The Narrative Arc

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
–T.S. Eliot

The Narrative Arc

There is a point, in almost every conversation I have with visiting educators, where I explain the pedagogical framework of Brightworks. We gather around a big piece of brown butcher paper, and uncapping a chisel-point Sharpie, I say, “This is the Arc,” as my hand draws out the chord of a large circle. “It is a reference to the narrative arc in a story, and we chose that because we never want to forget that every student here is on their own personal journey.” This statement generates a range of reactions from the educators, some will nod, some are waiting to see where it is going, and some, in a faint echo of the moment when I first drew it for myself, will lean forward with sudden and unexpected delight.

This notion is so foundational to life at Brightworks, that it is easy to forget. Like fish in water, the students don’t really think about the medium they live in. Of course they have a personal story, doesn’t everyone? Yet, where the diagram lays out a smooth and continuous curve, their stories are almost fractal in complexity and filled with emotional peaks and valleys. This is what makes their stories worth living; they are complicated and surprising. It would be quintessentially boring if your personal story was as smooth and unvarying as the arc I draw on paper. Imagine each of the sub-plots of a student’s life as threads, and that learning is the process of organizing those threads into a coherent fabric.

Pick a moment in time, say the age of ten and a half, and you will see that there are many active threads; relationships (family, friends, peers, collaborators, pets), projects, personal interests, media (movies, books, games, web series, etc), politics, weather – and this list changes over time, with some threads taking dominant roles and others fading into the background. It’s tempting to make an analogy with weaving on a loom, and call some strong threads the warp lines and the more dynamic threads the weft, but life is much less regular than that. We have to look to the fabric arts and see the work of experimental artists who might appear to be weavers until we look closely and see that they are incorporating spoons, bits of concrete, and love letters into the works they are creating – this is a better analogy than the perfectly orderly patterns coming off of the traditional loom.

Wired to Learn, Wired to Experience

There is a little structure in the brain called the *lateral habenula*, and it plays a key role in the learning processes because it is the thing that notices when our predictions about the future are wrong. Put another way, it’s the lateral habenula that triggers the sense of being surprised. In explaining the importance of this, a neuroscientist once told me that “you never want to forget which cave the saber tooth tiger jumped out of.” Generally, the lateral habenula fires off when what we expected to happen, doesn’t happen. The other big change that happens when the saber tooth tiger appears is that we get a huge jolt of adrenaline and a fight-or-flight response kicks in. Our heart rate shoots up, breathing rate increases, and our cognition goes way down as we focus on escape. Who cares about noticing what shade of blue the sky is when you’ve got a tiger chasing you?

Reading the research, it would be easy to think that this little bit of the brain is only concerned with bad events, but there are a couple of circumstances where it triggers good feelings and one of those is the situation where something we learn connects ideas in a surprising way – the sense of “AHA!” that we get when we are making new meaning out of what we are learning. This positive reaction and flood of good feelings happens in concert with another region of the brain, much more recently evolved than the lateral habenula, known as the *basal forebrain*. There is a lot happening in the basal forebrain, and it is the area of focus for many sleep experiments because of its role in the production and release of acetylcholine, a compound that, among many other things, creates a sense of wakefulness. Interestingly, acetylcholine is critical to the learning process as well as an enabler of the plasticity part of neuroplasticity. So, when we’re awake, and something that we are learning surprises us, we get this great jolt of dopamine, a dash of acetylcholine, and a little squirt of adrenaline – this neurochemical cocktail increases the chances of a much longer retention of the new knowledge. It’s sort of like the watchdog parts of the brain realize that this new thing we just learned might be important, and great effort is made to emphasize the new connections. This is the wonderful feeling of delight that we have when we figure something out!

Fundamentally, we are wired to enjoy learning that surprises us. From a purely biological perspective, it is clear that we evolved this positive reward system because it is beneficial to our survival as a species to learn new things.

