Participating in Play
Shared experiences are what children crave. They want help, choosing paths. If they can not get guidance from me, they will bring their passion for technology to a friend’s house and find it on those devices.
Children naturally try to draw me into their digital world — and I let them. I look for ways to learn about them and how they think by using their language of games and play.
This is what we do:
- I look for moments of “co-playing” and unstructured play.
- I demystify technology, and do not enshrine it.
- We create self-confidence in play, and self-control.
- We focus on teamwork and cooperation.
- We learn from failure.
Many times, the instinct to “disappear” into the digital world is a replacement for the real-world interactions and communication that people need but cannot immediately get. Often, I find that children do interact with each other, and me, while fully immersed in a game or device activity. When this happens, I treat it as a golden moment.
Scroll to the bottom for questions and academic resources to back this up.
Co-Playing
Groups of children at a very young age will “co-play” near each other. They are not cooperating or sharing toys necessarily, but they are sharing space and “being social” in a way that is primal and real. Witness groups of teenagers or even adults doing the same thing while focused on their devices.
You will hear snippets of conversation, spontaneous laughter that merits explanation. You will see subconscious ticks, and posture that belies the inner workings of the mind. Like you, I used to scoff at this behavior. Now, I observe closely and learn about the person putting themselves on display without thought of being watched.
They are people “in the wild.”
With children, I find that this kind of close examination is critical. I would never give a power tool to a child and then allow them to use it unsupervised. By watching them, adjusting their posture and ergonomics, and tuning in each and every time they exclaim, I am teaching them a valuable lesson.
Children walk along the future’s edge, and deserve a guiding hand.
I like to let them know that they will be observed. I let them know that I am available for questions or for help with a difficult part of the experience. Even if I can not see what they are doing, I can keep a close ear on what the boys are hearing.
This is how I am always ready to capitalize on the “teachable moments” and participate in their digital life. I long for the ways that my kids draw me into their experiences. I jump at the call to “Look!” or “Watch this!” or “Check this out!”
If possible, I like to set them up with an activity that requires my interaction. I can solve a puzzle game with them, or learn an epic game story side-by-side. My younger boy will sometimes watch me play a difficult game. I make sure that I only progress when he has read the in-game numbers or his older brother has read the in-game messages.
Demystifying Technology
Children will have a much richer digital destiny than ours. They deserve access, and the practice of control. Not only will the programmer’s path open up opportunities for them, it will decrease the effect of being “spellbound” by software.
I have found that once I have built something that runs on a device that I use every day, the feeling of power and control is enormous. I want that for my children. It is the first step to understanding why things are built the way they seem.
Here is how I do this:
- I teach them about networks, and the difference between WiFi and cellular signals.
- Let them help me restart the device when it freezes.
- I teach them as much terminology as I can (e.g. “crash,” “bug,” “glitch,” “error”).
- I help them to understand that software is made by humans, who sometimes make mistakes.
- I avoid generic terms like “hack” for more precise terms like “program” or “build.”
I sometimes show them what source code looks like, and demonstrate how I build stuff. While this may not be practical for most people, just taking a look inside a web page is way easier than it sounds, by enabling the Develop menu on Safari for instance.
The more we as adults keep ourselves informed about the way things work, the less our children will feel mystified by it. The less mystery there is to software and technology, the less intimidating it is, and the more control children will feel.
I will never forget the power I felt after installing my first program on my own iPhone. I will never personify my gadget again—it is not a companion, it is a tool. The truth is that any amount of personal discovery we can do will help our children experience this power — even if that discovery is at the most basic level.
Just because a person lacks a degree in Computer Science should not mean that they must forever remain bewildered by the way the digital world works.
Always be curious.
Igniting Imagination
I am constantly amazed by my younger son’s imagination. He can turn a stick into a hundred things: a light saber, a wand, a probe, a scanner, you name it. To him, the world is a fort, a game board, a play ground. I think as we get older, we lose that sense of impermanent reality.
My goal as a parent is to nurture that flexibility. If I can transform the hallway into a tunnel, and the kitchen into a base, he will play along gleefully. I throw away the rules. Just because I am “hit” does not mean I am down. If I am “down” I am not down forever. I will get “healed.” I will “bargain for my life.” I will change sides in the conflict.
