Educational Philosophy

[Jared Cosulich]

Peanutty is grounded in a lot of educational research that I've been
doing. None of it is particularly new, but it might be interesting for
people to learn more about it.

Most of it comes down to motivation. What motivates us? Once you have
motivation then everything else comes a lot easier.

Once a student (young or old) is inspired or curious then teaching
something becomes a lot easier.

If a person sees purpose in what they are doing, has autonomy in their
decisions (try forcing someone to do something they already enjoy and
you'll understand the power of autonomy - we need to be able to make
our own decisions), and sees progress in how they are learning, then
the intrinsic motivation will drive people to accomplish more than any
badges or leaderwalls or other game mechanics ever will.

Personally I think puzzles do one of the best jobs of capturing almost
all of these motivational factors. I wrote a blog post about it here:

http://jaredcosulich.wordpress.com/2012/01/05/puzzle-mechanics-are-better-than-game-mechanics/

When someone puzzles something out (they're not told how to do it,
they just figure it out on their own), the intrinsic rewards are
great. If you can create something that allows someone to constantly
make small observations that increase their ability to do interesting
things, then they'll keep moving forward, motivated by the progress
they are making. Interestingly if you lay out the path for them then
the motivation almost entirely goes away.

So that is what I'm trying to accomplish with Peanutty. Make it
intuitive without providing instructions. Allow people to use what
makes sense to them and have them discover the next more complicated
thing on their own, when they're ready.

People start by solving puzzles, using the visual tools available to
them (firing the cannon, etc). As they start to notice the code and
other solutions then they start to play around with that. Eventually
they dive in to the Level code and start playing with that. At each
stage they can enjoy their new found knowledge by using it to create
interesting things.

That's the goal, make it so that at any point during the learning
process you can accomplish fun and interesting things, but you get the
sense that with a little more exploration you can figure out something
new that will allow you to accomplish even more fun and interesting
things.

[Leif Segen]

I appreciate what you're doing - both sharing your thinking and the product you're making!

What age groups have you tested with? What age groups are you targeting? I've been teaching Processing to some 5th through 7th graders. They might be ready for this next.

[Jared Cosulich]

Leif,

Peanutty isn't intended for one specific age group. I'm aware of some high school classes playing with it as well as some middle school classes. I'm not aware of students as young as 5th grade trying it out, but I have no reason to suspect that it is beyond their abilities.

Right now Peanutty doesn't quite have enough structure around it to work for most classes. The classes that have experimented with it generally have fun, but it doesn't seem to have enough scaffolding to lead to a more in-depth experience similar to something like Minecraft.

Please feel free to try it out. There's a lot of stuff there that students can play with. You can create your own solutions to the challenges or even create your own levels, but unfortunately as it is right now it's unlikely that students will engage to that level without a lot of guidance.

Jared