Common sense is decidedly uncommon. Sometimes science affirms a widely held belief, sometimes it refutes common knowledge and sometimes it leads to a paradigm shift. All these discoveries are equally valuable.
Every time there is a scientific study, someone responds saying it has confirmed their worldview, and is therefore pointless, betraying a deep misunderstanding of the purpose of scientific studies.
If you can do it convincingly, you can probably play games involving some skill if you adopt a consistent and beatable strategy. Like Uno by playing the oldest legal card in your hand and choosing a color you hold randomly for wilds, or Guess Who by always choosing an attribute that about 1/4 of remaining characters share.
That's a partial solution. It doesn't help them with developing winning strategies if the outcome is random. Nor does it help them develop determination; nor, I wager, resilience to losing.
I want my kids to beat me, not just win by chance.
Its not a solution, I believe. Random success is not based on decision making skills. Random success will teach child to make random decisions.
Just not be afraid to really lose to your child in game which at start equally unknown for both you and your child. Let your child to learn how to win and learn how to learn to win.
If you or your child do not like chess, you can choose any other game, which allows your child to use his fluent mind strengths to win you. Just stop thinking that child is small, stupid and unable to win a fair game. He really can win, but not the games where your crystallized mind has its advantages.
I'm guessing that you meant to type "learn how to win and learn how to lose", which is a great point. Understanding how to move forward happily after failure is a huge asset.
Yes, you are right, game maybe used to teach child to lose. And of course should be used in such manner.
But I meant something different. Learning how to play particular game is a small step to aquiring general learning skills. How to learn is a great problem, and many do not know efficient ways to learn something. But its very important not only to move forward after a failure, but to become smarter and increase chances of making successful decisions on the next occasion to win.
Recently I got into this relatively new iOS app called Really Bad Chess that is a lot of fun along these lines. My partner was never taught Chess but wanted to learn, and this made it entertaining to get started for both of us.
Ludo's fundamental, underlying lesson is that your actions don't matter at all. (The player has literally no agency in the game, it could be equivalently played by a RNG.) That doesn't seem like a good parenting lesson. A board game should be an opportunity to develop strategic thinking skills, rather than teaching the child that they're irrelevant.
A bit of a sidetrack, but Ludo does have decisions: which disc to move and how many spaces. Chasing vs rushing to complete. Whether to move a disc when a 6 is diced or to bring a new disc into play.
Lots of things in life (good and bad) are pure luck. Handling things you "do/don't deserve" with appropriate emotional responses is a valuable life skill.
To be clear: the bad parenting lesson is that the child learns that their actions don't matter. Rolling the dice gives the illusion of agency, but of course the child does not actually get to make any decisions. Their actions do not map to any recognizable outcomes; they may as well act completely randomly. This strikes me as a bad thing to learn.
> Lots of things in life (good and bad) are pure luck. Handling things you "do/don't deserve" with appropriate emotional responses is a valuable life skill.
Option 3: play games with substantial elements of chance and strategy.
Card games are particularly good in this respect, but there are a wide variety of games where a completely unskilled player can occasionally win against a much more skilled opponent.
Another option is a game where you're both playing against "something" but not really against one another. For instance in Scrabble, your opponent is really the language and your knowledge of it, rather than the other person. Plus luck, of course.
Likewise the violin. There are "levels" to reach, and competitions, but ultimately it's down to you and the music and the instrument. The point where my daughter surpassed me on violin came remarkably quickly. Granted, I was trying to play along on the double bass.
As I read it, the idea occurred to me to learn a new instrument along with your child. My experience is that kids learn to play an instrument faster than an adult; even given that, they'll only progress along with you by practising, and it's a pretty cool way to spend time with your kid.
rule: .*daily.* deny -- to stop people wasting time...
rule: imgur.com/.* allow -- kitten pictures allowed
-- (we don't want to have a revolution at our hands)
It turned out to be due to Incapsula web accelerator/protector [0].
> Incapsula is a service that secures and accelerates the website you were trying to reach.
It works fine in Firefox/Chrome, I was trying to open it using qutebrowser so maybe
it's a problem with QtWebKit? Anyways, my fault for jumping to conclusions (thinking the site was hugged to death).
Confessing I didn't read the article, but from my parenting experience - Beating your kids at games teaches them one very important thing about real life: to learn a skill you have to practice repeatedly. This inevitably involves frustration and persistence which any human being should be prepared to deal with in life.
The President-elect of the United States is a Manchurian candidate, and HN is continuing to hold out its ban on political discussions. One would think that events of such magnitude would cause a reconsideration at the very least.
Without knowing about the "game" from the study and the "rigging" process in greater detail than the article provides it's hard to see how (or whether) the outcome is meaningful.
One solution strategy that works very well from my experience is to ask them upfront whether they want to play "for real" or to play to learn. [edit: A third mode is "for (silly) fun" where everything is allowed.]
