Skip to main content

The Rubiks cube and peer learning

When we were children, the Rubiks cube was a source of immense fascination. It was eminently unsolvable and those who solved it came on TV news.

Somehow, it never struck us then that it had to have an algorithm to be solved.

Cut to the internet age. Every kid has the cube and the algorithm and after that it is no big deal at all. Layer by layer, they get it.

And thats when the fun ends. If it is a matter of just knowing the algorithm, whats the big deal?

 No, it has not been dumbed down, even with the algorithm it is a great learning - for visual patterns, memory and even the 'aha' moment.

So, from being an inscrutable mystery, the Rubiks cube is a great learning tool and like kids competitively reading books to keep pace with each other, the Rubiks cube is a quest for mastery among the kids.

I love the way kids learn competitively. When kids learn together and learn competitively, they learn well -helping each other and making each other better.

And that is a great recipe for a peer learning process. Except that kids grow up to be adults...

Hint: Self Motivation :)

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The man who saved Pumpelsdrop

This was a story we had in college if I am not mistaken. Perhaps it was in school, but a delightful story it was. The story goes somewhat like this ( reproduced from here ), but the college version we had was slightly different from this.  I t was a dull, gloomy and a depressing morning in a town named Pumpelsdrop in northern England. The Great Depression had brought all the businesses to a standstill. The bored automobile dealer was spending time alone, as usual. But, this seems to be an unusual morning as an odd entity (customer) appeared on the horizon. A man in a bright suit walks up to the dealer and says, "I need to buy a Rolls Royce Phantom II. We have a business conference coming up and I need to impress my customers". Then proceeds to pay 10% of the deal with a single check for 2000 pounds. The rest he says will pay when he takes the delivery.   The auto dealer was stunned. He was delighted to hear that someone is holding a business conference of some kind and

The Mintzberg triangle

At a recent training, someone spoke about the Mintzberg triangle. I located it here . Image from that page reproduced here. The page linked above has a better explanation of diagram above, but what intrigued me was that the triangle exists for practically anything. The facilitator referred to this in the context of facilitation. Of how facilitation has science, craft and art to it. That is so true,  I thought. Worth a thought! Need to read of Mintzberg though...

Waigaya and Sangen Shugi - Honda

Two big takeaways from Driving Honda were Waigaya and Sangen Shugi. A few days ago, we were working on a strategy module for a company. As we leafed through old and new theories and books around the same - one comment which caught my eye was Henry Mintzbergs comment where he says "Strategy is like weeds, it has to grow all around your company" A lot of times organisations dip into their pool of employees (and sometimes customers) and solicit ideas from them. This happens either at an offsite or a meeting or some quarterly review and the ideas pile up. Most companies today have an innovation program that encourages bottom up ideation. Many of these ideas are future strategy - provided someone is listening. Sometimes these ideas are not immediately implementable - but if one keeps looking, there might be valuable stuff in there. And if (post such programs) ideas die very often, the motivation of someone to keep doing it will also diminish. Waigaya is what Honda call