

Result of Giving Poor Households Computer Vouchers - mhb
http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/03/one-game-machine-per-child.html

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tokenadult
I think parents have to actively and persistently encourage their children in
valuable habits (e.g., reading, drawing, outdoor exercise, music practice,
etc.) before the first computer games are allowed in the house. The computer
games are very well designed indeed to be a time-consuming form of playful
engagement. They rob time from the deliberate practice young people need to
become expert in something valuable. Fortunately, my oldest son now likes to
actually program, in a variety of languages, rather than spend much time
playing childish computer games. And my second son likes to write creative
fiction, although the computer games haven't lost their charm for him.

~~~
cia_plant
My parents were quite irresponsible, and let me waste my time playing video
games and reading escapist fiction, instead of doing valuable effortful
practice. When I went to MIT, I found that many of my classmates had been
neglected in the same manner.

~~~
swombat
Reading "escapist fiction", as you call it, is probably one of the most
valuable things you can do with your young mind.

~~~
cia_plant
Any discussion of education seems to bring up a whole raft of ideas about what
does and does not effect the young mind, and in which direction.

Plato, who was rather more observant and intelligent than you or I, felt that
young people would be best served by learning only valorous stories, which
showed just and good men triumphing and so on. He felt that the basic
components of education ought to be music and gymnastic; and that an
overemphasis on music would produce an overly intellectual and sentimental
adult (an overemphasis on gymnastic would produce a brute).

Views seem to have completely shifted, to the point that Plato's program
strikes one as absurd. However, I am not aware of any breakthrough in our
understanding of the nature of education: our modern ideas are based, like
those of Plato, on an observation of society, and of children, and of
education, all colored by our assumptions about what is and is not valuable.

When I tell people that I played video games and read novels, they are no
doubt inclined to think that I must have become smart and capable thanks to
the novels and despite the video games. Why do we think that way, and not in
the opposite way - that I became smart by playing video games, and despite
reading lots of books? When I solve a hard problem, it feels more like the
feeling I have in Quake, when I'm holding the entire playing field in my head
and keeping track of where my opponents could be, than like the feeling I have
while reading a book.

~~~
swombat
Plato was certainly smarter than both of us put together, but he also lived in
a very different cultural landscape than we do. What books were available to
young people then? Not many, I'd wager. The lack of suitable mass publication
mechanisms certainly reduced the importance of literature. And the vast
majority of the authors that I would think of as "great" had not been born
yet. It is debatable whether a landscape devoid of mass publication means
would still produce a healthy supply of great literature.

Since the printing press, we've had an explosion of amazing literature
produced and distributed throughout the world. Many of the greatest thinkers
of the last three centuries left their thoughts behind for us to build on. As
an added bonus, many of them left those thoughts in highly entertaining forms
that entertain and delight as much as they instruct.

It would really be looking the gift horse in the mouth to the extreme, to
demand that impractical scientific studies be conducted to "prove" that
humanity's great books make your life better.

Of course, we may have a difference of definition here. By "escapist fiction"
I assume you included most fictional works, including such masters as Gabriel
Garcia Marques, Herman Hesse and Jorge Luis Borghes, who definitely have the
ability to transport one outside of the real world into that of imagination.

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pragmatic
A different take: How much "homework" can you do on a computer? In college and
high school the only homework I did on the computer was typing (and later with
access to the internet, researching papers). I gamed a lot more.

It's really a condemnation of computers in education. You really can't do that
much homework.

Obviously today anything you want to know and learn is available online.

So as a reference tool the computer is unbeatable. However, as a learning tool
does the computer (much like the TV before) remains underutilized?

~~~
stcredzero
The best educational boost a computer can give is in the area of _using
computers_ and _programming computers_.

Measuring the effect of computers on homework presented primarily on dead-tree
media makes no sense.

Alan Kay and also the OLPC folks had this right: the biggest opportunity
computers give to expand a young person's mind lies in _tinkering with
computers_.

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frederickcook
I've got to say, thinking back on my own K-12 education, almost the entirety
of which I had access to a computer at home, I don't think I did a whole lot
of homework on it, and I definitely played a lot of computer games.
Additionally, if the teachers weren't giving out assignments that required the
use of the computer, which seems unlikely if not everyone has access to a
computer, then the computer won't be used for homework. Obviously, that wasn't
the goal of the program, and I"d be interested in hearing more about the
"increase in computer proficiency and perhaps some improvement in a cognitive
test."

Personally, I know that access to computers and computer science classes in
high school probably had a much larger impact on my interest and aptitude in
computer science.

Perhaps the program would be more effective by bringing computers into school
at an earlier age (combined with useful curriculum). I remember playing Oregon
Trail in computer class in elementary school (early nineties) and thinking
back, I really wish the instructor had shown us (me) a command prompt and some
Fortran or BASIC.