The more I give into his imagination, the better the play goes. I realized one day that I am not supposed to “win” when we play. I am supposed to be “got.” I am supposed to lose spectacularly. I am supposed to be foiled, trapped, disabled, or immobilized. This is so he can monologue.
Imagination for him is sometimes about reenactment. If I can guess which scene he is playing out, it is easier for me to play along. My favorite is when he twists the scene slightly, adding his own interpretation of the goals. I am always searching for the goals in his play, to help him achieve.
Creating Self-Confidence
His older brother is different. He wants to win as well, but it is more about skill and less about “rules.” What is “fair” to a child is so different than the adult version, and I have realized why. Fair is when they have a chance at winning. The whole world is a set of odds stacked against them, because they are smaller, slower, and not as smart as most of us.
If I give them a glimpse of the world where they can win against an adult, their self-confidence soars. Imagination and creativity are 100% self-confidence. They are the product of a will to overcome odds. They are the solution to the problem of boredom. They are the result of overcoming negative emotions.
Creativity is the way, and imagination is the vehicle, towards fun and happiness. All I ever want to do is allow my boys to create meaning in their lives by using their powerful little minds to overcome the odds against them.
It is too easy to knock a person down, and too difficult to build them up. All it takes is the wrong reaction to someone’s achievement, and they are crushed. If I ever notice that the boys react positively to a compliment, or tell me they love me, I am on alert to figure out what exactly I did right.
Happiness is a byproduct. I have noticed that contentment is the result of achievement and meaning in a person’s life. I cannot “make my kids happy,” but I can help them be successful, and help create meaning out of life’s challenges. They will be happy and content if they know I love them no matter what.
I think self-confidence comes from that knowledge, that they are loved. No amount of telling them will sink in, I have got to show them. I start by loving myself, having confidence in my own abilities as a father, and the right actions flow from there.
In my experience, ”creating self-confidence” is a combination of three actions:
- Demonstrating confidence and agency
- Promoting self-control
- Accepting results
For children, play is the real work of childhood. Children treat games and playing like a job, and rightfully so. The mysteries of social interaction and fairness and imposing one’s imagination are best discovered when learning by doing.
That is why, when I am invited to play with boys, I take it super seriously. If one of them makes a rule or puts me in a role, I become the part. I take it to the next level, like this:
- Let them win, until they let down their guard.
- Get comically upset when they “beat me,”
And I would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for you meddling kids!
- Let them cheat if they want.
Oh no, not the Wuxi finger hold!
My favorite thing to do, though, is to stack the rules against myself.
Promoting Self-Control
At some level, I would be happy to see my children become proficient at certain video games. After all, I spent hours with my siblings and my friends (and my dad), bonding over Legend of Zelda and Super Mario Bros and even arcade games like Galaga.
These days, e-sports are a true path to economic success. Video games can become not just a parent-child bonding experience, but also a means for older children to connect with real-life friends remotely or in person.
I know that the Internet can be a scary, dangerous place. I severely limit intercommunication to games and specific messaging apps amongst trusted contacts. This is a crucial first step towards learning responsibility online.
My children and I sometimes text message one another from across the house. It can be just as exciting for them as writing to a pen-pal, and they get the thrill of doing an “adult thing” and reading a special message from Dad.
When the children are using the iPad for instance, I often take the time to clean up or do other chores. I am always ready, however, to participate in a moment of fun, or intercede when there is an issue. That screen is their steering wheel, but I push the pedals.
A Focus on Teamwork
There is a philosophy of parenting and technology that I have discovered. It is on the extreme side. I call it “technology All-In Scenario.” This is where parents not only permit high levels of device usage, or gaming, but actively enable it. In this context, technology literacy is the goal.
This attitude can take a few different directions. In one direction, children become proficient gamers and some even pursue professional esports careers. In another direction, children become proficient programmers or designers of software and hardware.
These families look for ways to support and showcase their young talent. I have seen countless examples of this, from LEGO play into robotics competitions, and music mixers into performance art. My friends and I hold a contest every year that draws hundreds of strangers together in a safe, controlled environment for the purposes of helping each other extend these passions, and bring new ideas to life.
