{"id":30998,"date":"2011-06-05T13:30:16","date_gmt":"2011-06-05T13:30:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/its-like-sitting-a-kid-down-at-the-oric-1-kids\/"},"modified":"2018-12-06T10:21:58","modified_gmt":"2018-12-06T17:21:58","slug":"its-like-sitting-a-kid-down-at-the-oric-1-kids","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/its-like-sitting-a-kid-down-at-the-oric-1-kids\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"<div id='gallery-1' class='gallery galleryid-30998 gallery-columns-3 gallery-size-thumbnail'><figure class='gallery-item'>\n\t\t\t<div class='gallery-icon landscape'>\n\t\t\t\t<a href='https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/its-like-sitting-a-kid-down-at-the-oric-1-kids\/attachment\/31002\/'><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"100\" height=\"100\" src=\"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-content\/uploads\/tumblr_lmbk6grKjq1qescwho1_640-100x100.png\" class=\"attachment-thumbnail size-thumbnail\" alt=\"\" \/><\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/div><\/figure>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\n<p>It&rsquo;s like sitting a kid down at the ORIC-1. Kids are naturally curious. They love blank slates: a sandbox, a bag of LEGOs. Once you show them a little of what the machine can do they&rsquo;ll clamor for more. They&rsquo;ll want to know how to make that circle a little smaller or how to make that song go a little faster. They&rsquo;ll imagine a game in their head and then relentlessly fight to build it. Along the way, of course, they&rsquo;ll start to pick up all the concepts you wanted to teach them in the first place. And those concepts will stick because they learned them not in a vacuum, but in the service of a problem they were itching to solve. Project Euler, named for the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler, is popular (more than 150,000 users have submitted 2,630,835 solutions) precisely because Colin Hughes &ndash; and later, a team of eight or nine hand-picked helpers &ndash; crafted problems that lots of people get the itch to solve. And it&rsquo;s an effective teacher because those problems are arranged like the programs in the ORIC-1&rsquo;s manual, in what Hughes calls an &ldquo;inductive chain&rdquo;: The problems range in difficulty and for many the experience is inductive chain learning. That is, by solving one problem it will expose you to a new concept that allows you to undertake a previously inaccessible problem. So the determined participant will slowly but surely work his\/her way through every problem. This is an idea that&rsquo;s long been familiar to video game designers, who know that players have the most fun when they&rsquo;re pushed always to the edge of their ability. The trick is to craft a ladder of increasingly difficult levels, each one building on the last. New skills are introduced with an easier version of a challenge &ndash; a quick demonstration that&rsquo;s hard to screw up &ndash; and certified with a harder version, the idea being to only let players move on when they&rsquo;ve shown that they&rsquo;re ready. The result is a gradual ratcheting up the learning curve. (via <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/technology\/print\/2011\/06\/how-i-failed-failed-and-finally-succeeded-at-learning-how-to-code\/239855\/\">How I Failed, Failed, and Finally Succeeded at Learning How to Code &#8211; Technology &#8211; The Atlantic<\/a>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&rsquo;s like sitting a kid down at the ORIC-1. Kids are naturally curious. They love blank slates: a sandbox, a bag of LEGOs. Once you show them a little of what the machine can do they&rsquo;ll clamor for more. They&rsquo;ll want to know how to make that circle a little smaller or how to make [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"gallery","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[],"tags":[1538],"class_list":["post-30998","post","type-post","status-publish","format-gallery","hentry","tag-humane-games","post_format-post-format-gallery"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6PWot-83Y","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30998","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30998"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30998\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31004,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30998\/revisions\/31004"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30998"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30998"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30998"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}