THeory? Yes, No.

An article from OLDaily about Sims and letting people limp along really caught my eye tonight. The link to the article is http://clarkaldrich.blogspot.com/2008/10/in-sim-do-you-let-players-limp-along.html. I had been looking for 3 days now to find an article on theory on OLDaily. When I found this article it really got me thinking about our approach to education. The article may not be directly related to educational theory, but it was provocative to my idea of education.

It mentioned how in sims, that early choices can greatly affect the entire game and how well you will do. Now this is realistic, but the point in education is for learning to occur, not just let them know what is realistic. The proposed alternative was to have "gates" that needed to be reached and then players got a sort of start over where the past didn't have that great of an affect on them. This idea is similar to the idea of playing games with levels. You can start over each level and the only effects from the last level is that you get to go to the next level.

What does all of this have to do with learning theories and educational theories? Well, I'm not sure exactly but it had me thinking about how much we will let students "limp through" sections of a class or entire classes. Sometimes we feel that it is necessary to let them struggle for a while in order to strengthen them. In contrast, some teachers feel that supports should be in place to assist students not long after problems begin to arise. Ideally teachers should find some balance between helping students too fast and letting them just suffer through the work. I find myself sometimes wanting to help as soon as I see a problem, but I am doing much better at just letting the students try and work things out themselves. If we don't let them try and work through their issues then they will become dependent, but if we wait too long they may become discouraged and quit. Again, this isn't a theory, but what popped into my mind.