Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Computer and Cognitive Development
Toward the end of Thursday’s lecture, we talked about how computer technology can help children in their cognitive development, and this has reminded me of my childhood experiences with computer facilitating programs. Remember when I was in elementary school, we have a computer class which the class will go to the library to learn to use computer. Of course, the computer back then was really old and I don’t quite remember what program that I played with. However, one interesting thing about the class is that we get to play a simulation game about opening a dinosaur park of your own. And starting from choosing land, organizing the park, buying dinosaur and all other business plan, we would need to decide for ourselves the action that we wanted to take. The game required a lot of hard problem solving skills, especially for elementary students, and it was then I realized that not everyone in the class can successfully master the game, and that not everyone’s cognitive development happens at the same age. Personally, I was one of the students struggling with the game and having difficulty to bring my park’s revenue up to a positive number; however, thinking back now, I think the game helped me in developing problem skills as well as training me to be an incremental theorist. I kept on trying each time I failed to open a park, and eventually, I gained enough experience to successfully managing my own business. This experience with the game taught me that success is not determined by innate ability, but with constantly trying and never giving up. I think this is one of reasons that, even until today, I still follow the incremental theory rather than entity theory.
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In elementary school, I also had a lot of exposure to computers in class. At the start of my first grade year, my school opened a computer lab with enough Apple Macs for a class to two students per computer. I remember that the most popular thing was a painting program, and the popularity of it led to a limit on how many of our pictures we could print. In the second grade, keyboarding skills began to be taught. I remember that my class won a contest among classes at the school for making the longest list of words that only use home-keys (a, s, d, f, g, h, j, k, and l, for those who don’t remember what home-keys are). When I was young, my step-dad ran a small computer repair shop, so I was exposed to internal hardware as well as educational programs. In the third grade he gave a demonstration in my class where he took apart a computer and ran it outside of the tower, which most other students hadn’t seen before. In my third and fourth grade classes, the game of choice was Oregon Trail, in varying degrees of graphic advancement. The goal of this game was to take your wagon train to Oregon without breaking down, starving, or drowning along the way, and seems to be a game that everyone in my generation who was raised in Oregon played in school. In the fifth grade, our school upgraded our computers in the classrooms, and my school also got Dino Park Tycoon (the game mentioned in the post above, I think). I was also one of the kids who had a hard time getting my park up and running, though others in my class took the starting few thousand dollars and turned it into a million dollars profit. For my own learning style, I preferred computer programs to worksheets and other tools. I had math, geography and literature games at home growing up, and played them regularly. Even though such games do not have the human interaction that studying with a parent has, they allow kids to work at their own pace and learn to solve the problem on their own. I would frequently reference an atlas while playing Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?, instead of asking my parents where a city or country was located. I got to develop my own skills, and I think many others of my generation got similar benefits from the educational games that were available while we were young. Since then, I’m sure that such games have become more refined, and they will continue to be a beneficial tool for many kids who choose to enjoy them.
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