A Riddle Wrapped in a Game
The 11th in the Egan Pattern Language
1. A problem
Schools have a weird magic: the moment they enter the classroom, sometimes even the most jaw-dropping epiphanies turn to ash.
2. Basic plan
Starting perhaps in third grade, turn science lessons into hyper-interactive intellectual quests. Turn one of the Secrets & Revelations° into a riddle — a simple question that students feel like they probably already know the answer to (but which they most assuredly do not).
Help them work together to figure out the answer.
To make it easier for them, sprinkle in stories, metaphors, vivid images, & experiments as hints. And to ramp up tension, limit the time they have to solve it — the whole class period, or perhaps the whole week.
At the end, if they haven’t figured it out, unveil the answer.
3. What you might see
Students shooting hands high into the air to play a part in solving a puzzle.
4. Why?
The two dominant approaches to science education — Educational Traditionalism and Educational Progressivism — don’t have that much to say about how to help kids feel the wonder of the world.
Traditionalism says “just give them more information!” while Progressivism says “help them figure things out themselves!” And, to be clear, a very gifted teacher can use either approach to bring students into the excitement of ideas. But very gifted teachers are rare; this doesn’t scale.
5. Egan’s insight
Where do we see this in the human experience?
Traditional societies don’t depend on once-in-a-generation teachers: if they don’t pass on what they’ve discovered about the world, they go extinct.
The societies that survived figured out how to weaponize certain forms of information — like riddles and games — to engage children’s attention, emotion, cognition, and memory.
We can use these, too.
How might this build different kinds of understanding?
Though this is grounded in the SOMATIC — kids’ natural predilection for 🤸♀️PLAYFULNESS — it dials that feeling up to 11 through the MYTHIC tools of 🧙♂️RIDDLES and 🧙♂️GAMES.
(What do these weird emoji mean?)
And, as said above, it uses 🧙♂️STORIES and 🧙♂️IMAGES as hints — forms of information which will fairly easily lodge themselves in students’ memories. Putting the answer as a 🧙♂️METAPHOR helps even the kids who came in knowing all the scientific terminology to see the strangeness of the world from a fresh perspective.
ROMANTICALLY, it makes it easy to celebrate the 🦹♂️WONDER of reality. And PHILOSOPHICALLY, it functions as a sort of bizarro 👩🔬SOCRATIC DIALOGUE.
6. This might be especially useful for…
Kids who need intensity to pay attention to anything.
7. Critical questions
Q: Brandon, this sounds HARD to put together. How do you expect classroom teachers to come up with these?
It is hard — and I know that, because I’ve put together hundreds of lessons like this! (I’m happy to let any school use the Science is WEIRD curriculum. Maybe I should dissect just one lesson on here, to show how this pattern looks.1)
Q: You mean, give them the videos, and have them hit “play”?
That would be fine, but I think the more promising option is to give them the notes, let them watch the videos,2 and help them perform the lessons themselves.
Teaching is a craft — it’s probably best learned through imitation.3 After a couple dozen, I expect most teachers to be able to make similar lessons themselves.
Q: So is this more Educational Traditionalist, or more Educational Progressivist?
This is a third way that gives both sides some of what they want. Progressivists might like that it gives kids quite a bit of agency, and thrusts them into out-of-the-box thinking. Traditionalists might like that it incidentally helps kids learn oodles of information
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8. Classroom setup
When we play a game, the historian Johan Huizinga suggests, we draw a magic circle, and insist that whatever goes on inside it is subject to different rules than those of the outside world. Imagine how a forty-four year old lawyer might act differently —
at a card-table
on a stage
on a tennis court
in a court of justice
It might behoove us to take this seriously. It shouldn’t be necessary to make an entirely different space — it might suffice to do something as small as turning everyone’s chairs 90º and leading the class from the front of the room.
9. Who else is doing something like this?
About ten years ago, it seemed like everyone was talking about “gamifying” education. I was excited — games were a cultural tool! This could work!
I don’t hear too much about gamification anymore. My hunch is that it was a solid idea that got sucked into the “this one weird trick will save education” media-hype machine, and inevitably failed to deliver what people promised.
(How to keep Egan education from getting sucked into this machine is probably something we should discuss, and maybe ask some veterans of educational reporting about.)
Anyone want to point to great examples of gamification that have outlasted the fad?
10. Related patterns
This weaponizes the intellectual content in Secrets and Revelations°.
This is a great way to make it obvious that knowing Origin Stories° is useful — students will pay attention to the story so they can, say, utilize the result of an old experiment to answer the riddle. As this requires becoming acquainted with a lot of new knowledge about the world quite quickly, this is helped along by Metaphors before Definitions°.
And this has certain parallels to Boss Questions° in math.4
If you’re interested in this, let me know in the comments — spurs to action are always helpful.
And isn’t double-speed great?
Which is itself perhaps the biggest tool in SOMATIC understanding. But of course I would say that — I’m just imitating Egan. (To be fair, I think he was just imitating René Girard.)
There’s a historical reason for this, which I had forgotten, and which Eneasz figured out anew: these riddles evolved out of the Boss Questions.
This is missing the "How this could go wrong" section. Off the top of my head, here's one failure mode:
Not all students get excited by riddles. Some get frustrated by the gnomic statement of the riddle, and/or freeze under time pressure. And if they hit a wall trying to figure things out-- or worse, when they see others get to solutions that they just couldn't intuit their way toward-- they can get discouraged and down on themselves. I know because I have been that student sometimes.
Ah! I think what I find lacking in these Patterns is an explicit "diagnosis." The implicit diagnosis seems to be:
> The reason schools are like this is teachers simply don't understand the value of engagement enough to prioritize it. Therefore, to fix this we need to preach Egan hard and creatively enough until people take his insights seriously.
Is that your underlying thesis?