This works for all ages... and for boardgames and physical games. It's their choice which mode they want to play in, and they trust and respect you more when given the choice. You treat them as a peer. You can beat them mercilessly, or you can join their side and practice the game together. And the thrill and confidence they get when they beat you playing 'for real' is just priceless.
Physical contests (sports, racing, wrestling), knowledge contests ("Do you know x?"), practice based games (as you mentioned, some board, chess, etc).
Essentially anything where "I've consumed more calories that you have" or "I've had more years to think that you have" are an unfair advantage for purposes of fun.
The comment you're replying to described it as three choices, but you can also consider it a spectrum.
pure instruction -> teaching through playing -> friendly match -> competitive match
Let's use a card game as an example.
Pure instruction: Both players play with their cards visible to each other, and the teacher coaches rules and strategy as they play.
Teaching through playing: The hands are now private, but the teacher will tell the student if they're making bad moves and allow do-overs. The teacher may also set up situations for the student to take advantage of.
Friendly match: The teacher is playing against the student. No coaching is given. But, nit-picky procedural rules are not always followed. (You've set that card down and your hand left it, you can't pick it up again).
Competitive match: Rules are followed to the letter.
Thanks. Wouldn't there also be the "I am wiser than you, and can either play 'easy' or play my best" even when playing competitively? "Competitive match" as you define it is more about following the rules, not the effort put in to actually try to win and outmaneuver the other player.
Think of a chess game, for example. We can play by the rules to the letter, but if I decide to systematically take your pieces one-by-one or "forget" some of my own experience to perhaps make it more fun, are elements I assumed are in the original comment above.
How did you get your kids started with board-game type games? I have a 3yro and we just have "silly fun" with dice but I'm trying to figure out how to show him the "move N places forward" mechanic where N is the number on the die.
My dad tried to teach me to count using dimes. I had some kind of learning dissabliity. I just couldn't remember how many dimes he would throw on the table, once he would take them away.
He started to get bored with my lack of progress. He then decided to play Magician. He would take a dime and, (Palm it--without me seeing), act like he's putting a dime into his mouth, and then pull it out his navel.
I was floored. He did it about ten times. My dad was truly amazing. "Dad--can I try it."
I can still picture the look of fear/doom on my dad's face when the dime didn't come out my belly button. I just asked him, "Where's the dime?"
I couldn't go to the bathroom without my parents for the next two days. They finally found the coin.
(I'm not passing this along as any warnings. I think parents are a bit too overprotective today. If I had a child I would defiantly use dice to teach counting. It's just a funny story I just recalled.)
Isn't 3yo a bit too early? I mean, at three years old a child is legally smart enough not to swallow the dice... but I thought knowing how to interpret numbers and apply them is a bit more advanced than knowing not to eat the numbery thing. ;)
Yeah fair enough, I was just wondering about the future. How did you build up to a full board game with your kid? What were the phases? 1. Succeed in not eating the dice 2. ??? 3. Play a game of Sorry! within the rules.
3 years old is definitely not too early to start playing structured games.
At first, early on, games should be very simple. The idea is to focus solely on the basic structure of games:
--game start
--keep attention on game
--turn taking/following in correct sequence
--problem solving around a very simple goal
--game end
--with finally very clear assessment of player ranking (i.e. You won, I/we lost or I won, You lost)
Underlying all this should be a heavy focus on the maintenance of appropriate emotional responses and behavior modeling (e.g., no gloating, no sore losers, no emotional aggression or defensiveness).
Again, this is all ground-floor stuff, so kids can start learning it as early as 2-ish. Learning to take turns is a huge emotional advantage. As is learning how to both succeed and fail in games and life with grace.
A very good game that has a degree of complexity appropriate to kids that young is "Animal Upon Animal" by HABA.[0]
It's a simple stacking game: On your turn, stack this animal on that animal; if the stack of animals falls over, that's the fail state. (There is a 6-sided dice with pictures on 4 of its faces, and 1 and 2 pips on the the remaining, but it can easily be removed from the game until the child in question is ready for it.)
> I'm trying to figure out how to show him the "move N places forward" mechanic where N is the number on the die.
Maybe start with hopscotch (the regular kind with where you toss an object into a square, but with clearly numbered squares), telling them each time the number of the square they're on, the number of the square they're heading to, and the number of hops they'll do, before they do them. After a while, they'll get an understanding of how the numbers on the squares relate to what you're saying, and maybe even a vague intuition for subtraction.
Eventually, you can replace the thrown object with a rolled die (I suggest a big soccer-ball-sized die they can see from far away, with numbered faces instead of pips)—whose roll indicates how many spaces they should move rather than the space they should move to—and keep playing the same game.
Once they get that, then they're ready to play board games.