Building Blocks of Learning

There is an interesting theory currently being explored about how learning is represented in the brain. It’s only a theory because the actual analysis of brain structures that represent knowledge is a work in progress, but it’s a good theory and it resonates with a lot of research and observations about how learning happens and how knowledge is organized. The theory is that the atomic element of learning is the analogy; *this is like that*. These tiny associative connections include a strength, so it can be anything from “this is really like that” to “this is kind of like that”.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), provides a way of looking at brain activity as it happens, and tests done with this technique seem to support the observations and the theory. Neuroscientists often say “like fires like,” and what they mean is that if you think about “orange” you will activate all sorts of connected concepts and references, from orange as a fruit to a uniquely personal associative list of orange colored things ranging from pumpkins to sports teams. These “facts” are apparently macro clusters of knowledge that are assembled out of tiny little “this is like that” analogies. You can watch yourself chase these “like-that” through a simple associative-chain exercise; think about pumpkins for a moment. Notice all the connections you can make? It’s breathtaking when it happens deliberately and under self-observation, but in reality, those kinds of associations are firing all the time. You’re connecting experiences as they happen to your existing personal knowledge, and constantly adjusting your prediction of the immediate future – with your lateral habenula “noticing” when those predictions fail.

Like almost all of the systems in the human brain, lack of use increases cost of use – meaning that if you don’t surprise yourself regularly, it gets harder to surprise yourself. The lateral habenula needs stimulation in order to function correctly, and for that surprise mechanism to work (the one that triggers that deeper learning) you have to be making predictions, and to make a prediction you have to be engaged enough to formulate one. Lack of surprise comes from lack of engagement, and habitual lack of engagement leads to apathy – the antithesis of delight. 

Eating Oatmeal

Whether we are paying attention or not, we are making connections. Those connections form webs, where, if we could look closely, there is as much or more unintended detail (mostly with weak connections) as there is intended content (with hopefully stronger connections). If we could look at it happening while you were reading about Copernicus, we would see some of the details about the astronomer getting built right along side details about the smells coming from the kitchen, the song playing in the background, the wind moving the branches outside the window, the texture of the chair, and all the unintended, undesigned, and rich elements of the moment. The intentionality of reading and focusing ensures that there is some emphasis on the Copernican details and the associations you make to things you already know. Unconsciously, and sometimes consciously, we are re-reading the last few words, sentence fragments, or whole sections, leading to the strengthening of the intended connections. The result is that we start knowing some things about Copernicus, but when we access a memory we activate all of the connections, so we are getting back weak references to the texture of the chair along with strong references to the learned content. We didn’t mean to learn about that chair, but we did.

The odd thing is, the weak connections are actually beneficial. The learning processes of the brain seem to do better when there is variation in the experience. Researchers have proven that changing your physical location for studying improves retention. Until very recently, it was common practice for parents and teachers to encourage students to make a study place, free of distractions, and use it every night for homework. On the surface, this monk-like approach appears to be a good idea because it makes the homework the focus. But where do we find adults when they need to get work done? College students, writers, entrepreneurs, and programmers, can all be found at the coffee shop, headphones on and eyes focused on a textbook, laptop, or notebook. What a complex and sense-rich environment – the exact opposite of the monastic study-nook.

Routine activities are hard to differentiate in our memories. Think about the last time you ate oatmeal. Think about brushing your teeth on Tuesday morning. It is easy to conjure up generalized sense-memories of this thing we do multiple times a day, but try to review the last ten times you did it. This is the problem with the study-nook as well, and to some extent the rigorous structure of the traditional classroom with assigned seating; you are doing the same thing over and over, performing a routine that produces little in the way of unique experiences. Consider all of the time you spent at that desk in 3rd grade. Perhaps you can recall the classroom, and the teacher, but very few lesson details remain. This is not to say that you didn’t learn anything there, it’s just more likely that everything you did learn there is now more strongly associated with more recent experiences that make it more difficult to remember the earlier context because of how undifferentiated the 3rd grade learning experience was. That being said, most of us can remember some things that happened in 3rd grade – but it is overwhelmingly more likely that a distinct memory from that far back has a strong social component (you won the class spelling bee, or lost it, or a classmate got hit in the nose and there was blood). Could there be something inherently more durable about “social” memories?

From Rickety Structures to Deep Foundations

So, there you are, studying Copernicus in your homework spot; he lived in the early 16th century, he proposed a heliocentric model of the solar system, he had a long, drawn out, kerfuffle with the church, and so forth. These facts start accumulating in a web that tends to have strong connections internally and weaker connections externally. Isolated structures like this are common when learning something new, and they suffer from temporal fragility – they can get pruned away if they are not accessed. The more we learn about the new topic, the more connections we will make to already known things, and the more likely we are to retain the new information over the long run.

When topics are taught in silos, separated almost entirely from each other, the memories formed are weak and are quickly pruned away when we aren’t forced to visit the topic by a schedule of regular classes. If, on the other hand, we learned those typically siloed subjects in the context of an authentically engaging experience, then those new concepts and skills are anchored firmly and form a part of a durable memory.