~~~
tshtf
I found Oregon Trail educational when I was young, but maybe in different ways
than the game's authors intended. In the early versions of the game, you had
to purchase food, clothing, and what not. I recall the prices of these changed
as you went to various forts.

The obvious way to win the game was to buy a negative amount of clothing when
the cost of clothing was high - the game performed no numerical checks when
purchasing items. You could survive the journey between two forts with a
negative amount of clothing, and when visiting the subsequent fort you could
purchase all the goods you would need for the entire journey.

~~~
moultano
It was just trying to teach you about short-selling and credit default swaps.

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dschobel
Reminds me of the program planned by the great Rod Blagojevich here in
Illinois (and made famous in _Freakonomics_ ) to send one book each month to
the homes of low-income families based on a prior study which found that there
was a very high correlation between kids having books in the home and their
performing well at school.

~~~
tjic
Idiot politician gets causality backwards; film at 11.

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jcl
_Not surprisingly, with all that game playing going on, the authors find that
the voucher program actually resulted in a decline in grades_

This is a little surprising, actually. The study showed the amount of homework
done is pretty much constant across both groups, and I'd expect that to be the
main influence on grades, not what they do in their leisure time. One has to
wonder what the non-game-playing students were doing in their spare time that
increased their grades, or what aspect of the games is hurting grades.

~~~
JeffJenkins
I believe that graph is about the time spent on the computer doing homework,
so it's possible the increased computer game playing took away from non-
computer homework.

~~~
jcl
I took a look at the paper, and that is not an unreasonable explanation... It
seems that the increased computer use did indeed reduce the time spent doing
non-computer homework a bit, although the data is quite noisy and may not be
statistically significant; TV viewing was similarly impacted. But what really
took a hit was _time spent reading recreationally_. I can't help wonder what
influence the reading had on grades relative to the homework.

Another thing in the paper that I found somewhat surprising was that slightly
different parental rules had markedly different effects:

 _Interestingly, we find evidence that the presence of parental rules
regarding homework mitigate some of the negative effects of winning a computer
voucher without affecting the gains to computer skills and cognitive ability.
On the other hand, the presence of rules regarding computer use reduce the
positive impacts on computer skills without improving academic achievement._

<http://www.columbia.edu/~cp2124/papers/computer.pdf>

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barrkel
My first computer had a broken cassette drive, so the only thing I could do
with it is program it, and I had to write a new program every day.

On the other hand, before I got the computer, I used to hang around at a
friend's house and program on his, even though he did have games that worked.

I think a happy medium might be some kind of Smalltalk system with a handful
of very basic games, to serve as some motivation to those not as empowered by
"READY." as I was, but with an open architecture so that everything can be
tinkered with. That, and versioning or forking so things can easily be brought
back to a working state.

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ZeroGravitas
What is the message (or "punch line") that is supposedly clear here?

It seems poor households have higher computer ownership percentage than even
the richest in this study, wich seems odd.

It also appears that while the poor have much higher ownership levels, they
proportionately play less video games (though it's hard to judge from the
graphs, note the scale changes from ownership proportion going up to 100%, to
play ever day proportion only going up to 40%).

I've read several other studies which claim introducing computers in homes or
schools is actually counter-productive if not done right but the rich/poor
thing seems just to confuse this issue, and I'm really not sure what point is
being made here.

Is he against computers or vouchers?

~~~
youngian
I believe the graphs are all post-voucher numbers. In other words, those below
the red line are the ones who qualified for the vouchers, thus the jumps in
ownership. The punchline is that while computer games increased substantially
because of the program, using computers for homework did not.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
I considered that, but since we don't have the pre-voucher numbers, how do we
know if it increased or not?

It all seem to rest on there being a discontinuity between those that are
nearly the same level of income but some get a voucher and some don't but,
strangely, the ownership level decreases as you approach the line, then
increases again.

The very poorest, with the highest computer ownership, appear to have the
highest computer study time too.

~~~
youngian
Quite possibly it's just quirks in the trendlines caused by small sample size
or something. I would imagine the original paper has more numbers and
information on methods, but sadly it looks like it's behind a paywall.