Try "Animal Upon Animal" by HABA.[0] It's an excellent game for kids exactly that young. Very simple stacking game. I highly recommend it. It'll teach turn taking and goal oriented thinking.
My 2.5 year old did my dice rolling in Trivial Pursuit last night (1970s retro Australian edition). I just made a big thing of showing her the number on the die, reading it aloud, then moving the piece that many spaces while counting up. She is interested because she seems to see the social significance of the dice throw within the game environment, but not fully aware of the movement options/significance. That's OK. Using numbers at all is good at this age. I wonder at what cognitive level children interpret randomness, such as dice throws.
We bought Orchard by Haba for our 2yo and she absolutely loved it, still plays it sometimes 2yrs later, and it motivated her interest in board games in general.
There are games that are simpler and better for kids than trying to get them to slog through Monopoly or whatever.
My First Carcassonne and Sushi Go! are two we like and they're playable for adults too. (A lot of kids games are terrible, ones based on licenses like Disney or Paw Patrol for example.)
Also check out Peaceable Kingdom they make cooperative games for kids (Hoot Owl Hoot, Race to The Treasure, etc.) I haven't played them personally but based on reviews some families really enjoy them a lot.
FYI: http://www.peaceablekingdom.com/ may be hacked or was sometime in the past. The site wasn't loading so I tried archive.is and the cooperative games link on the home page loaded a porn site
There's a big difference between a three year old who has just turned three and one who is nearly four. We've got a three and a half year old (as well as a six year old who loves board games with a passion). He has just got the hang of moving pieces forward based on the roll of a dice.
He has played Uno (without the scoring and with face up hands of cards) for a while now. The other game he has been able to play and that I recommend as not being as painful for adults as some, is an Orchard Toys game called 'Where's my cupcake?', but he's only just at the snakes and ladders type stage. We played a lot of Sorry too with my six year old when he was about 4-4.5. The other thing we have done is having the three year old 'on a team' with an adult, but that obviously works better with multiple kids.
One they hit 4.5/5, there are tons of games you can play with them. That's when things start get to fun! Basically, I wouldn't worry yet - they just have to get to the right stage developmentally which they will do.
A common idea in Go is that a stronger player will play a "teaching game" with a weaker one. The game is sufficiently abstract and complex that the weaker player may not even notice the actions of the stronger player who endeavors to play poorly so that they are only slightly better than their opponent and have the opportunity to share new ideas and tricks at a level appropriate to their student.
Obviously, these have to be done intentionally. A weaker player who nearly wins only to discover their opponent was "teaching" is probably a bit offended: their accomplishment stolen from beneath them.
What aids all of this is that Go has a handicapping system that can be very well tuned so that for people who would score within 40-60 points of one another you can probably tune the game down to even odds.
> The game is sufficiently () complex that the weaker player may not even notice the actions of the stronger player
I recommend to people learning to look at the activities of someone "good" at the field but not a star for this reason, I don't know if it applies to all fields but for ex I got the same feeling learning chess by following GM's games (I was lost) and a book like "Master vs Amateur" opened my eyes to typical errors made by intermediate players that won't show up in chess books (another example is "The Amateur Mind"). I tell soccer players than besides enjoying watching the games of the big teams and star players to watch "journeymen" games from a 2nd division to learn the basics.
Also the reason why we frequently learn more from a student mate explaining something that from a veteran teacher or professor, who forgot the struggles of the beginners.
Napoleon didn't clarify, I don't believe. The quote was "I would rather have a general who was lucky than one who was good." Certainly, "Beyond possible comprehension by others" isn't what I mean or a likely interpretation. "Succeeded for reasons beneath others notice" would be more the idea. As an example, Grant's tendency to thoroughly disambiguate his orders and always put them in writing (after a Shiloh order debacle) helped his luck a great deal. But it isn't something others would necessarily notice or be in a position to notice. Sheridan had some astonishing luck, but it was possible because he insisted his subordinates (each taking separate routes) be highly disciplined and courageous and get to each point exactly on time, no matter what. (Later, one of those subordinates, Custer, would be cut down because his peers didn't fulfill their orders and arrive on time to join him in battle despite all - and because he did push on as he'd been taught. Coordination only works if everybody's doing it.)
Another option is to take on additional objectives, which serve to handicap you.
For instance, when competing to win, there's little room to be exploratory, playful, envelope pushing, maximizing learning. First tries at anything mostly fail. So I'll say "I'm going to focus on learning new things, not just on winning". And verbalize the exploration like "hmm, I wonder if...", attempt, and post mortem review ("I just tried X... and Y happened"). Or offer that as an option - "I'd like to try throwing (at target) under my leg... or would you rather I throw regular?"
Play to teach can be mixed in as a part-time objective. "Fake-oops, I dropped my card face up. What was it? What's something you might do differently knowing I have that?"