Put in concrete terms, when we learn math (for example) because it is relevant and meaningful in the context of what we are doing – it sticks. When the math we are learning enhances the quality of the experience, we begin to actively seek more math knowledge.

The purpose of the Arc at Brightworks is to create an engaging framework for the emergent story that is the context in which the student is learning. A story that they are co-authoring with us; a true collaboration, an opportunity to experience and share delight, to see the world anew.

—–

A few salient references:

Varying study locations helps with retention – https://web.archive.org/web/20211016113123/https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/07/health/views/07mind.html

Eureka effect, and cerebral lateralization – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_effect

Mirror Palindrome Numbers

I took this picture while driving, much to the panicked screams of my passengers. What they couldn’t see, and I had very little time to capture, was that the odometer was displaying a very curious number, namely “122551”. It may not be obvious in the font being used here, but on my dashboard, rendered in seven-segment LED numbers, it exhibited perfect mirror symmetry. These kinds of numbers are related to palindromic numbers (which I explored earlier this year), but are just a little bit more odd because they rely on how the numbers are represented visually.

The question I began to think about was something like: “How many times will the odometer of my car display a number that contains it’s own reflection?” In this strange kind of numerical analysis, some numbers will never show up (3, 4, 6, 7, and 9), some exhibit self mirror-symmetry by the nature of being symmetrical about the vertical axis (0, 1, 8) and then 2 and 5 are a reflective pair. What that means is that any time a 2 or a 5 shows up, there must a corresponding opposite 5 or 2. For the record, 9 and 6 don’t count because they are rotations not reflections. So how is this essentially arbitrary property distributed along the number line?

To examine a few million integers efficiently, I would have to create an efficient way to check a number for mirror symmetry (in python). I decided to treat all mirror-able numbers as if they have a mirror pair the way 5 and 2 do — this simplifies the comparison step. For odd length numbers, I check for self-symmetry on the central digit.

SymPairs = {'0':'0', '1':'1', '2':'5', '5':'2', '8':'8'}
SymMonads = ['0', '1', '8']

def sym_check(v):
    l = len(v)
    match_count = 0
    for i in range(l/2):
        target = v[i]
        if not target in SymPairs:
            continue
        match = SymPairs[target]
        if v[l-1-i] == match:
            match_count += 2
    if l & 0x1:  # odd length
        # check center digit
        if v[l/2] in SymMonads:
            match_count += 1
    rval = 0.0
    if match_count > 0:
        rval = match_count / float(l)
    if rval == 1.0:
        print v
    return rval

Armed with a function that returns 1.0 for fully mirror-palindrome numbers, I checked to see how many there were between 0 and 100,000:

0	15821
1	18081
8	18181
11	18881
25	20005
52	20105
88	20805
101	21015
111	21115
181	21815
205	22055
215	22155
285	22855
502	25025
512	25125
582	25825
808	28085
818	28185
888	28885
1001	50002
1111	50102
1251	50802
1521	51012
1881	51112
2005	51812
2115	52052
2255	52152
2525	52852
2885	55022
5002	55122
5112	55822
5252	58082
5522	58182
5882	58882
8008	80008
8118	80108
8258	80808
8528	81018
8888	81118
10001	81818
10101	82058
10801	82158
11011	82858
11111	85028
11811	85128
12051	85828
12151	88088
12851	88188
15021	88888
15121

The great thing about this function is that it returns 1.0 for a perfect mirror-symmetry number, and something less than that for something that exhibits some symmetry. So we can visualize that as grey scale in an image. Here’s the corner of an image that contains a rendering of all the numbers from 0 to 1,000,000. In the upper left corner is 0 with the pixels representing 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 and so on moving to the right. Pixels 0, 1, and 8, are bright green because they are self-mirroring. Checking the list above, we see pixels representing 11, 25, 52, and 88 lit up as well. In this rendering, grey pixels are kind of symmetrical, and black pixels exhibit no symmetry (according to how the code is testing for it).

That pattern of rectangles continues, with an evolving variation, from there on out. Viewed as a graph, you can see the gaps between fairly evenly distributed ranges more clearly.

Start looking for patterns in numbers, and you will find them. This is also true for all endeavors, mathematical or otherwise.

Structural Engineering Concept Bingo

This is an experiment in tracking how, when, and why, big structural engineering concepts come up in Tinkering School. I’m not sure “bingo” is striking the right note, but this is a portion of a little chart I made for myself as I head into another big Tinkering School summer.

