Does learning have to be torture?

I think that there is almost no one among us who, at least once in a joke, when we were little, one of the "older ones" did not say the irritating "Are you studying or torturing a book?"

For me, learning has always been a pleasure - I read encyclopedias, novels, collections of stories, dictionaries. By no means do I want to convey that I recommend for the mother to be inactive. I simply absorbed the information and knew how to use and present it without the whole process making me happy!

But today, more than ever before, teaching a new generation of kids is torture. Parents and teachers today - again more than ever before, at least in my subjective conviction - complain that children do not read, learn and are not interested in learning.

What's the problem now? Insufficiently inventive teachers who do not know how to interest students or a generation of students who are really so lazy and careless as to resist any attempt at learning.
Okay, there are teachers who really don’t like their job and don’t bother and there are kids who aren’t “warmed up” to learn, but I think we’re at some invisible turning point in consciousness - analog and digital consciousness and teachers are analog and students digital.

It seems that all these children are interested in is scrolling on the touchscreen, liking, tweeting, pinning, whether there is wi-fi or not, preferably on an iPhone or iPad, at least in dreams, and if nothing else, then on some "more modest" mobile device.

It all drives their parents and teachers crazy.

I absolutely adore gadgets - I can’t spend five minutes without looking at a tablet, one wonderful invention that gives me enough space to read everything I need and even write, which my cell phone, no matter how big, doesn’t allow me to . I am addicted to these devices, I admit. And I have no intention of reducing the amount of time I spend there. I use social networks a lot in the promotion of my texts, especially those on the blog, and I even choke the newsfeed with my posts.

Why not use this passion of the generation that is replacing us to give them knowledge?
The concept of edutainment has long been known. You know - these are those educational shows, like Sesame Street, a series of documentaries, entertainment shows in which you learn along the way. Of course, we remember Branko Kockica and a number of other shows that taught us teamwork, friendship, phenomena from nature and society.

The problem with this concept is that the creators of such content seemed to think that education is a kind of bitter pill that must be taken, a kind of mental fish oil, which must be packed in a candied wrapper in order to have a beneficial effect. This bitterness of education and its subsequent sugaring is not exactly the best solution. Especially not today, in a world where television is slowly, almost imperceptibly dying out and being replaced by digital media.

However, the biggest problem of edutainment is the passivity of the audience - when you watch the show, you do not participate in it, everything is served to you. I'm not saying that such shows are not good and that they should be excluded from the program (well, there are almost no such shows on our televisions anyway, unless someone remembers to repeat something from the eighties), but I'm saying that we should aim for something more modern, something more interactive. . Because-look - these new kids want to make decisions, they want to actively create or at least have the illusion of making decisions, rather than sitting patiently and waiting for something to be said to them.

So what could be an alternative to edutainment?

Here it is - it's called playful learning.
"Learning through play" is not an unknown, uber-modern concept either. The Montessori system applies it, but on a prehistoric, analogous level. However, the means by which playful learning can be achieved are becoming increasingly high-tech. You see, computers are a bit out of fashion, unless you are a professional who needs a machine for something more than Facebook, email and Viber.

Applications are a hub around which many things happen. Trying to create mobile apps that would provide a new learning environment through games is something to think about. Games with vivid colors, stylized characters, with conquering new levels, multi-ending stories, all spiced with information from science that needs to be mastered and used - well, that's a concept to think about. It would be convenient if these games required the use of a scientific method - from hypothesis through experiment to proof.

For now, there aren't too many applications like this - if there are any, they are either pre-amateur, poorly designed or not dynamic enough. Of course, there are also quite good ones, but they are not available for our area.

Of course, one should not even think that such applications could replace teaching - but it would be great to develop them so that they can be a kind of homework and a convenient addition to teaching.