Thoughts on a Frustrated Friday

When will the bell ring, and end this weariness

How long have they tugged the leash, and strained apart,

My pack of unruly hounds! I cannot start

Them again on a quarry of knowledge they hate to hunt,

I can haul them and urge them no more.

---Last Lesson of the Afternoon, D. H. Lawrence

Why do the kids hate to hunt the quarry of knowledge? Why did I hate text books myself? Still do? Why was school like dragging my soul through dirt? 

What's engaging? What engages you? Epic wins? Marks? 

Can games help you solve complex real-world problems?

Let me quote Jane McGonigal from her TED talk:

Right now we spend three billion hours a week playing online games. Some of you might be thinking, "That's a lot of time to spend playing games. Maybe too much time, considering how many urgent problems we have to solve in the real world." But actually, according to my research at The Institute For The Future, it's actually the opposite is true.Three billion hours a week is not nearly enough game play to solve the world's most urgent problems.In fact, I believe that if we want to survive the next century on this planet, we need to increase that total dramatically. I've calculated the total we need at 21 billion hours of game play every week. So, that's probably a bit of a counterintuitive idea, so I'll say it again, let it sink in: If we want to solve problems like hunger, poverty, climate change, global conflict, obesity, I believe that we need to aspire to play games online for at least 21 billion hours a week, by the end of the next decade. (Laughter) No. I'm serious. I am.

Now, the real question is what kind of games McGonigal is talking about? World of Warcraft or Call of Duty? It's easy to see why we are hooked to those kinds of games. They are so interesting, that's why. But when you develop games that are meant to solve real world problems, would they still be so interesting?

Another real question then is - can we develop such games which are really interesting and which can help you solve real world problems?

KIPP

KIPP has been making a lot of news lately. KIPP stands for Knowledge is Power Program – a network of schools in US for kids from underprivileged communities that aims to train them to be outstanding leaders and most importantly find the otherwise unavailable door to college admission and a better future.

In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell compares KIPP to the rice paddies of China. Rice paddy workers in China, he says, devote a mind-numbing 3000 hours of work every year in their fields to cultivate the rice crop. And this hard work does not go unrewarded. It has eventually made the families of those workers prosperous - “No one who wakes up before dawn 360 days a year will fail to make his family rich.”

The notoriously disciplined, high-stress atmosphere at the tuition-free, open-enrollment KIPP school with longer hours of study and shorter vacations is doing to the low-income inner-city kids from Bronx what the 3000-hour work schedule did to the rice paddy workers in China. It is making them prosperous, is opening doors to a better education and better lives.

When are we going to see a KIPP in India?