When I speak at conferences, my distaste for grades, and most forms of measurement applied to student learning, comes across quite clearly. This stance often leads to a question of the form “If we don’t test them, how will we know they are learning?” The answer is, simply, if you knew them, you would know if they were learning or not – and if they aren’t, testing isn’t going to help you understand why. “So,” someone will ask, “if we don’t measure the kids, what can we measure?” I believe that it might be useful to measure the school; how well is it engaging the students? how happy are the students and staff? how excited are students and staff to start the day? how much after the school day are they talking about the ideas of the day? are they making excuses to stay longer at school? This chart is a small experiment in measuring and documenting my own practice.

In my 12 years or so of Tinkering School, the kids that have come multiple times have developed strong intuitions about structural engineering. Structural engineering is a discipline, and I like this definition from Wikipedia:

Structural engineering theory is based upon applied physical laws and empirical knowledge of the structural performance of different materials and geometries. Structural engineering design utilizes a number of relatively simple structural elements to build complex structural systems. Structural engineers are responsible for making creative and efficient use of funds, structural elements and materials to achieve these goals.

Look at any of the past years of Tinkering School projects and you will quickly see the emergence and use of “relatively simple structural elements to build complex structural systems”. These patterns are near-perfect examples of basic structural engineering concepts, despite the fact that we hardly ever do anything that resembles a lecture about engineering (although in Overnight camp we do sometimes have a morning “vitamin” that looks suspiciously like a five-minute lecture/demonstration). There is a strong rolling culture at Tinkering School that is fostered and maintained by the alumni tinkerers. A major component of that culture is the accumulated knowledge, both tacit and explicit, about structural engineering. It is quite common for an older tinkerer to give advice to a younger tinkerer and to frame it in terms of previous projects; “When we were working on the windmill tower…” For example, large rectangular frames of wood are often easy starting points for new constructions, and as one comes together, the alumni student will (more or less gracefully) suggest that a corner gusset or diagonal member would be a good way to keep it from skewing over sideways and turning into a trapezoid.

When we are working with the kids, we use all of the real terms from structural engineering (“lever”, “moment arm”, “compression”, “tension”, etc), and then explain as needed in the context. These terms don’t always stick on the first encounter, but by the end of the week, they start reliably popping up in conversations.

We’ve never looked really closely at how the topics come up and which contexts create the most durable learning moments. So, I created this chart of the most common concepts and at the end of each day during our team reflections, I will see which boxes I can check and write anecdotes to capture some details. It’s not perfect, but I’m curious to see what it looks like at the end of the week and to see if there are any patterns to the anecdotes.

Here’s the full chart.

The Surprising Distribution of Palindromic Numbers

Assume that numbers like 121 and 23432 are interesting because they are palindromes (rendered in bright green), and that numbers like 122 and 22432 are kind of interesting because they are almost palindromes (rendered in a shade of gray corresponding to how palindromic they are). Now calculate and render that for every pixel in a 1000×1000 image, with pixel 0 being in the upper left hand corner and pixel 999,999 in the lower right, and you’ll end up with something like this:

Code developed in Jupyter notebook, here.

Notes to New Tinkerer

A few years ago, a teacher in New York asked me to describe how I would do a simple project in a classroom setting that retained key elements (open-ended, self-directed, engagement-based) of the Tinkering School pedagogy.

Doodlebots – an exploration of kinetics

Materials
There are six important ingredients:
– batteries (AA)
– wire (almost any insulated wire will work)
– motor (http://bit.ly/amI7ik – $1.09 each if you buy 10 or more)
– duct tape (although we’ve had some good results with scotch tape)
– pens (felt-tips produce the brightest marks)
– stuff from the recycle bin (plastic tubs, cardboard, lids, etc)

You may also want some scissors, a utility knife, and some stiff wire (home improvement stores sell a soft iron wire for tying rebar together that is easy for kids to work with – we keep a couple of rolls around just because it’s so handy).

Project Stages
Remember that this is an exploration, not a series of goals per se. We want the kids to discover the properties of the materials, share their discoveries virally, and build on each other’s ideas. The adult collaborator is there to help and should only offer suggestions when specific questions are asked. Avoid getting the kids into an “ok, I did that, what next?” cycle by never directly answering the “what next?” style questions – the kids will look to each other for inspiration. Only if there is a real drop in momentum should the collaborator actively nudge the kids in a direction (and often the best way to do this is if the collaborator starts building something themselves – the kids will see what they are doing and start to emulate it, then discover a new path).

