Copy That: Education, Being a Teacher, and Group Problem Solving

I have volunteered as a TA in various organizations for the past 3 years. I have volunteered in kindergarten, elementary school, middle school, and high school. If there’s one problem that’s the bane of my existence, it’s copying.

In our class we briefly discussed various techniques for controlling the spread of information across networks, especially in the aspect of problem solving. This caused me to think of the situations where I allowed copying.

Oftentimes, kids doing homework are working simply to solve the problem, not to learn the techniques used to do so. If one kid solves a problem, it’s highly likely he will be willing to show it to other students (coming from a homeschool environment, this was a behavior I thought to be quite peculiar.) Oftentimes, a class was simply too big for me to keep eyes on all students at all times; I often knew kids were copying answers behind my back, but there wasn’t too much I could do. Besides, I wasn’t the teacher; I had no real means to punish these students. The most I could do was offer my help if they were struggling.

However, last summer I was in a very different sort of teaching environment. I worked as an instructor at iD Tech camp, where I taught game design to kids aged 8-18. These kids all learned how to make games in a week, and went home at the end of the week with a finished game they could show their friends.

Oftentimes, a student would come up with a cool way of doing a cutscene, or an enemy, and pretty soon I would find this element in every student’s game. Actually, the more I saw this happen, the better the games were at the end of the week.

In this environment, there were no strictures on copying; in fact, it was encouraged. What was the difference between these two situations?

The key difference between school and iD Tech camp is that in school, students copy VALUES. What is the capital of France? What is 2 + 7?

However, in iD Tech Camp, every student is working on a different type of game. Therefore, there are no real “values” to copy, as every game project is open-ended. Instead, these students are copying PROCEDURES. If one student does something cool, the student next to him will look at his game and put that element in his game. Therefore, the student learns to APPLY the procedure in a new environment.

As we have become college students, we recognize that while copying values is an easy way out, the only way to truly learn is to copy procedures. The students at iD Tech internalize this approach from a very early age. One of the main critiques of the American education system is that this focus on values, with a respective emphasis on standardized testing, results in an environment where the rewards of copying correct values are too difficult to resist. It may sound like wishful thinking, but I hope that our education system can figure out a way to reward effective procedural copying. Only then will the vision of students soar.