Founded in 2007 as iPhoneDevCamp, one week after the launch of iPhone, iOSDevCamp has become a Silicon Valley tradition. Inspired by the principles of Open Source contribution, participants bring their ideas and find great teams to collaborate and cooperate. Over the past nine years, our group has produced ten camps, and has distinguished itself as the most diverse group of designers and developers in the area, boasting 25% women participants in our idea contest last year.
The community and this event have given rise to rock star founding teams, brilliant apps, and solid startup companies. Winners and sponsors of our contest have gone on to ship and sell to big name companies all over Silicon Valley.
Our event is a small miracle of volunteer organization every year. It is a large-scale event, incorporating people from all over the country and sometimes the world. Anyone can do this, however, if you follow some basic principles, and get similar results at your own scale.
Our focus on teamwork means dedication to the following principles:
- Contribution
- Collaboration
- Community
- Mutual trust
- Shared ambition
Often, I bring my two young sons. The last time I did, we discovered the joys of 3D printing, and I partnered with one of our sponsors later that year to produce a custom Delta for them. Through debugging and fixing the printer together, the boys now know the language and discipline of engineering:
Measure, design, build, test, debug, repeat.
One year at Developer Camp, we had a group of young girls accompanied by two moms. They did not know how to program, and in fact none of them even had access to an iPad or any device over the weekend. However, they had experience playing games, and they had a fun idea for a game of their own.
We set the girls up in a large area of their own, with giant pads of paper and markers, in a section of the space where there was a lot of foot-traffic. The moms stayed with them as mentors, but largely left them alone while they designed and drew the five screens they used to explain how their app worked:
It was called Topple, and the goal was to see how tall you can build a tower before it falls. The girls found out how iOS uses a basic physics engine, and relied on that to provide the “intelligence” inside the app. They found out what “sprites” are, and learned about the technical language of developers.
When it came time for the demonstration, each of the five girls ranging in age from 5 to 11 each took one big sheet of paper and narrated the action inside the game. Their presentation was the most concise and endearing demonstration at the camp. They won for Best New Developers that year.
For the girls, participation took the form of playing games, learning about the parts of a game, and making important decisions about what parts to design and what parts to leave to the imagination of the audience.
For their parents, participation felt like teaching. It looked like asking questions of the real programmers at the camp. It sounded like asking questions of the girls. It felt like encouraging them to make their own decisions.
This is a case of the minimum technological effort. This is a case of focusing on the user’s experience, and acting like a designer more than a developer. The best part of this story took another two years to unfold.
Next Level
The eldest girl came back the next year, and participated on a winning team, helping them test their app and learning more about the basics of programming. By the following year, now in middle school, she had learned enough to become powerful.
Her parents lent her a machine for the weekend, and sat with her as she physically programmed Topple with the help of other programmers on site. She got one of the screens working to the point where the blocks would stack and fall, according to the basic math contained inside Apple’s developer kit.
Of course, she won Best Young Developer, this time by herself on stage, performing the demonstration completely and on time.
Participation means encouragement. It means pointing the child towards resources that can help them learn. Participation means lining up examples, and answering questions with questions.
Do not let this aspiration intimidate you, but instead use these moments as time to learn together. In the case of our winning girls, it means teamwork and persistence.
Participation builds confidence in a way that only happens when an adult acts a little more like a kid, and a kid grows a little bit older in kind.
Anyone Can Do This
I once met this nine-year-old boy at my Developer Camp event named Yash. During our pitch sessions, I spotted him in line for the microphone, clutching a notepad of his own writing. He seemed nervous, and my job is to make sure everyone is comfortable, so I joined him in line.
Yash said he had an idea, but he was not sure if he should mention it. I offered to help, and I held the mic while he kept both shaking hands on his pad of paper. He told the audience that he wanted to stop bullying in his school. His idea was to use a device of his own design, and he needed help coding it, using the network, and also he needed someone to help with the artwork.
At this point, his 30 seconds were up, but I kept him up there.
Let me get this straight. You are how old? And you are here with your dad. And this is the first hackathon you have ever been to. And you need a developer, and a designer, and you are going to keep kids from getting bullied at your school.
Yes. Applause.
After that, he had two developers come up and volunteer to help, but I knew his journey was just beginning. I told his dad to keep bugging me for help and connections. The next day, Yash ran into a problem with networking that his helpers could not fix. The only person I knew with skill in this certain area was not at the camp, but we are really close so I just called him.