Finally, don’t reveal all of the materials at once.

Stage 0 – prep
If the kids are young (say less than 6), cut some 6 inch lengths of wire and strip the ends (you need about 1/2″ of bare wire on each end of a wire). Each kid will need two wires. If it’s bigger kids, just put the spool of wire out and give them the wire-strippers to cut and strip their own wires.

Cover the table with butcher paper to protect it from getting covered in doodles.

Stage 1 – playing with motors
Put the motors, the wire, the tape, and the batteries on the table (one motor and one battery per kid). I like to say “These are for you.” to make it clear that they each now “own” a motor and a battery. Allow the kids to discover how to get the motors going. There is no potential for disaster here and when the kids get the motors going they will revel in their success. Often there are a few kids with enough of an inkling of how motors and batteries work that they will get things going. If after 10 minutes of fooling around, no one has a motor going, the collaborator should demonstrate. Once the motors are going, let the kids play with them for a good 10-20 minutes. If there is active exploration of spinning motors, let it keep going.

Stage 2 – Vibration
All it takes create motion is some vibration. The easy way to do this is to put tape on the shaft of the motor, or tape something to the shaft of the motor. Often a hunk of tape is sufficient.

Stage 3 – Chassis
Bots need bodies. Introduce the collection of recycled materials. No two creations will be the same, and it’s not a competition (although sometimes kids will compete with each other spontaneously) so it’s not important that everyone get exactly the same materials in this stage. Just put the pile out and suggest that they might want something to attach their motors to – the kids will pick out the things that inspire them. This stage takes a while. There are an infinite number of solutions to the problem of getting the motors to move the bots, so let the kids discover these the same way they discovered how to get the motors going – let them fool around.

Stage 4 – Doodling
Bring out the pens. You hardly have to say anything, but if they get distracted decorating their machines (a perfectly acceptable behavior), select the most disengaged child and ask if you can “try something”. Add the pen to the bot in the least sophisticated way possible and set it down on the work surface to see what happens.

Resources:
Lots of people have done this project in one form or another, but the Exploratorium also has a nice write-up for use in the classroom.

The Gamification of Everything Might be a Bad Thing

I am a fan of the work of Jane McGonigal, but as I think about the details of the actual school day at Brightworks and consider the use of game mechanics to engage children in the day to day tasks of keeping the place shipshape, I face some concerns. Ideas like Chore Wars certainly have some appeal, but I wonder what the long-term effects of this kind of experience might be.

Rewards and the Implication of Authority
The notion of a reward, some kind of benefit for having done something measurable, carries with it the idea that someone (be it person or algorithm) has judged your effort and found it worthy. At Brightworks, we deliberately avoid judgement-based evaluation of the children’s work and try to let the work speak for itself – both to the child and to the world. If a team of children builds a sailboat and it sinks on the maiden voyage, nobody has to tell them that the boat didn’t work right – the boat tells them that directly, and in a more nuanced and appropriate manner. We may need to help them see the event as just a momentary setback on the journey to building a great boat, but they understand that their boat didn’t work. Likewise, if they make a great boat and sail it across the bay, we don’t need to give them a gold star or an ‘A’ – the boat does this as well, and again, in a more nuanced and appropriate manner.

In a (somewhat infamous) project at Tinkering School, we built sail-powered carts that we intended to use in an empty field near the seashore. Despite the excellent construction, and the voluminous sails, the carts never moved under wind power. Had this been a gamified experience, the kids might have received no points for completing the project – and yet this project remains a durable and valuable memory in the history of Tinkering School. The kids who worked on these carts remember the experience in vivid detail and can explain in enormous detail the whys and wherefores of the failure. Simple game mechanics would not award any points, but I defend the experience as immensely valuable. Perhaps this is why the role of the human dungeon master in Dungeons & Dragons is so important to the experience – life is complicated, and learning experiences are doubly so. The long-term benefits of an experience cannot be summarily judged and awarded in the moment. The value may be cumulative and not visible or even meaningful until years later.

Do we habituate ourselves to external validation by always expecting an award for doing something? It seems to me that we might undermine our ability perceive our own efforts and the efforts of others as positive without some sort of score or reward. As in most things, a polarized view of gamification is probably not useful. I am certain that making chores fun by awarding experience points has its place and in and of itself is not harmful, but as we see gameplay introduced to more and more of our lives, we should keep an eye on the net impact. If awarding points gets more people contributing to social good, then I have a hard time seeing that as bad. But I fear that over time we may forget how to perceive value for ourselves (unless… we can be awarded points for having an internal perception of the value).

