[ExI] toys rewiring kids' brains

[spike]

We have seen the comments on how video games are rewiring our brains, with
the modern generation of kids having an entirely different skillset from the
ones you and I developed in our own misspent childhoods fooling with Rockem
Sockem Robots and board games and such as that.  One thing really caught my
attention on this Christmas morning.  The kids all got legos (they love
those things, as I and their parents did) but there is a critical
difference.  Now all the legos come in kits that make some specific thing.
The kids follow an instruction book to make the set.  Tragically many years
ago, we kids would get legos in the form of a bucket of plastic bricks full
stop.  I don't remember seeing any instructions or sketches of things we
were supposed to build.  We invented stuff.  We could stay busy for hours
just building random things of lego blocks.  Now, they follow as specific
instruction set, and end up with a closed-ended finished product, with a lot
of very specific pieces, rather than about a dozen or so generic blocks.

 

Many of us here will spend part of this day with kids, relatives perhaps, or
kids of friends, so we will get to see what I am writing about.  Now the
task is to extrapolate what happens when kids who grew up with these kinds
of highly specific toys do in the real world, where everything is
accomplished by following a specified and well-documented path to success
with little room for deviation.

 

spike

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