 Dr. Gertzegger, thank you so much for taking the time for this interview and first we'd like to know how do you think technology can create productive context for learning for children? I think it expands the range of what's possible. It allows kids to have access to domains and fields and subjects of study that wouldn't be possible otherwise. That allows them to create in ways that would be unimaginable just a few years ago. So you discussed in opening your speech, you said that school is technology, so what did you mean by that? I think the invention of school, the structure of it, the practices, the policies are associated with this model of a building with little desks and a big desk. As I said, 25 little desks, one big desk, where the teachers at the front of the room, where they're presenting some information, hoping the students are remembering it, and that, like all technology, that technology is subject to change, subject to question, to evolution, and that if we think of school as technology, we're in a position to be better prepared for that evolutionary change. And we can start thinking about what are the affordances and constraints of that technology, what are the benefits and consequences, what do we gain by having everyone in the room together at the same time, and how can we best take advantage of that opportunity, as opposed to using it in a way that sort of wastes the time of the children or the teacher and reproduces activities that you could do elsewhere or on your own more efficiently. Okay, so do you think if there was no internet, can learning survive without internet? Yes. So why do you think that? You said that information access is only a tiny part of the education process, so can you elaborate on that a bit? Well, that's always been the case, but because we're talking about ICT, and information is at the center of that, and we think of the internet as being all-encompassing, that it's worth making the point that people have always learned by having experiences. They've learned through apprenticeship, through being mentored, through collaboration, through direct experience with nature, or with technology or machinery or school or art materials, and that those experiences lead to the largest gains in knowledge. Information just sort of fills in those gaps. Now, school has traditionally been largely based on access to information. Even if the internet didn't exist, the textbook does, and some teachers have almost what I call a faith-based relationship with the textbook, that it's treated as scripture and they just sort of turn pages and dispense information. Well, we know that we can teach them, but they don't stay taught, that a lot of that stuff you were taught in school isn't ever used again, isn't remembered after the quiz, and so it's always been the case that there's been over-reliance on information when it comes to education, when the really powerful educational experiences, the really powerful learning occurs when you're actually doing something. And when you add the sort of adult and political hysteria associated with the internet to the equation, it becomes a very expensive, torturous process in schools where we're on the one hand telling children that this is preparing them for their future, and they know for a fact we're lying to them because it's not even preparing them for the present that exists outside the school. When I was here last year, I had trouble getting my email the entire time I was here. When I walked out to the Sook, and there's open Wi-Fi in the street. So, why can't you be unfiltered, open access to the internet in the street and not in a school where there's supervision, and adults who can help children make sense of the world and become more ethical and better citizens. So there's this conflict, schools get very flummoxed up and confused by the internet, probably because what the children have access to is respected and coveted by adults in ways that, while we traditionally provided children access to, they didn't feel the same way about. So let me explain it in a different way. Neil Postman once said that the only differences between childhood and adulthood is biology and access to information. The access to information children used to have was stuff we didn't care much about. Cricket, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Barbie, children stories, fables, legends. Well, now they might put you out of a job. They might say my teacher is no good and tell the world. They may say the government is corrupt. Well, that adds a different level of threat to the adults in charge. And eventually I think we'll find an equilibrium, but adults are behaving very badly when it comes to the internet. And as a result, I don't want that to impose itself upon all the wondrous things we can do with computers and schools that are non-controversial. So I don't want this temporary controversy to confuse us and detour us and derail us from doing the sorts of things we can do with computers that everyone would think was valuable. Programming, building robots, composing music, creating animation, telling stories, taking photographs, making movies, creating simulations, conducting science experiments, writing. That's all incontrovertible. It's all without controversy and viewed as valuable, typically by adult society. If we get bogged down and focusing on ICT, then we worry about filters and policies and passwords and why doesn't it work. The computers in my house always work. I don't have an IT crew. And I've got as much sophisticated stuff as most schools. The difference is no one has disabled the hardware. No one has made it more difficult to use than it need to be. And that's clearly the case in schools. I haven't been in many Katari schools, but I know anywhere else I travel will give five-year-olds 47-character user names and change the passwords every two weeks because, I don't know, the Russians might find out or something. And so as a result, it just becomes tiresome and bothersome and confusing and technically difficult to support and expensive because we have a lot of personnel involved in this. And that doesn't inspire teachers to learn and grow and think about doing things differently. And it just raises the level of antagonism between children and adults. And I'm all in favor of anything we can do to lower the level of antagonism between children and adults. So why did you say in the conference that we need not protect computers from children? They're just computers. They don't break them. They don't steal them. They don't lose them. And if they do something really silly, you reformat the hard drive and start over again, they're just computers. They're just computers. They're increasingly inexpensive. We behave as if they're a nuclear secret stored in the seventh-grader's laptop and it doesn't make any sense. Everywhere I worked in the world, for example, we're giving kids laptops, the level of theft, breakage, and loss is lower than what you would find in a Fortune 500 company. The children take care of them. The logic in the United States was, my child loses her mittens. Well, they don't lose their laptop. The laptop matters to them. And if they do lose it, it doesn't matter to them. And it doesn't matter to them, it's because what they're doing in schools isn't sufficient. There was a case in Australia, 100 laptops disappeared from a school. It