—
Kevin makes the excellent point that I’m taking a very reductionist approach to thinking about gamification:

I’m sure the popular notion of gamification is the gold-star interpretation, but games don’t have to point-based. I think the bigger benefit to games in many contexts, like education or business, is the shift from linear to-do lists into holistic/systemic thinking about things encountered. One of the strongest elements of gaming is the narrative that give the mechanics life. I love the notion of businesses having DMs, not PMs.

Which Daniel also backs up with a relevant example:

… Compare Gowalla’s design (which emphasizes curating a digital “passport” or story of your life and travels, and discovering and exploring new places and cities) with Foursquare’s design (a points-based system nominally about retaining “mayorship” of the places you frequent) and I think you get a very good contrast of two wildly alternate takes on “gamification.”

And Tim Gill of the Rethinking Childhood blog adds:

Agree. Say no to star charts! My friend the UK child psychologist and writer Jennie Lindon has written about where you end up when children are told “If I’m good, they will give me stickers.”

Chad Calease wonders:

could it create a “play backlash” where counterculture rebels against “gameful influence”? counterculture eventually bcomes culture

And, on the pro-gamification side, there is this recent talk from TEDxBrussels, where Gabe Zichermann makes the point that gamification, when done well, can be a really good thing.

John Conti thinks it boils down to something fairly simple:

All important points. For me, the distillation of all this is:

• Adult Encouragement => Children feel loved
• Children allowed to fail and then learn => Children feel confident
• Children earn points for actions => Children learn how to be a player, in a system, a cog…

And Richard Bartle, speaking at a conference in Barcelona, thinks that it might not be very fun once everything is gamified (because the experiences are not being designed, just gamified):

The big thing about social games that they don’t like to tell you, is they’re not actually social. Games played on social network sites is what we mean by social games … These games are categorized more by the platform than that they are social themselves. The way they engage their players is not through interesting gameplay, it’s done through extrinsic rewards — basically bribes. … The difference is, social games rely on the extrinsic rewards so as to be compelling. People keep playing the game because it keeps giving them things — rewards. This has led to gamification. In the hands of designers, this has a great deal of potential, but unfortunately it’s not in the hands of designers, it’s in the hands of marketers.

Daniel Bigler (in a recent tweet):

Gamification backfires for Khan Academy. Interesting comment section, too.
…The creators of Khan Academy added badges to make it more interesting and motivating, not to make you ignore everything else and just aim for the badges. [full story]

A (Hypothetical) Genetic Basis for Extranormal Powers

In the Afterlife...

I was chatting with a friend about ghosts and ancestor worship recently, and put forth the notion that if a genetic mutation allowed you to exist (in some form) beyond the death of your body, and *if* you could influence the physical world in some way (however limited), then you might behave in a manner that had a positive benefit for your surviving family members.

Imagine that you are a ghost and you can stand watch over your family at night to wake them up (perhaps by disturbing their dreams?) when danger looms. The family has the uncanny sense that they were lucky that they woke up just in the nick of time, but in reality they are awake because of the direct beneficial efforts of you, their dead relative/ancestor. These minor acts of supernatural disturbance constitute a benefit for the surviving members of the family and they have a small advantage, genetically speaking, over the other members of their tribe who cannot come back as ghosts.

Then I happened upon this interesting description of an experiment that showed good evidence that the brain might be able to send information backwards in time to itself in order to shorten nerve response times:

All of which got me thinking that there could be a whole slew of cognitive-effect mutations that would be hard to detect or test for, but that might still be beneficial to the survival of a genetic line. Things like “luck” might be explained by extending the reach of the backwards transmission of information described in the video, and once you have a durable consciousness that outlasts the body, you can imagine that it might sometimes take up residence in another body (something we might call “possession” in the aggressive case, or reincarnation if it happens early enough).

Just as there are viral explanations for vampirism, it’s fun to come up with plausible explanations for psychic abilities. Although, being born a Kennedy aside, it does seem like we would have noticed by now, if some families or individuals really had a paranormal advantage.

Canonical List of Talks (available as video)

Some of my speaking engagements have been captured on video and rather than keep digging up the links every time someone asks where to find them, I now keep this list updated.

TED 2007
Five Dangerous Things (you should let your children do)
Some thoughts on the dangers of over-protection and five (or six, depending on how you count) simple things that every child should be comfortable doing.

TED 2009
Life Lessons Through Tinkering
A taste of what Tinkering School is about.

