To encourage innovative thinking, schools should let students work on semester-long projects, said Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak in a speech, reports Computerworld.
“A really innovative person is known for something that usually took an awful lot of thinking, maybe even over years, and a lot of development in a laboratory putting it together and getting it to work. And it’s new and it’s different. And it’s not something you read about in a book,” he said.
“In school, intelligence is a measurement,” he continued. “If you have the same answer as everyone else in math or science, you’re intelligent.”
In English class, students write essays that express their own ideas, Wozniak said. (He may be overestimating the creativity of assigned essays.) Computer science students also should seek “different answers than what I’ve known in the past or what I’ve read or heard,” he said.
Technology development projects reward innovators with a feeling of personal pride of accomplishing something no one else has done before, and “that’s the sort of thing that inspires you to believe in yourself as an inventor type, not just an engineer who knows the equation.”
“The value of these big projects is you learn diligence, lot of repetition. A lot of hard work results in something that’s your own. Your own. You built it. You have personal pride,” he said. “Personal pride is the strongest motivating force there is.”
Wozniak taught computer science for years in the public schools his children attended in Los Gatos, a wealthy suburb of San Jose.
As an example of what Wozniak is talking about, I highly recommend Neal Bascomb’s The New Cool, subtitled “A Visionary Teacher, his FIRST Robotics Team and the Ultimate Battle of Smarts.”
-->Filed Under: Education Tagged With: computer science, innovation, robotics, The New Cool, Wozniak
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Obi-Wandreas says: April 10, 2011 at 8:21 amI love the idea, but unfortunately we’re telling kids they can go to the moon when they have trouble crossing the street.
Any sort of advanced thinking, planning, building, etc requires a thorough command of the basics. Kids can build a fort out of couch cushions because they understand what pillows are. Kids can build with legos because they understand the blocks and how they go together. And kids can write songs of the genres they listen to because they are familiar with them.
In order for any sort of computer science project like that to get off the ground, the kids need to have a thorough command of the basic mathematics and principles which form the structure. All too few kids have that.
Woz is trying to take kids from the ground floor to the top floor. He doesn’t realize the problem, however – the kids he’s looking for are still in the basement.
Stacy in NJ says: April 10, 2011 at 8:39 amAnother problem is motivation. Tell kids they need to complete a semester long project and it just becomes another thing they gotta do. While some my have an interest they want to investigate others will simply go through the motions because it’s required. Forced innovation seems like an oxymoron to me.
Richard Nieporent says: April 10, 2011 at 9:17 amIf Steve Wozniak is anything like the way he portrays himself in his book iWoz, you probably would want to think twice before taking any advice from him. The best I could say about him is that he is unconventional. A more accurate assessment of him is that he is weird, childish, vindictive and irresponsible. However, he is a brilliant engineer. If you don’t believe me, just read his book. In it, he constantly states how much smart he is than everyone else. I am not sure that someone like that makes a good teacher.
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