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tjstankus
My wife studies multi-modal literacy as part of her PhD studies. She was, at
one point, staunchly against letting our young daughter play too many computer
games, but as a result of her studies has done a complete 180. We monitor what
our daughter is exposed to, for the most part, but we find that introducing
her to games that stretch her skills in literacy, music, logic, etc. has been
really beneficial. The result? She was reading at 3 years old and reading well
by 4 years old. She just turned 5 and is into chapter books. Is this result
completely due to her game playing? No. But the games have definitely helped.

tl;dr version: in my opinion, based on experience, the right kind of games
will help literacy development

~~~
klipt
Would you mind giving an example of the right kind of game?

~~~
tjstankus
Most of the Nintendo DS games involve a lot of text. One example of a game
that she played quite a bit recently is Fossil Fighters. The Nintendo DS games
pretty much all assume you can read, though, so it's not hard to find ones
that develop literacy. She used to play the Leapster quite a bit. There are
many educational games for the Leapster. They develop skills that lead to
reading, but they don't assume you can read. The browser-based games are hit
and miss.

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Groxx
A perfect example of the dangers of differently sized graphs. The graphs were
clearly sized to imply that the increased use was almost all gaming, as they
sized them to line up nearly perfectly with the 10-hour charts. Note that the
computer-voucher side has roughly 2 hours more non-game, non-homework use, and
that in both, the majority of the time is still non-gaming and non-
homeworking.

What was it used for there? Browsing? Youtubing is not so useful, but there'd
definitely be some educational-browsing, and that's not testable in the
classroom. Giving someone a tool doesn't guarantee they'll use it properly,
but some do, and they're the ones who are more likely to _try_ get out of
poverty, instead of getting stuck where they are.

As to the decline in grades, I'd _definitely_ argue that an improvement in a
cognitive test - usually based around learning _skills_ , not whatever is
taught in class (typically rote memorization) - is far more valuable in the
long run. The ability to learn is invaluable and persistent, they'll probably
forget most of what was in the classes at that time anyway.

Scaled size comparison of the two voucher-charts:
<http://img687.imageshack.us/img687/9271/clearedup.gif>

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rlivsey
When I was at school I seem to remember that we weren't allowed to use
computers for most homework in order to encourage developing handwriting
skills etc...

Not that it helped, my handwriting is atrocious! That's mainly because in the
past 10 years or so I've hardly written a thing which wasn't meant to be read
by anyone other than myself.

~~~
sshumaker
I can do better.

My third grade teacher was a lovely woman but very old-fashioned, and at the
time very few people had a personal computer. When I handed in my first paper,
typed up using a word-processing program, she refused to accept it.

Why? Because she was convinced "the computer wrote the paper for me." I tried
to explain to her that computers as portrayed by the media (this was 1985) and
computers in fact were quite different, but she was firm. So I spent the rest
of the semester typing up my papers and then re-copying them by hand to hand
in.

It's funny to think that twenty five years later, the computer STILL can't
write my papers.

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coffeemug
The effect of giving computer vouchers to poor people in Romania is that they
go to places that will exchange the vouchers for money, and then lie on the
questionnaire about what they're doing with the computers.

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voidpointer
This leaves quite a lot of questions...

Were the homework assignments of a type were using a computer to prepare them
would actually help? Did the computers include the appropriate software that
was needed to do the homework? Had the homework to be submitted in paper form
and did the computers come with printers?

~~~
jcl
I found a copy of the paper here:

<http://www.columbia.edu/~cp2124/papers/computer.pdf>

The homework assignments are not described, but given that many students do
not have computers, it is reasonable to assume that the assignments at least
did not require computers. The computer vouchers came with free "educational
software", but few households installed it, and essentially no one spent time
using educational software, in either group. Printers are not mentioned.

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aarghh
I could not get to the original study, but the article seems to be cherry-
picking data. What was the time-line of the study? Is this a short term or
long term effect? Perhaps homework isn't the only thing that counts? Also,
what was the availability to broadband/internet access?

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bnomis
Source article
[http://blogs.worthpublishers.com/seetheinvisiblehand/2010/03...](http://blogs.worthpublishers.com/seetheinvisiblehand/2010/03/22/human-
capital-is-not-found-in-a-box/)

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steamer25
While I am generally opposed to government welfare programs, playing computer
games back in my day meant futzing with Extended Memory Managers, IRQs and Hex
Editors.

~~~
Karzyn
Perhaps, but sadly your day is no longer today and, by and large, that is no
longer the case.

~~~
steamer25
Good point that I forgot to mention ;) .

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tkahn6
Probably more valuable would have been the statistic of computer use devoted
to _educational_ activities (browsing wikipedia, learning how to program,
etc.).

Comparing "time spent doing homework" to "time spent playing games" is silly.
There is a constant amount of homework (once you're done, you're done) and
nearly unlimited amount of time to play games.