Big Ideas Fest 2009
Experience First – a radical approach to curriculum development
I share the “secrets” of Tinkering School as I explore the core ideas and guiding principles.

TEDxAtlanta 2010
Re-imagining Education
In our approach to public education we should dare to do less and let children do more.

Maker Faire 2010
Natural History of Danger
Exploring the notion that our ideas about what is and isn’t dangerous might have very little to do with the inherent risks. This talk is also available as a comic book.

The Jewel Thief, the Cliff Diver, and the Tinkerer.

For many of my teenage years, I assumed that I would grow up to be a jewel thief. Please keep in mind that I was a child of the 60’s and largely considered rich people to be exploiters of the common man – especially those with the excess income necessary to acquire jewelry. It was a phase.

I spent a lot of time thinking about what it would take to really steal a jewel from out of a locked safe somewhere in a house, or from drawer in a bank vault. I was a realist (of sorts) and truly imagined something complicated and fraught with peril – altogether unlike the scenes in movies where everything is beautifully lit and dramatic. No, I imagined waiting for hours in the tight confines of an air-conditioning duct or spending weeks learning how to pick a certain lock strictly by feel.

As time passed, I came to realize that the life I was imagining would be one spent wading around in a moral quagmire. How would I decide which jewels to steal, what to do with the money, and how many would I steal before I had enough money? Would I end up living just like the people that I was stealing from? It seemed like a slippery slope and eventually I let the idea go completely.

Years later, I found myself standing on this very cliff in Santa Cruz, California, about to jump into a surging ocean of unknown depth. We had seen kids jump from somewhere along this cliff earlier in the day while we were body-surfing further down the beach and thought it would be fun to try. “Time it with the swell,” suggested my friend.

As I stood there, gazing down at the dark water, I had a minor epiphany – this moment is exactly like the moment just before a jewel thief cuts through the glass to grab the goods. So, with one last look, I took a half-step back and then hurled myself out into space as far from the cliff as I could. Gravity took hold, and the fall stretched into seconds as I accelerated towards the water. The sound of the air rushing past was thrilling and horrifying as time expanded and then contracted suddenly with a whack.

Talking about it later, I proposed four meaningful stages common to jewel thievery and cliff diving:

1. Conception – you have the idea to jump off of a cliff, or to steal a jewel. You begin to plan, you climb the cliff, you buy rope.
2. Conviction – you are there, you could back out now and everything would go back to normal – but you don’t. You cut the glass case, you leap off of the cliff, you are committed.
3. Point of No Return– the glass is cut, your feet have left the cliff – there is no going back. The safest plan of action is to continue.
4. Execution – now it all depends on your skill, your training, your planning, your momentum, and your will. With or without you, the story will have an ending.

I brought this up over breakfast recently with a few friends and we decided that most great undertakings share these stages. From creating great art (where every brush stroke or touch of the metal grinder carries you one step closer to completion or calamity), to tinkering (where your idea unfolds or unravels before your very eyes). So, embrace your inner jewel thief and have the conviction to carry your ideas past conception – but remember to time time your jump with the swell.

The Interview That Didn’t Get Used

I agreed to an email interview for a blog recently, and then let the questions get buried in an inbox avalanche. Some time later, and very late at night, I noticed an urgent reminder from her… here follows my somewhat philosophical answers (most of which did not make it into the article).

1. What is your background? (I understand you are a software engineer and also a paragliding instructor but was hoping you could give my readers a bit more background about who you are).
Where does a personal history start? Was it when I was four and my brother and I spent every day wandering around on empty beaches and climbing on the wreckage of an abandoned wood mill? Perhaps it was when I spent three and a half months in a full-body cast recovering from a corrective spinal surgery at the age of fourteen and the staff of an alternative school program decided they would help me continue to go to school every day. There are dozens of events in a childhood that seem pivotal when viewed in hindsight. Without being able to point at any single event, I can say that those collective experiences laid the foundation for a life-long habit of self-directed learning that gave me one guiding principle: “do the most interesting thing you can.” What success I have enjoyed as a software architect and an innovator, I owe to that simple idea.

2. What inspired you to start the Tinkering School and ultimately write this book?
If my life and the way that I approach life was formed by pivotal experiences in my childhood, what does that imply for the children who are over-protected and see the world more from the backseat of a car than from the branches of a tree they climbed? Not only was I seeing children that didn’t get to explore the world on their own terms, I was seeing them grow into apathetic adults who lacked the basic skills and curiosity necessary to engage with the world. And can you blame them? When high school is just something that you survive, and college is only exciting because you get to drink, what kind of feeling does that create for learning in general? Tinkering School is an on-going experiment in fostering life-long learning, an attempt to instill the kind of persistence and failure resilience that helps us see problems as puzzles rather than barriers – the antithesis and antidote for apathy.

