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3 Tech Skills That Help Kids Hack Real Life

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This article is more than 9 years old.

The other day my niece and nephew came to visit. They walked into the house and were drawn, almost magnetically, to the table where all of my gadgets were laid out. They caressed my phone. Fondled my digital camera. Gazed curiously at my noise-cancelling headphones. Petted my back-up battery. Admired my ThinkPad.

Like the Sirens of Homer’s Odyssey, anything that had a microchip hiding inside beckoned these two teenagers. At first it was a little creepy. Then I reconsidered. While some adults worry that smartphones, tablets, and too much screen time is destroying the next generation, I remain optimistic. I see a lot of valuable life-world lessons that children can learn from playing video games, watching Netflix, and learning to code.

Parents and adults, however, need to be mentors and guides. Teach children how the lessons of digital life can be translated into real-world, everyday, tangible experiences. If we let them figure it out all by themselves, it is our fault if it doesn’t look the way we want.

Here are three ideas for how to make the most of your children’s obsessive relationship to 21st Century Technology.

1. Chat Etiquette

Anyone with a nine year old can probably guess how much time my son spends playing Minecraft: as much as he can. I am not a big fan of restricting screen time, but he’d play all day if I didn’t stop him. My compromise is usually to require other things rather than take away screen time. I like to frame other things as a positive, not turn something he loves into a negative. I say, “You need to read for a while, you haven’t done that today.” Or, “we’re going for a hike.” Yes, he still resists, and I then I exercise my authority. But the key thing is that I haven’t driven a wedge between his world and mine.

I wouldn’t want to do that. There’s a lot of good lessons kids can learn from Minecraft. I’m sure you have read lots of articles about the positive benefits of Minecraft. I have written many myself. One about how Minecraft is shaping the thought paradigms of Generation Blockhead. One about the differences between passive and active screen time. And quite a few about the ways Minecraft is being used in the classroom.

These days, however, one of my favorite things about Minecraft is that playing and chatting on servers has taught my nine year old son quite a bit about communication and conflict resolution. I noticed that when he’s scared of getting kicked off his favorite servers, he excels at controlling his emotional reactions. All the stern lectures in the world will never be as effective as the kind of intrinsic motivation that one experiences when he wants to fit into his own social milieu.

Recently, I figured out a way to summon his Minecraft social skills beyond the bezel of his laptop.

When he is really frustrated because of a conflict at school, with his friends, or fighting with his little brother, I simply reframe things in a way that makes him think about Minecraft. I say, “If this were happening in Minecraft, how would you handle it without getting kicked off the server?”

“First, I’d try to write to the person making me angry.”

“Right. Choosing the right words can be very persuasive.”

“Then, if that didn’t work, I’d log off for a while or go play something else until I cool down or the other guy leaves.”

“Right. So what could you do in real life?”

2. Buffering in Real Life

When my kids were little, I refused to fast forward through the opening title sequences of movies. I figured if they always had to wait it would feel normal, they would be used it. I didn’t want them to know you could skip the boring parts. I thought I was teaching them a valuable life lesson about patience. It was the media equivalent of the marshmallow test.

When they discovered DVR and video on demand, I worried that they would be spoiled—that they’d think you can always have entertainment when you want it. I lamented the fact that they would never know what it is like to suffer through boring infomercials, or wait impatiently for a half hour to pass before a favorite cartoon began. I was wrong.

I hadn’t yet considered the frustration that comes from buffering.

When we stream Netflix, or Amazon Video on Demand, the three of us joke that it always seems to need a moment to buffer during the most dramatic part of the story. At first my kids were frustrated, and then I told them to take a minute to be in the present, to pause and appreciate the tension created by the narrative. They looked at me like I was crazy.

However, the word “BUFFERING” has since become part of our everyday lexicon. When tempers are about to explode, when the boys have an over enthusiastic case of the “gimmees” or the “I wants,” I call out, “BUFFERING!”

We all imagine an hourglass, a spinning arrow, a progress bar, or dots moving across the screen for about 30 seconds. It creates a pause, a moment of repose and reflection. It works just like “time-out” but without the humiliation. It teaches them to stop, think, and make better choices. It often teaches me to do the same.

The other day my seven year old called “BUFFERING” when I was screaming, “get your shoes on!” while rushing them out of the house in the morning. After pausing, I didn’t rush any less. But I quickly realized that my raised voice and high anxiety wasn’t really helping achieve my objective.

3. Everyday Open-Source

In our individualistic culture, we often neglect to recognize group efforts. Despite knowing that most of the best ideas were developed over long periods of time through cooperative and iterative conversations among groups of people, we continue to narrate history as though single visionaries developed all the important innovations with single spark of revolutionary imagination.

On the contrary, everyone who had an MP3 player before iPods existed knows that Steve Jobs only brought a more sophisticated intuition about marketing and user interface to products that had already been around for a while. Still, we celebrate Steve Jobs the visionary, holding him up on a pedestal of individual genius. Even when we rightfully commend Steve Jobs only for iterating existing technologies with design-thinking genius, we neglect to recognize the team of exceptional collaborators that contributed to Apple’s best products.

Likewise, Darwin was only the one theorist among his contemporary naturalists who was best at articulating the idea of natural selection and transmutation of species. That’s how scholarship has always worked; data is shared. It’s open source. Each researcher makes a baby step and we iterate together toward human progress.

When we collectively perpetuate the notion of isolated individualism, we raise a generation of children that are so afraid of not getting personal recognition that they guard their best ideas against intellectual patent infringement. Instead, we should show them how open-source software works.

Sharing is not just about toys and snacks. When kids help each other level-up in a video game, they are not cheating; they are learning how human progress truly functions. When one person can’t overcome an obstacle, a colleague helps. Our corporate culture, which privileges competition over collaboration, is reflected in our educational dependence on standardized test metrics and personal grades. Instead, we should be emphasizing collaborative project based curricula that teach kids the value of transparency and iteration. The values that make open source initiatives successful.

Encourage your children to take part in "open source play."

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