One can also optimizing for game interesting / fun. "Well I could use this card to wipe you out there, instead of discarding it, but this is so much fun, I want to fight it out".
So never "illusionary success", always transparent honesty. But being explicit that there can be more than one "game" at play. But also have to watch that this all doesn't become an "it's unpleasant to lose" avoidance strategy - if playing "for real", maybe that's to the bitter end.
This something I've realized about my own impostor syndrome: the people who are most likely to knock me down a peg when I'm being overconfident are the only ones I trust when they compliment me. If you only ever hear positive things from someone, you can't trust that what they say is true.
It's harder to improve something when you never get negative feedback. I'd rather hear a negative opinion than nothing (when looking for feedback, that is).
Ok, I must have read something wrong, but what they are saying is that children put more trust in people giving them useful clues than people giving them not useful clues. Something that seems quite reasonable.
Which makes me confused by this quote: "... it suggests that children may not be as savvy as previous research has suggested."
Obviously a "helpful" clue that doesn't improve your chance of success (they always succeed) isn't really helpful. Isn't it quite savvy to recognise that?
If someone has gotten a better understanding of what they are actually trying to say I'd like to hear it.
There might be an interesting result in it somewhere, as it could be interpreted to imply that only slightly challenging kids in an educational context could lead them to believe that their learning efforts has no use if the challenges are adjusted to never let them fail. But I don't see how the results could be interpreted to mean what the title says.
One experimenter gave accurate clues; the other gave inaccurate ones.... But for half of the children the game was rigged so that ultimately they would find the hidden objects.
So one adult was always giving bad advice and one was always giving good advice. But in half the games it was rigged so the child always found the toy even if they looked in the wrong places. The advice from the adults was still always bad and good advice for the rigged games.
Afterwards they asked the kids who they thought were more helpful. Even though one adult was giving bad advice always and one adult was giving good advice always the 4-5 years olds only discerned this if they actually lost the game when they didn't follow the good advice, even though the adult giving bad advice was always still giving bad advice.
I think the key is they must have rigged the game to ensure the bad advice adult was always still giving bad advice. If the bad advice turned into good advice in the rigged version then it wouldn't work, just like you said.
I think the point they were trying to make was that even though the kids had benefitted in earlier games from helpful advice and received no benefit when given unhelpful advice that by being allowed to then succeed in the rigged game the kids failed to acknowledge the value of the earlier advice. This shown by the kids not having a preference for the more helpful person. Though I think the conclusion they are drawing would really depend on the sample size of games a kid was given in order for the kid to be able to distinguish good & bad advice from the game simply being pure chance all along.
I still don't see it. How on earth would a kid recognize unhelpful advice if it still resulted in finding the object? The kid does not know the game is rigged. I think it is more likely the article has not fully explained the experiment. It would make me sad to think this was actually published.
Say the advice is "look behind the couch in the living room" and the object is later found on the kitchen counter. And the rigging consists of the experimenter asking the kid to get something unrelated from the kitchen, for example.
is usually pretty effective (and is in this case ;-) ). In CS you'll find a PDF hosted on the author's home page like 99% percent of the time. Other fields are more spotty, but this approach is still pretty effective.
I used my student super powers on that and now have the answer!
There was actually 4 similar studies described in the article. But the first one is the most important.
The setup was that the kid would watch a video where a toy was hidden in one of two cups. The helpful person would point out to the kid in which cup the toy was hidden. The unhelpful person would not give any hints at all but rather just explain which toy was hidden. The kid would of course follow the helpful persons advice, but would have to guess in void of any advice.
The kid would then get to guess in which cup the toy was hidden, whereafter the answer was revealed in the video. However, in the successful condition, the answer was modified so the kid would guess right no matter what.
This was repeated eight times, after which the kid got to choose which person would give them advice for four more trials.
It was in this situation it showed that the kids who had always been successful did not seem to value the better advice they would expect to get from the helpful person while the kids who had failed due to lack of advice chose the helpful person.
In the article they discuss this being due to the kid trusting their own ability to guess, not needing any help.
I'd say that the results are academically interesting as they increase our understanding of children's decision making. But I don't think they should be taken out of context and be applied as a some kind of answer on how to do parenting and teaching.
I'm with you. I think the whole "good" advice and "bad" advice is relative. It could be misconstrued and applied to the real world. Someone could say that "good" advice is stealing, ripping off people's accounts because if you do it right, you get to reap the rewards earlier than hard work and you don't have to suffer the consequences. In this case, it sounds to me like the researchers are painting "good" and "bad" by their own subjective opinion, and they end up getting the obvious "I didn't agree with your conclusion" result, but from children. When those children grow up and start calculating the extra time it takes based on poor advice, they will probably learn and come to different conclusions like we all have. But as it is, children are naturally trusting and don't expect some jerk is going to lie to them. Too bad the world is harsh.