3. What are the benefits of allowing kids to do the things you describe in your book?
At the heart of the book are two important ideas; children will be safer and more able to mitigate risk if they are given a chance to practice, and that by letting children experience the world in a hands-on way, we lay the foundations of creativity and innovative thinking. The book creates a context for parents and children to have a rational discussion about danger, to examine the benefits of an activity and weigh them against the potential hazards.

4. What feedback have you received on the book and by who? – I imagine there may be some outraged parents…
I’m happy to say that aside from one child psychologist in Australia, the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. A few people in the media and some parents have wondered if the book “takes it too far”, but there is no consensus on which topics are too dangerous. At a book signing event recently, one parent took me to task for suggesting that children should climb on the roof of a house, and before I could explain the thinking behind that activity, another parent said that she used to eat her lunch on the roof as a child and that she lets her children do it too.

5. Do you think you may be pushing the boundaries a bit too far? Why or why not?
The book encourages parents to be clear about what they are and are not comfortable doing, and to share and discuss those boundaries with the child. No topic in the book should be attempted unless both parent and child are ready to do it in a safe and responsible manner. But having said that, we (as a society) have to ask who is responsible to for defining those boundaries? If we let the bureaucrats and lawyers do it, there won’t be any more parks, bicycles, or recesses. Every parent should decide for themselves, what the boundaries are, and instead of calling the police when we see a child playing in the yard unsupervised, we should applaud. Let us choose as a society to relish this moment, arguably the least violent in human history, and go outside to play, to experiment, and explore.

6. Some safety regulations are in place for a reason, have you thought of an alternative approach to teaching kids how to make something rather than putting power tools in their hands?
The experience is not about the tools, it’s about the ideas. We use hand tools, we use improvised tools, we make new tools, and yes, sometimes we use power tools too. Part of the point of the project format is to make it work with you have. If we’re out building something in the woods, we’re not going to have power tools – but we’re still going to explore the idea.

7. You don’t have your own children, correct? Do you feel it is a hindrance or a benefit for the work you do with children? Why? ( Frankly, as a mother myself, I wonder how your approach would differ if dealing with your own children).
I think that we are all responsible for the safety and well-being all of the children – that’s the promise that we make to them as a society. I may not share the unique bond that a parent has for their child, but that also gives me a perspective that is different from the parent point of view and I may be able to see the benefit of an activity more clearly. That being said, I know that my parents raised me with an unusual amount of freedom, so I’m fairly certain that I would be that sort of parent my self given a different set of circumstances.

8. Who has influenced you as a person most in your life?
Certainly my parents and my brother have had a huge impact on who I am, and my wife (collaborator on both the book and the school), as well as the huge extended family of Beatniks, artists, musicians, film-makers, poets, tinkerers, and lost souls that my parents welcomed in our house over the years – most of whom still call me ‘kid’. Teachers who were patient with me as I abandoned the curriculum, and those employers brave enough to look at what I had done instead of what degrees and diplomas I didn’t have. And Mose Allison, because I still want to be able to play piano and sing like that.

9. What books are on your night stand for pleasure reading?
In no particular order…

Metaphors We Live by [METAPHORS WE LIVE BY -OS]
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson

Leviathan
Scott Westerfeld

Free-Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry
Lenore Skenazy

Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth
Doxiadis et al

Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith
Jon Krakauer

Skull Session
Daniel Hecht

Journal of Delacroix (Arts & Letters)
Eugene Delacroix

Seeing Voices
Oliver Sacks

No More Secondhand Art
Peter London

The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life
Twyla Tharp

Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology
Gregory Bateson

Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger’s
John Elder Robison

Head Cases: Stories of Brain Injury and Its Aftermath
Michael Paul Mason

Thinking with a Pencil
Henning Nelms

The Brain’s Sense of Movement – Perspectives in Cognitive Neuroscience
Alain Berthoz

Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work
Matthew Crawford

The First Time I Got Paid For It: Writers’ Tales From The Hollywood Trenches
Peter Lefcourt et al

Thinking in Pictures (Expanded, Tie-in Edition): My Life with Autism (Vintage)
Temple Grandin

Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul
Stuart Brown