Learning Because You Want To

My friend Clint Rutkas recently finished a project to create a machine that mixes drinks. (You can see a demo at Drunktender lives! A brief live demo) Now a computerized machine that mixes adult beverages is a cool thing for a party in a geek sort of way, but more than anything else Clint started the project as a learning experience.

Time and again you’ll hear people say that the best way to learn anything is to need to learn it to solve a problem. So coming up with a challenging, interesting, potentially useful and ideally fun project is often the way people choose to learn new things. It’s not just programming and  computer science either. I look on projects that require me to buy and learn how to use new power tools as a double win. Well maybe even triple win. I learn something new, I create something useful and I get a new power tool I can use on later projects. Yes, I have heard “now that you have that [cool tool] I want you to also …” I can live with that.

I see this as directly applicable to how we teach students. It is not enough to tell students “trust me this will be useful some day.” They don’t buy it. They want to see value now. This should have some impact on how we choose/assign learning projects. We have to be careful to understand the needs students see and the problems they are interested in solving. This was brought home to me in a conversation I had with a student once. It went something like this:

Student: We need more projects that mean something.

Smug teacher: Oh you mean like that project we did about balancing checkbooks?

Student: No, I mean like tic tac toe.

Clearly we were seeing meaningful differently. Fortunately I am a believer in the value of the tic tac toe project. But also perhaps I needed to work a bit on the things I was teaching with the checkbook project.

Students will work their tails off to learn things that solve problems they want to solve. I’ve sent more than a few students off to math teachers to learn the mathematics they needed to create missile/rocket games. One student learned far more than the scope of our course to create an awesome Tetris clone one year. If you can keep a secret I spent more hours in the computer lab the semester of college when I didn’t have a computer course to create some programs that solved problems I wanted to solve. That sort of thing has continued my whole career.

I occasionally created projects for my students on the spur of the moment based on classroom discussion. It was more work for me of course. I would have to run to my computer after class to make sure I could solve the program or at least learn about the problems students were going to run into. And there was the rush to create a rubric for grading purposes. Worst of all figuring out how long it would take students to do made schedules a little more complex at times. But I think the effort was worth it. The students learned more because it was a project they had an investment in. I reused many of these projects as well of course. Never completely discard something that works. :-)

Time and again I hear students complain about computer science courses that are just math courses. Now I agree there is a relationship (more on that tomorrow) but just because a teacher was trained as a math teacher and loves math to pieces don’t mean all their students will. As with writing, in teaching we have to consider the audience. Do our projects allow students to “scratch an itch” that they have? Do we create opportunities for students to create their own projects that will create an internal motivation to learn? Do we give students an opportunity to push themselves? They’ll push themselves a lot harder than we as adults can ever push them. We need to give them the opportunity though. How do you do that in your classrooms?

Some related posts by smarter people than me that I recommend you read:

• Sometimes, Students Have an Itch to Scratch – by Eugene Wallingford at the University of Northern Iowa  - I love this phrase BTW. I intend to use it often.
• All significant education questions are economic – by Mark Guzdial at Georgia Tech – Interesting how they teach computer science using media computation and the students want to learn media computation even if they do not see themselves as interested in computer science. Well that is a rough version. Mark explains it much better.