Perhaps, in the "win whatever you do" case, the item is originally placed somewhere, and the good advice really does relate to that place—so there's a way to win "authentically." And then, if the child never searches that place, then the item is moved—to a place unrelated to the clues—so that they will find it.
The advice was "good advice" in the sense of "if you had followed the advice, you would have found the item before the taking-pity-on-you time limit." But it's not "good advice" in the sense of it having any relation to where the item was ultimately found—and therefore it can't be inferred to have been good advice just from the evidence the child has at that point.
On the other hand, if the game is played iteratively (like an iterated Prisoner's Dilemma), it would eventually become clear (presuming the child managed to find the item by themselves some of the time) that there is this "taking-pity-on-you time limit", and that some of the advice has a correlation to where the item is before that time limit. The child would likely intuit the "taking-pity-on-you" moment as the true loss condition of the game, and become upset when it happened, just as if they had been told they lost.
I was taught chess at age 6 by a national level player. While I have no doubt he never had to try hard to beat me, he never let me win. I was a far better player as a result.
While I never won, I was never discouraged, because he would always point out where I had made good plays and where I could have done better, in a very interactive manner.
My dad, while never a national level player, taught me chess, and likewise never let me win. The day that I beat him for the first time was an enormous triumph for me, and I'm happily imparting that to my own kids now. My 8 year old hadn't beat me yet, but his game has developed rapidly and that first win isn't very far off now. I'll offer him advice and help him understand why a given move was good or bad, but his moves are his and his alone.
When he wins, it'll be because he earned it, and I know from experience what a triumph that win will be.
In the chess arena - if heard a couple of good reviews of this game lately. Chess with random pieces but you get worse prices the better you play. Off for a game now. Really Bad Chess by Zach Gage
https://appsto.re/nz/XHxjcb.i
I do not understand how can he beat you if you started playing as a kid. Granted, I don't know what I'm talking about but unless you are going senile I don't see how he can beat you while he's still a kid.
Very interesting research. Unfortunately we all should have learned by now that it pays to be skeptical of all provocative social science findings until replicated...
The title is inconsistent with the article title, and even the article title seems inflated to what it describes.
As I understand it, the experimental group played a game they couldn't lose (rigged) and adults gave them "hints." The kids [correctly] identified that they weren't dependent on the adults' help in that group.
However, there doesn't even seem to be a link to the actual study anywhere, so I can't even check what this research actually is.
If you or anyone can suggest a better (i.e. more accurate and neutral title), we can change it. The HN guidelines call for changing titles when they are either linkbait or misleading (and that's not an xor).
Both the subtitle of the linked article and the published journal article's main title are: "Success inhibits preschoolers’ ability to establish selective trust".
The "establish selective trust" phrase is much more accurate than just "trust" -- in fact, the current title on HN in strictly incorrect. The preschoolers don't have problems trusting. Rather, you could argue that they're more trustworthy when they never lose. It's the "selective" part that's important. (That said, this feels a bit pedantic to me, and it seems as if no one is confused by the difference in wording.)
The "Let your kids lose:" prefix on the SD headline (and not in the peer reviewed publication) could cut either way -- it might be link bait, but it's also not inconsistent with the researchers' advice.
In summary the takeaway would be "you only understand the importance of something when you lose it" thus those kids who won the game despite receiving good advice thought that it was normal somehow to the point of not acknowledging the help they've got as they succeed anyways, but those who lost recognize that good advice would have helped them. I hope I understood it correctly.
Call me crazy but why should the kids that got good results from both adults differentiate between either adult. Obviously the kids that received information that did not pan out from one adult would prefer the adult that gave them information that did. The results seem perfectly obvious to me. The kids are not stupid or am I missing something here?
The article doesn't explain the experiment very well, which has caused confusion for myself and other commenters here. Having read the actual research paper, I'll try to outline how the experiment works, as I understand it:
Children were shown a video on a laptop featuring two containers. There would either be a helpful person or an unhelpful person who secretly puts a toy in one of the containers. The helpful person would then indicate which container they had put the toy into (either by pointing to the container or by lifting the containers to reveal the toy). Contrary to what the article says, the unhelpful person simply did not offer any sort of hint. The child would then be asked to select the container the toy was in.
I suspect "children" here may be a distraction: under the same artificial constraints, adult players might show the exact same behavior.
From the article (and abstract), it's hard to imagine a game where the 'bad' advice is really 'bad' if (1) the player always trusts it; and (2) they then always succeed. In such a case, the forced-success may retroactively make the bad-advice 'good'. (At best, maybe the bad advice forced a slower completion? But that requires assuming some more complicated game.)
From playing the game of interpreting this article, I have concluded that neither the article author nor the researchers (via their original abstract) can be trusted to summarize such research in sufficient detail for unambiguous interpretation.
