Well, it’s been long time since I was in school, but I can tell you one thing I was bored out of my mind in elementary school, junior high, high school, and it wasn’t until college that I really felt challenged, probably because I was taking 33 credits in one semester. In fact, I can remember telling some of my classmates that I believe that our school system was nothing more than prison for kids, and later I likened it to day care center for working couples’ children – I kind of still believe that. Okay so, let’s talk about this for moment. Specifically, I would like to address the issue of student boredom.
Now then, as the class sizes get bigger, our education system will rely more on computerized teaching to tackle the challenges and economies of scale. It will also help the budget which is burdened by legacy costs, top heaviness, and over regulation from the federal level, things like NCLB for instance. What about the future of education, digital learning tools, and our new social networking in information age?
There was cool little article recently in SpaceDaily entitled; “New computers respond to students’ emotions, boredom,” written by Staff Writers at Notre Dame and published on March 07, 2012. The piece stated:
“Emotion-sensing computer software that models and responds to students’ cognitive and emotional states – including frustration and boredom – has been developed by University of Notre Dame and colleagues from the University of Memphis and MIT.”
Neurologists have discovered that just before human makes mistake, their brain wave has little flicker, and interestingly enough, many videogame companies now have brainwaves they can induce into the player for emotions such as fear, contentment, love, and anger. This makes the game seem more real, tapping into the emotional component of the human brain. Since emotions such as boredom or frustration is rather easy for artificial intelligence, we have delightful opportunity at hand.
In fact, many help-lines in larger corporations now read the voice of the person calling in needing help, and it can tell if they are frustrated, angry, and then decide what to do about it. You see, these types of similar tools for education make lot of sense. Students that are enjoying their subject matter will learn better, and isn’t that the goal of teaching. Putting kids in large classrooms and making them do rote memorization is cruel and unusual, and it’s time we stopped creating schools which were nothing more than prison for kids. Please consider all this and think on.
