and what doesn’t and they can adjust accordingly.
Kids don’t spend time trying to be CEO of Spaghetti Inc. They aren’t jockeying for power, they are working together creatively and having fun.

What stands out to me about the data that Tom Wujec shares, is not that architects and engineers build the best towers (as he says, we would expect that), but that kindergartners are not very far behind. This makes me wonder about what important things we are deprogramming kids to do as we send them through the education system. If the education system was really working, I would expect that adults would be able to construct the best, highest towers. I would expect that those with the most education would build the best towers. But as we see, this isn’t the case. In school we teach students that everything has a correct answer. Sometimes that answer means filling in the “c” on a bubble test, and sometimes it means getting your teacher to nod and say “that’s right”. School has become a game of “guess what the teacher is thinking”.  As a result, we have students who can come up with one correct solution to any problem. In the real world, we often need more than one right solution. Many times we need several solutions and creative thinking applied to the problem. Our most recent example of this is the BP oil spill. I can’t help but wonder what great solutions kindergartners would come up with that adults aren’t even considering because we have been deprogrammed to think that way.
What does this mean for schools? It means that we need more opportunities for students to explore multiple solutions to a problem, it means that we offer kids the chance to discuss and stop asking the one answer questions all the time. Sometimes there is one correct answer, but in life that isn’t always the case. Students need to be given the chance to explore both options.

(As a side note, it is interesting to me that when the incentive of a prize was offered, not one team had a standing structure. I am working my way through Daniel Pink’s book Drive right now and it mirrors what he says in the book.)

TED Talk Tuesday: Tim Brown urges designers to think big

Kelly Tenkely3 Comments on TED Talk Tuesday: Tim Brown urges designers to think big3820 views

Today’s #edchat discussion on Twitter was all about training kids as critical thinkers.  I believe that we are losing students as critical thinkers because in our current model of education, where we are standardizing education with tests, we teach kids that there is one correct answer to every question.  We limit their thinking to what we have already determined is an acceptable answer to the question.  This is extremely limiting.  Critical thinking means that we aren’t satisfied with the easy answer, we think about multiple solutions to the problem and even think of additional questions.  We approach a problem differently, more creatively.

In today’s TED Talk, Tim Brown talks about his journey in design and his tendency to think about problems on a small scale, limiting himself to the obvious answers and a single solution.  Design wasn’t always this way, design used to be big. Design thinking solves problems and works to create world changing innovations. It seems to me that there is a strong correlation with what Tim refers to as Design Thinking and what we call critical thinking.  Roger Martin calls this integrative thinking, the ability to exploit opposing ideas and opposing constraints to create new solutions. Isn’t this what we are asking our students to do when we are looking for critical thinking?  What we really want students to do is think as designers.   When I watch children who haven’t yet entered the classroom, I notice a strong correlation between the way a child thinks and the way a designer thinks.  They are questioners, tinkerers, and are never satisfied with one solution.

Design thinking could be our model for critical thinking in the classroom, but beyond that design thinking could be our solution to reform in education.  Exploiting opposing ideas and opposing constraints to create new solutions.

Design is human centered, it starts with what humans need or might need. It means understanding culture and context.   From destination to active participation that is meaningful and productive. Value is added through collaborative experiences and not through monetary gains alone (think Twitter). In times of change we need new thinking and new ideas.  We are in the midst of massive change and we need to rethink what we accept as basic fundamentals. We need new choices because our current options are becoming obsolete.  We need to take a divergent approach and come up with something that hasn’t been done before.  What is the question we are trying to answer? What is the design brief for education.

The first step is to start asking the right questions. (I think #edchat does an honorable job of this!)  What are the right questions?