In modern schools, most any deviation from prescribed behavior is considered "rule breaking". A kid playing a game they way they want to play it, rather than the way they were taught to play it, is a disruptive kid that needs correction by peers or authority figures.

I've seen this!

When the toddler plays an iPad game he likes to start by "failing" (choosing the wrong option, deliberately crashing a toy car, doing nothing at all) and watching what happens. It looks to me like he's basically experimenting - trying things and watching what happens. I generally just let him try and fail (and discuss what happened with him) and after about 1-2 minutes he tries the "right" thing because it helps him make progress - or hits the "X" and quits if he can't figure it out.

But some folks who watch him do this get pretty mad -- "no, kid, you're supposed to click on the blue one! No, don't crash the car, go down there! You have to push something!". This is an interesting philosophy, and while it's not one I share I'm not gonna intervene because he needs to get used to hearing this from people sometimes.

My 1 yr old does this all the time when exploring the world. I have had to tell my 17-year old stepchild who easily gets down on failures, that my role as a parent isn’t to protect my children from failure, but to protect them from catastrophic failure (ones that cannot be easily recoverable from).

Myself, it isn’t something I learned until I was an adult, encountering “growth mindset” and practicing martial arts. Failures are the foundation of growth and anti-fragility, and works better if you can un-identify with it.

I have this problem, and it takes concerted effort for me not to "fix" those situations. Even though I know they're better off if they figure it out themselves, my desire to "help" people is very hard to overcome. I use quotes around those words because I know that what I'm doing is not actually those things in many cases, and they'd actually be better off if I waited for them to ask for help.

This, so much this. Happens all the time both w/ the kids and at work. I've had to learn this one in both places and one helps the other.

I still find it easier at work. I find it's easier to distract myself w/ just answering some slack messages from someone else while 'looking interested' on the video call w/ someone while they figure something out after I gave them a hint. It was so much harder while at the office though and it still is so much harder w/ the kids.

How do you make yourself wait? I still haven't figured out why sometimes I can wait for them to figure it out and sometimes I can't.

How do I wait? Hmmm... Poorly. Like I said, it's a struggle. But I think in the end I remind myself what's better for them.

I think it also helps to think of myself in that situation, and what I'd want. I do not want people to take a puzzle from me. I'd much rather work at it until I'm frustrated, and I will actually lash out verbally if people try to solve it for me. So remembering that helps. But it's hard to remember that because most people actually seem to not like puzzles, and seem like they would rather just have the solution.

At work, I just give hints most of the time, and try not to actually spend any of my time on it beyond that. Things like, "I'm pretty sure there's a function that does something similar already. It's probably in the XY component?" and leave it at that until they fail to find it. But if it's a fun problem, I still fail at that.

A toddler probably gets as much 'reward' from the Skinner box like iPad games on failure as on success. It makes a noise, flashes an interesting image.

The reason to 'succeed' an older child is to satisfy the conditions and progress in the game, a toddler maybe gets equal reward (at first) because they don't see why driving further is success.

Once the novelty of the first set of sounds and images is exhausted then interaction products new images and so greater 'reward'.

Doesn't seem useful behaviourally?

Being able to control the game and progress on demand is still mastery, even if the spectacular failure is interesting to explore first.

I blow up plenty of things in Kerbal Space Program in interesting ways before deciding to buckle down and get more science.

Playing around with the "wrong" geometrical proof instead of taking the straightforward and known-to-myself approach isn't harming me, either.

Young kids like exploring the whole state space-- not just the ones we're likely to label as success or useful. Then at some point later they get afraid to fail-- especially to be seen failing. It's a mixed bag: motivation to push "forward" is useful, but fear of failure prevents deeper understanding or full effort sometimes.

Thinking "meta" this same behavior (adults intervening in how children play games) is analogous to the phenomenon described by the article, that is children correcting their peers.

It's like that with Lego.

Some people grab the bricks, mess around, create and destroy chaotically, explore.

But then there's this whole other culture. They create the thing described by the directions, step by step.

I was a combo of both. I would build the thing one time when it was brand new. It was a good way of learning how some pieces could be combined and be used in designs. After that, all the pieces got placed into big buckets for later assembly into whatever. I've never had a lego "build" last longer than a few days.

I think I treated Lego instruction books a bit as my bible. Thou shalt built this, at least once. Most of my creativity was in composition: I would built a city out of all those more or less built-to-instruction sets, and would overhaul said city every few months or so. Road plates would have sidewalks, roads with directions, that I would type and print on a computer, rail, preferable with a higher bridge somewhere every time. Once the whole city was built up and complete (no space left empty), I'd take it all away and compose a new city.

Man, we do both in my house.

When I was a kid, I mostly had pile-of-legos and not sets. I did very little following of the directions.

My kids *love* just messing around with piles of LEGO (and even Duplo) and making their own creations: mostly weapons. And they also love working on the 3000 piece crazy-complicated sets, presorting everything and figuring out where to put each piece step by step.

There's a whole lot of creative, unstructured play (not really heading towards mastery of sculpting or design), and a whole lot of concentrating replicating a model. It'd be kind of neat if they'd decide to do something inbetween.