Eugene spoke with Yash and his dad for an hour, trading code and secrets online. They solved it together, remotely from New York to the camp in San Jose. I still owe Eugene big time for this one, but it was not over. Yash needed design help.
I think, by the end of the event, Yash had gotten help from pretty much everyone who was available to help. Of course, making the app work is only half the battle. He needed help presenting, too. Obviously his dad is amazing for bringing him here, and helping him solve problems, but the demo needed one other person.
Bully Watch
I volunteered, and here is how it went. The app is called “Bully Watch,” and it consists of a small wristband with network access. For purposes of the demo, Yash’s dad operated the app while Yash spoke. The principle is to alert people that someone is getting bullied. As soon as a threat appears, the user taps his wrist.
On the screen, the wristband turned from white to orange. Now everyone around the user can see that he or she is feeling threatened. But of course, some bullies are only encouraged by this. They want the target to feel intimidated, and so a signal like this might not work.
In the case where the user gets continuously bullied, he can tap the wrist again. On the screen, the wristband turned red. This is where I came in. The app actually sent an SMS to my phone, in the audience, and I rose up and acted like the Vice Principal. I read the message aloud into my microphone, completing the demonstration.
Bully Watch notifies adults when kids are being bullied, with the name of the child, optionally with their location. Yash won for Best Educational App, but that is not the end of the story.
This All-In Scenario is where a child’s interest in technology consumes them. It attracts other members of the family, and positively affects their relationship. At a certain point, parents and siblings get drawn into the child’s pursuit. In this case, Yash came back the next year.
This time his idea was about conserving water. He and his dad and his team built an app that listened to the sound of the shower, tabulating the amount of time family members ran the water. Then, it scored the family based on the speed of their routine. Of course, he won again for Best Environmental App.
If we are conscious about how and when technology emerges in a child’s life, we can feel confident getting immersed when the time is right.
What To Learn From Failure
I have been all over the world, helping communities to follow this model of teamwork and success. The place where most cultures fail is, ironically, failure itself. Supporting innovation means understanding and learning from failure. The large majority of startups will fail, and it takes a special kind of savant to keep trying.
Where I am from, you do not know what a person is worth until they have faced humility and risen above. Where I live, to fail is to have tried something big in the face of overwhelming odds. Silicon Valley is so mythological about the “pivot” that it almost celebrates failure.
In my community, we have a special award for those who make it all the way to demo time, only to have their presentation marred by technical difficulties.
We call it “Best Sacrifice to the Demo Gods” and they get a real prize plus the “opportunity” to babysit the giant “idol” that we have for this category. If they return the following year with the idol intact, their “karma” is lifted and they get extra consideration.
This practice embodies the principles behind our philosophy of learning from failure:
- Competition
- Cooperation
- Inclusion
- Inspiration
- Iteration
If you are not failing often, you are probably not trying hard enough.
I have failed many times trying to develop this framework — but as my professor once said:
“On a good day, we fail in a really interesting way.”
REVIEW
Think through these five questions to give yourself space, and stretch your imagination:
- How do adults “co-play” in the same way that young children do?
- What are ways in which technology and software seem “magical” to me, and what myths can I dispel by learning a little more about them?
- How do I demonstrate self-confidence to my children?
- What are some games or digital activities that promote ongoing collaboration between me and my child?
- How do I personally learn best? By trial and error? Reading? Watching? Via projects? Or do I learn by teaching? Whichever way that is, how can I recognize the best way that my child learns and participate in that?
For more learning on this subject, I recommend some educational theory:
- My former Harvard University professor Dr. Howard Gardener wrote about the theory of multiple intelligences. Everyone does learn differently, and it is worth your time to discover your best way, and think about how that differs from the children.
- Another professor of mine, Dr. David Perkins runs Harvard Project Zero, a group that studies the arts as a cognitive activity. They conduct investigations into the nature of intelligence, understanding, thinking, creativity, cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural thinking, and ethics.
- My former mentor Dr. Seymour Papert pioneered constructionism, or learning by building and doing. At the MIT Media Lab we learned the motto “Deploy or Die” which basically means that we must always be sharing our work with others — like here at Tech Wild.
- My son’s former teacher practiced something like “play therapy,” which helped me structure my home environment more productively towards fun and learning:
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