cc Erik Hersman

When the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that children under 2 spend exactly zero time in front of screens, what its members are concerned about is substitution -- all the time those children aren't spending acquiring new skills and language through one-on-one interaction.

Yet a new effort by researchers at MIT’s Lifelong Kindergarten group will attempt to create a programming environment suitable for toddlers. It's hard to imagine that any but the most precocious children would be able to interact with Scratch Jr. before the age of two, but as Heather Chaplin reports for KQED, the new software will be aimed squarely at children who have barely learned their colors, much less how to read.

“What’s most important to me is that young children start to develop a relationship with the computer where they feel they’re in control,” [says Mitch Resnick, director of the Lifelong Kindergarten group.]

The advent of touch interfaces means that children are spending more time with computers than ever. More than two hours of screen time a day has been linked to psychological problems, but short of that, wouldn't children's screen time be better spent mastering new skills?

Programming, in particular, is the new literacy. If children are exposed to the alphabet from the time they can sit up, why wouldn't we introduce programming as early as possible?

Scratch, Jr. is a re-designed version of Scratch, which has been used to teach programming principles to elementary school-age children. Gone from Scratch Jr. is are the reliance on text and colors that young children have trouble distinguishing. The entire interface is to be simplified, even gamified. Chaplin reports:

The group has also been studying tutorials in videogames, which teach kids how to play without realizing they’re being taught. “We want to add something like that to Scratch Jr,” [says Marina Bers, a graduate student at MIT’s Media Lab.]

To the extent that adult education in programming -- via sites like CodeAcademy -- is currently in vogue, it's only logical that we should be trying even harder to make an education in programming as essential to a child's education as all of the other areas of study that we consider essential.

Some aspects of education -- especially mathematics, which requires repetitive practice -- seem like they could easily be adapted to the video game format, where players are encouraged to play over and over again until they master new skills.

A study of the effectiveness of one video game designed to teach linear algebra, called DimensionM, revealed a significant difference between a control group, who received traditional mathematical instruction, and a treatment group, who played the DimensionM game.

Owing perhaps to the limited statistical power of their study (which included about 200 kids), the researchers don't make any attempt to quantify the difference that the game made, other than to say that the students who played it in school did better. Past studies have revealed mixed results for the use of games in the classroom, but the authors argue that this is precisely the point -- any game that's to be used in school should be evaluated in a controlled study first.

In terms of the larger implications for education, it's worth noting that this school district, which was somewhere in the Southeast U.S., was relatively low-achieving to begin with. So arguably the study's results are more likely to generalize to similar districts. In fact, a growing body of educators are already arguing that the world's worst-off children are better off being educated by machines.

Educational games have come a long way since the Cave of the Word Wizard and Dungeon of the Algebra Dragon, and DimensionM typifies the changes that have taken place. Not only does it take place in a three-dimensional world, but it's also multiplayer, tapping into kids' natural inclinations to both compete and cooperate.

Given the level of math phobia present in American schoolchildren and the sorry state of financing for education, it's worth asking whether or not the trend lines of declining quality in education and increasing quality of educational games have already crossed for a significant portion of American students.

Here's a graph I just made up right now to illustrate my hypothesis. No doubt it will be showing up in authoritative reports sometime soon, after its origins have been scrubbed by the Internet.

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