When Flight Simulator came out, my first thought was to see what would happen when you crashed the airplane. People would actually get upset as I would try to crash it. These were adults! They'd get so into the game they were afraid of crashing the imaginary airplane.

(It was a bit disappointing, it would only freeze the screen and draw a crack across it!)

If someone crashes out of curiosity what happens then I think that's cool, but I have had someone deliberately crash it as a way of annoying me which I found quite rude (i.e. the equivalent of pretending to be illiterate in response to being suggested a book to read).

DCS (a military flight simulator) does have damage models for the aircraft - (especially in VR) getting your wing shot off is very fun

Surely by 2021 there is the equivalent of Burnout for aviation games?

Which is a contrast to say, watching what Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood teaches 2-4 year olds about conflict resolution, taking turns, and finding ways to play together.

You're talking about US modern schools, right? (Genuine question)

Not my school in the US.

Cynical me thinks there is no actual underlying experience driving the observation.

It was a pretty common feature of the schools I grew up in.

My second-earliest school memory was being asked to sit on my nametag in Kindergarten (the standard time out). We were doing an activity where we were supposed to circle whether something made a short or long O sound, and were listening to an audio tape with headphones. The words were printed on the worksheet, though, so I went ahead and circled all the correct ones and then sat quietly doing nothing. When the aide noticed she sent me to the tag on the carpet and then everyone forgot about me because I was so quiet. I would guess I was there for quite some time, but my 5 year old notion of time was wacked.

I have many more memories of similar things: being punished for doing math problems in different ways, or completing work early, mutually agreeing to play a board game by different rules during "free time", or responding to an essay prompt in an unexpected way.

I am now a teacher at an independent school which my 3 sons attend. Faculty tries really hard to avoid doing this. It is aggravating and difficult when you have 20 kids and a subset go off in a completely different direction than you were hoping to reach with the activity. I can totally understand that with larger classes like most public schools have, a worse behavior baseline, etc, how one would be tempted to leap to chastisement.

this was my entire experience in "computer" classes K–12 in the 90s–00s. never once were we encouraged to play around or try new things. we were taught to follow instructions to the letter to use computers to complete arbitrary tasks exactly as prescribed. the closest thing to letting us "color outside the lines" was letting us literally pick the color and bgcolor attributes for the HTML4 web pages we made for some assignments in "Web Development" class... in 2008. (of course about half of our graduating class had all already taught themselves rudimentary CSS to style their MySpace profiles a few years prior!) around 2004(!!) we spent a couple weeks learning HyperCard (in the Classic Mac emulator OSX used to ship with), and while I immediately recognized the possibilities for making games and interactive stories and all kinds of neat stuff using this then-ancient software, nope, just shut up and make this slide presentation about snakes or whatever like the assignment tells you to. I've posted about this here in the past but looking back I have this vague feeling that, at least in these computer classes, the teachers like barely had a grasp on how to do anything with computer outside of specifically prescribed tasks of the assignments they had us do, and were sort of scared of anyone like me who wanted to eff around and see what all we could do with the technology. part of me has always wanted to be a public school computer class teacher just so I can instill some of the sense of discovery and creativity that access to these powerful machines grant us, that I was never given in school growing up.

In a computer class in the 90s, it would actually have made some sense. Schools have never had good IT staff, and it was easy to screw things up accidentally. Hell, in '94 I was in USAF tech school and watched a guy answer yes to the "WARNING: This will remove all data on non-removable disk drive C:" prompt not 30 seconds after the teacher explicitly said that getting that message meant you had mistyped. Allegedly an adult, and actually a pretty smart guy, but still managed to render that particular workstation unusable for a while.

Today, the school uses disposable VMs which are built on demand and nothing the student does can render them inoperable. And Chromebooks that are similarly unkillable. Different world now than 25 years ago, for sure. My kids' school gives the students wide latitude to screw up.

reasonably fair assessment, but the problem with Chromebooks is that they're basically glorified smartphones as opposed to desktop PCs, in that they're consumption devices as opposed to creative devices. sure you can get various chrome extensions (presumably not on these school Chromebooks though) that let you get part of the way there—I passed my first semester of CS using only a Chromebook with the Secure Shell extension to remote into my linux box at home—but by and large the era of everyone having the untapped creative power of a cheap commercial desktop PC in their home is kind of over now, and in my opinion we largely squandered that wonderful time by not encouraging more young people to play around with them creatively.

In my last year of high school in the 70s, the school acquired a Business Basic 4 computer to do some of the administration work. They also created a computer class for the students, where we punched out programs on punch cards, and the teacher would batch run them overnight.

The teacher did not allow any students near that computer, as he was sure we were going to hack it and wreck everything.

(Yes, hacking was a thing even in the 70s!)

A valid point, although it's probably the article, not the study itself. The actual title is "Children across societies enforce conventional norms but in culturally variable ways". I say "probably", because I haven't looked into the paper - perhaps it does use this terminology after all (but I doubt it).

I don't think your criticism is valid. Children often play games that have rules. Comparing candyland or soccer or "block game we inevented for this experiment" to different ways of programming a loop misses the point.