One of my favorite approaches in chess: play straight up, but allow your opponent to switch sides with you once (e.g., let them play the endgame from a winning position).
i feel like it's important to win a couple of times while learning to give the human brain some short term reward to keep going. I'd surely try this first on something low stakes if a kid gives up. You don't want to give a kid a mindblock from something `important`
When all you do is win a predicament happens. You never learn from losing, but it never becomes financially reasonable to purposely make yourself lose just for the lesson.
121 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 181 ms ] threadI meant, why does it require a scientific study to understand that lying to small children deforms their worldview?
- Having a flippant, dismissive, repetitive comment provides no value to the conversation and wastes the time of anyone reading.
My daughter often wins at Ludo, but it's not because I let her. She also often loses.
I want my kids to beat me, not just win by chance.
Just not be afraid to really lose to your child in game which at start equally unknown for both you and your child. Let your child to learn how to win and learn how to learn to win.
As an example of such a learning: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11653538
If you or your child do not like chess, you can choose any other game, which allows your child to use his fluent mind strengths to win you. Just stop thinking that child is small, stupid and unable to win a fair game. He really can win, but not the games where your crystallized mind has its advantages.
But I meant something different. Learning how to play particular game is a small step to aquiring general learning skills. How to learn is a great problem, and many do not know efficient ways to learn something. But its very important not only to move forward after a failure, but to become smarter and increase chances of making successful decisions on the next occasion to win.
http://reallybadchess.com
A bit of a sidetrack, but Ludo does have decisions: which disc to move and how many spaces. Chasing vs rushing to complete. Whether to move a disc when a 6 is diced or to bring a new disc into play.
Chutes/snakes and Ladders is pure luck.
Lots of things in life (good and bad) are pure luck. Handling things you "do/don't deserve" with appropriate emotional responses is a valuable life skill.
> Lots of things in life (good and bad) are pure luck. Handling things you "do/don't deserve" with appropriate emotional responses is a valuable life skill.
That is also true.
Card games are particularly good in this respect, but there are a wide variety of games where a completely unskilled player can occasionally win against a much more skilled opponent.
Likewise the violin. There are "levels" to reach, and competitions, but ultimately it's down to you and the music and the instrument. The point where my daughter surpassed me on violin came remarkably quickly. Granted, I was trying to play along on the double bass.
As I read it, the idea occurred to me to learn a new instrument along with your child. My experience is that kids learn to play an instrument faster than an adult; even given that, they'll only progress along with you by practising, and it's a pretty cool way to spend time with your kid.
Thanks for the inspiration.
It works fine in Firefox/Chrome, I was trying to open it using qutebrowser so maybe it's a problem with QtWebKit? Anyways, my fault for jumping to conclusions (thinking the site was hugged to death).
[0] https://www.incapsula.com/why-am-i-seeing-this-page.html
The no-politics experiments ended a couple of days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13131251, but please don't comment unsubstantively on the topic like this.
This works for all ages... and for boardgames and physical games. It's their choice which mode they want to play in, and they trust and respect you more when given the choice. You treat them as a peer. You can beat them mercilessly, or you can join their side and practice the game together. And the thrill and confidence they get when they beat you playing 'for real' is just priceless.
Essentially anything where "I've consumed more calories that you have" or "I've had more years to think that you have" are an unfair advantage for purposes of fun.
pure instruction -> teaching through playing -> friendly match -> competitive match
Let's use a card game as an example.
Pure instruction: Both players play with their cards visible to each other, and the teacher coaches rules and strategy as they play.
Teaching through playing: The hands are now private, but the teacher will tell the student if they're making bad moves and allow do-overs. The teacher may also set up situations for the student to take advantage of.
Friendly match: The teacher is playing against the student. No coaching is given. But, nit-picky procedural rules are not always followed. (You've set that card down and your hand left it, you can't pick it up again).
Competitive match: Rules are followed to the letter.
Think of a chess game, for example. We can play by the rules to the letter, but if I decide to systematically take your pieces one-by-one or "forget" some of my own experience to perhaps make it more fun, are elements I assumed are in the original comment above.
He started to get bored with my lack of progress. He then decided to play Magician. He would take a dime and, (Palm it--without me seeing), act like he's putting a dime into his mouth, and then pull it out his navel.
I was floored. He did it about ten times. My dad was truly amazing. "Dad--can I try it."
I can still picture the look of fear/doom on my dad's face when the dime didn't come out my belly button. I just asked him, "Where's the dime?"
I couldn't go to the bathroom without my parents for the next two days. They finally found the coin.
(I'm not passing this along as any warnings. I think parents are a bit too overprotective today. If I had a child I would defiantly use dice to teach counting. It's just a funny story I just recalled.)
At first, early on, games should be very simple. The idea is to focus solely on the basic structure of games:
Underlying all this should be a heavy focus on the maintenance of appropriate emotional responses and behavior modeling (e.g., no gloating, no sore losers, no emotional aggression or defensiveness).Again, this is all ground-floor stuff, so kids can start learning it as early as 2-ish. Learning to take turns is a huge emotional advantage. As is learning how to both succeed and fail in games and life with grace.
