Everything Tagged with 'Gever Tulley'
‘Fifty Dangerous Things’ in The Huffington Post
I’m sure at this point I don’t know anybody who doesn’t already know of this book – but, well, look! Gever Tulley and his book “50 Dangerous Things (You Should Let Your Children Do)” are currently featured in The Huffington Post!
Even if you’re already familiar with it, check out the link anyway. There’s a great photo slideshow of a family as they chronicle their way through each dangerous thing, with great anecdotes such as this one:
Jack (age 7, on Rule 42: Break the Recipe Rulebook):
“I’d say the most dangerous part was the peanut butter and the chunk of cheese. It made it taste really really bad. I thought it was really fun. I’d say the funnest part was thinking of the stuff to put in it. Actually I thought it was just really really exciting. If you’re talking about taste it wasn’t fun. It made me want to do more things in the kitchen, but it made me want to not make that combination ever again.”
The Gamification of Everything
Gever Tulley considers what sort of implications the ‘Gamification’ experience may or may not have in education:
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.