this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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Tablets out, imagination in: the schools that shun technology (2015)
Feel like you should post this stuff in the Luddite community, not the technology community.
My kids who are now teens had ipod touches practically from birth (we got the first versions of the Ipad, raspberry pi etc). They looked so clever to non-technical people fluidly swiping puzzle pieces around on a screen in a UI language most adults at the time barely understood. Then one day I put a wooden puzzle in front of them and realised their touch puzzle apps lacked several degree of freedom available in the physical world and they didn't know how to rotate. The physical world is so much richer in many ways and skills learned in it are often more widely applicable.
It isn't that technology isn't valuable and can provide a benefit. It isn't automatically superior or more complete and some people fetishize it to a ridiculous extent. For decades kids spent a huge amount of time cutting and pasting content into powerpoint in primary schools here at the expense of illustrating, reading and hand writing because companies like Microsoft were engaged in a war for mind share. Most technical people like myself thought this was a very poor use of technology but less technical people probably thought we were luddites. I have seen my kids do animation and story telling with apps that I think is quite a good use of technology but I wouldn't deny them the experience of doing art with physical materials which I think in most ways is more foundational.
This reminds me of a time when I was a kid, drawing something in class, when I started drawing little colored dots, mimicking pixels on a screen. I thought computer graphics was so cool. I still do, but I did then, too!
I was fortunate that, for their first home computer, my parents sprang for a fancy 486 machine with a graphics card capable of 24-bit color. Thanks to that hardware and various pieces of graphics-related software, I got a solid understanding of pixel graphics and the RGB color system. I also learned fundamentals of graphics programming thanks to QBasic's built-in support for VGA graphics modes—I'd imagine a shape, then figure out how to teach the computer to draw it using QBasic's graphics primitives.
I also had traditional art supplies as a kid, but they went mostly unused. I gravitated hard toward computer graphics. I think it's because I was fond of pretty lights as a kid, and what's a computer screen but an array of several million pretty lights?