A very good game that has a degree of complexity appropriate to kids that young is "Animal Upon Animal" by HABA.[0]
It's a simple stacking game: On your turn, stack this animal on that animal; if the stack of animals falls over, that's the fail state. (There is a 6-sided dice with pictures on 4 of its faces, and 1 and 2 pips on the the remaining, but it can easily be removed from the game until the child in question is ready for it.)
[0]http://a.co/bJ8syTL
The 3 year old will tell you what they want to do.
At 3, my little guy's favorite toy was rated for 8+ years old, and his favorite game was chess.
He never cared if he won or lost at chess, his primary purpose was to push his pawns, castle, and then get in at least one en passant.
Maybe start with hopscotch (the regular kind with where you toss an object into a square, but with clearly numbered squares), telling them each time the number of the square they're on, the number of the square they're heading to, and the number of hops they'll do, before they do them. After a while, they'll get an understanding of how the numbers on the squares relate to what you're saying, and maybe even a vague intuition for subtraction.
Eventually, you can replace the thrown object with a rolled die (I suggest a big soccer-ball-sized die they can see from far away, with numbered faces instead of pips)—whose roll indicates how many spaces they should move rather than the space they should move to—and keep playing the same game.
Once they get that, then they're ready to play board games.
http://a.co/bJ8syTL[0]
https://smile.amazon.com/Jax-8001-Sequence-for-Kids/dp/B0000...
My First Carcassonne and Sushi Go! are two we like and they're playable for adults too. (A lot of kids games are terrible, ones based on licenses like Disney or Paw Patrol for example.)
Also check out Peaceable Kingdom they make cooperative games for kids (Hoot Owl Hoot, Race to The Treasure, etc.) I haven't played them personally but based on reviews some families really enjoy them a lot.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiel_des_Jahres
He has played Uno (without the scoring and with face up hands of cards) for a while now. The other game he has been able to play and that I recommend as not being as painful for adults as some, is an Orchard Toys game called 'Where's my cupcake?', but he's only just at the snakes and ladders type stage. We played a lot of Sorry too with my six year old when he was about 4-4.5. The other thing we have done is having the three year old 'on a team' with an adult, but that obviously works better with multiple kids.
One they hit 4.5/5, there are tons of games you can play with them. That's when things start get to fun! Basically, I wouldn't worry yet - they just have to get to the right stage developmentally which they will do.
Obviously, these have to be done intentionally. A weaker player who nearly wins only to discover their opponent was "teaching" is probably a bit offended: their accomplishment stolen from beneath them.
What aids all of this is that Go has a handicapping system that can be very well tuned so that for people who would score within 40-60 points of one another you can probably tune the game down to even odds.
I recommend to people learning to look at the activities of someone "good" at the field but not a star for this reason, I don't know if it applies to all fields but for ex I got the same feeling learning chess by following GM's games (I was lost) and a book like "Master vs Amateur" opened my eyes to typical errors made by intermediate players that won't show up in chess books (another example is "The Amateur Mind"). I tell soccer players than besides enjoying watching the games of the big teams and star players to watch "journeymen" games from a 2nd division to learn the basics.
Also the reason why we frequently learn more from a student mate explaining something that from a veteran teacher or professor, who forgot the struggles of the beginners.
For instance, when competing to win, there's little room to be exploratory, playful, envelope pushing, maximizing learning. First tries at anything mostly fail. So I'll say "I'm going to focus on learning new things, not just on winning". And verbalize the exploration like "hmm, I wonder if...", attempt, and post mortem review ("I just tried X... and Y happened"). Or offer that as an option - "I'd like to try throwing (at target) under my leg... or would you rather I throw regular?"
Play to teach can be mixed in as a part-time objective. "Fake-oops, I dropped my card face up. What was it? What's something you might do differently knowing I have that?"
One can also optimizing for game interesting / fun. "Well I could use this card to wipe you out there, instead of discarding it, but this is so much fun, I want to fight it out".
So never "illusionary success", always transparent honesty. But being explicit that there can be more than one "game" at play. But also have to watch that this all doesn't become an "it's unpleasant to lose" avoidance strategy - if playing "for real", maybe that's to the bitter end.
That rule seems overly strict perhaps? Like if someone only says positive things, but only occasionally, then there is still a signal there.
Positive praise, if rare, with neutral (or no) feedback otherwise, can have a similar effect.
Which makes me confused by this quote: "... it suggests that children may not be as savvy as previous research has suggested."
Obviously a "helpful" clue that doesn't improve your chance of success (they always succeed) isn't really helpful. Isn't it quite savvy to recognise that?
If someone has gotten a better understanding of what they are actually trying to say I'd like to hear it.
There might be an interesting result in it somewhere, as it could be interpreted to imply that only slightly challenging kids in an educational context could lead them to believe that their learning efforts has no use if the challenges are adjusted to never let them fail. But I don't see how the results could be interpreted to mean what the title says.
So one adult was always giving bad advice and one was always giving good advice. But in half the games it was rigged so the child always found the toy even if they looked in the wrong places. The advice from the adults was still always bad and good advice for the rigged games.
Afterwards they asked the kids who they thought were more helpful. Even though one adult was giving bad advice always and one adult was giving good advice always the 4-5 years olds only discerned this if they actually lost the game when they didn't follow the good advice, even though the adult giving bad advice was always still giving bad advice.
I think the key is they must have rigged the game to ensure the bad advice adult was always still giving bad advice. If the bad advice turned into good advice in the rigged version then it wouldn't work, just like you said.
But yes, it's hard to determine whether this is how the experiment worked from the article. Unfortunately the actual paper at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022096516... is paywalled in the usual way.
Searching for
is usually pretty effective (and is in this case ;-) ). In CS you'll find a PDF hosted on the author's home page like 99% percent of the time. Other fields are more spotty, but this approach is still pretty effective.There was actually 4 similar studies described in the article. But the first one is the most important.
The setup was that the kid would watch a video where a toy was hidden in one of two cups. The helpful person would point out to the kid in which cup the toy was hidden. The unhelpful person would not give any hints at all but rather just explain which toy was hidden. The kid would of course follow the helpful persons advice, but would have to guess in void of any advice.
The kid would then get to guess in which cup the toy was hidden, whereafter the answer was revealed in the video. However, in the successful condition, the answer was modified so the kid would guess right no matter what.
This was repeated eight times, after which the kid got to choose which person would give them advice for four more trials.
It was in this situation it showed that the kids who had always been successful did not seem to value the better advice they would expect to get from the helpful person while the kids who had failed due to lack of advice chose the helpful person.
In the article they discuss this being due to the kid trusting their own ability to guess, not needing any help.
I'd say that the results are academically interesting as they increase our understanding of children's decision making. But I don't think they should be taken out of context and be applied as a some kind of answer on how to do parenting and teaching.
The advice was "good advice" in the sense of "if you had followed the advice, you would have found the item before the taking-pity-on-you time limit." But it's not "good advice" in the sense of it having any relation to where the item was ultimately found—and therefore it can't be inferred to have been good advice just from the evidence the child has at that point.
On the other hand, if the game is played iteratively (like an iterated Prisoner's Dilemma), it would eventually become clear (presuming the child managed to find the item by themselves some of the time) that there is this "taking-pity-on-you time limit", and that some of the advice has a correlation to where the item is before that time limit. The child would likely intuit the "taking-pity-on-you" moment as the true loss condition of the game, and become upset when it happened, just as if they had been told they lost.
While I never won, I was never discouraged, because he would always point out where I had made good plays and where I could have done better, in a very interactive manner.
This has got to be one of the best ways to learn.
When he wins, it'll be because he earned it, and I know from experience what a triumph that win will be.
The title is inconsistent with the article title, and even the article title seems inflated to what it describes.
As I understand it, the experimental group played a game they couldn't lose (rigged) and adults gave them "hints." The kids [correctly] identified that they weren't dependent on the adults' help in that group.
However, there doesn't even seem to be a link to the actual study anywhere, so I can't even check what this research actually is.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The "establish selective trust" phrase is much more accurate than just "trust" -- in fact, the current title on HN in strictly incorrect. The preschoolers don't have problems trusting. Rather, you could argue that they're more trustworthy when they never lose. It's the "selective" part that's important. (That said, this feels a bit pedantic to me, and it seems as if no one is confused by the difference in wording.)
The "Let your kids lose:" prefix on the SD headline (and not in the peer reviewed publication) could cut either way -- it might be link bait, but it's also not inconsistent with the researchers' advice.
Children were shown a video on a laptop featuring two containers. There would either be a helpful person or an unhelpful person who secretly puts a toy in one of the containers. The helpful person would then indicate which container they had put the toy into (either by pointing to the container or by lifting the containers to reveal the toy). Contrary to what the article says, the unhelpful person simply did not offer any sort of hint. The child would then be asked to select the container the toy was in.
I hope that clears things up.
From the article (and abstract), it's hard to imagine a game where the 'bad' advice is really 'bad' if (1) the player always trusts it; and (2) they then always succeed. In such a case, the forced-success may retroactively make the bad-advice 'good'. (At best, maybe the bad advice forced a slower completion? But that requires assuming some more complicated game.)
From playing the game of interpreting this article, I have concluded that neither the article author nor the researchers (via their original abstract) can be trusted to summarize such research in sufficient detail for unambiguous interpretation.