created a huge problem. That's a lot of money. Oh my God, all these laptops are gone. This proves schools shouldn't have laptops. They were stolen out of lockers during school holidays. So my first thought was, why were they there? They were there because they don't matter to the kids. And they don't matter to the kids because they hadn't become an integral part of what they do as being a child, as being a learner, as being a student at that school. So that was an indication. That was symptomatic of the school failing, not the laptops failing. Because in schools where the laptops matter to the kids, you can't pry them out of their hands and the children take care of them. The line that's often used is, no one washes a rental car. You don't return a rental car, you don't clean it out. And when it's your laptop, you take care of it. When it's a school computer, they're increasingly difficult to manage because they have a thousand drivers who don't care about them. So do you think that personal computing guarantees student involvement? No, I just said the opposite. And I said no. It could, and it could increase student involvement in ways we've never imagined before. And including teacher involvement. I made reference to this very quickly. But in schools and in universities where I've worked, where we've required teachers that have laptops or students that have laptops, it's changed their view of themselves. They dress better. They enroll in advanced courses. They apply for leadership positions. It changes everything. So it can. But if the school expects nothing of the children and doesn't create imaginative context for them to use the computers in ways that excite them, then no, it won't have that impact at all. It really saddens me when I go into schools and I see kids playing flash games on their laptops or staring at a webpage because they have nothing better to do. There's a million things they could do that would be a lot more exciting. What's really powerful is when the kid sits up in the middle of the night because they thought of how to solve the problem they're working on. Or time disappears when they're engaged in a project that really matters to them. That's what's possible. And if schools aren't achieving it, that's the fault of the adults. So what's your idea of a future classroom? How would it look like? Would it be any different from now? Well, I'm not Nostradamus. I won't be arrogant enough to suggest that I have a crystal ball or a predicted future. I will make one prediction with that caveat. Schools will no longer have the monopoly on children's time that they do now. And one sign that I'm right about that is how much policy makers in the United States and elsewhere think we need to lengthen the school day. That's the first sign that I'm right. That they're panicking and they're not learning enough to make it longer. It's clearly the case that people will be learning in a lot of different contexts and they may not be coming to school for as long. And if that's the case, we have to go back to that example I used in the school as technology. What is it we can do when we're in that space together that we can't do otherwise? That's really important. The second thing I'd like to say about the future of education is the future of education looks a lot like the past. And I don't say that nostalgically. And I don't say that as someone who's hostile to technology or to the future. I'm an unapologetic advocate of kids having access to as much technology as they can handle. But I think the lessons of John Dooley and Loris Malaguzzi and Seymour Pepper and John Holt and John Piaget and Herbert Cole and Jonathan Kozl and Deborah Meyer and Ted Seiser. Progressive educators who dedicated their lives to making classrooms less mind-numbing and soul-killing. Places that had animals and plants and blocks and toys and science equipment and dress up corners and books and excited teachers who had expertise in a variety of subjects. We need to get back to that. There's a lot of what used to happen in classrooms a generation ago or two generations ago that have disappeared as we've chased this elusive fantasy of every child. You know, getting perfect marks on some deeply flawed standardized exam. One of the things that the 21st century allows for is that education no longer needs to be based on scarcity. I should have said this clearer in the session I'll say this afternoon. Qatar has the opportunity to embrace a philosophy of education that allows a lot more children to succeed. If they were to follow a British model, it would be a huge mistake. Huge mistake. The British model has been rooted in classism for centuries. It's based on the notion that education is scarce and only some children deserve it. And they make little fluctuations and little tricks and come up with little changes over time. Like now in eighth grade you could decide whether you want to be a ditch digger or go to Oxford. Well, that's inadequate because that ditch digger should have the opportunity to go to Oxford too. And they may want to change his mind or change course or become interested in something else. And the Oxford student might find joy in ditch digging. But creating a school system that artificially ranks and sorts children is unnecessary. It's immoral. It's wrong. And we clearly have the case now because of technology, because of what the internet allows for, there's no reason why 10 more children or 100 more children or a million more children can't go to Harvard. And in old days there was a reason. We had a fixed amount of space, a certain number of professors. There's no reason why every child can't have a better education than they've ever imagined before. And if you were to follow a sort of structure that's based on creating winners and losers, that makes that impossible. And it does great violence to the future and to the hopes and aspirations of potential children. So in this session you discussed the personal manufacturing. And you said that kids can play a role in this realm. So what did you mean by that? How do you think that could happen? Well, at the most fundamental level, I think there's an awful lot that can be learned through the making of things. And that also sort of builds upon fundamental human nature and a desire to be creative and to make things. And that when you make things, you're learning a great deal and you're creating for an audience and you're connecting disciplines of science and math and art and literature, potentially. Or the arts and sciences, certainly. And the personal manufacturing offers a number of opportunities as well as challenges to the current school system. Increasingly over the last generation, kids have fewer and fewer actual tactile experiences where they make things. I'm finding a great number of young people around the world who have never had a conversation with an adult. They've been bossed around, they've been told what to do, they've been called names, they've been tested and labeled and rank and sorted. But they've never fixed the car with a neighbor or gone fishing with an uncle or taken a cello lesson. And so personal manufacturing represents a return to traditions of arts and crafts and science. And it blurs the lines between those arts and sciences and engineering and creativity. Engineers know what they do is creative. In schools we tell kids those things are separate. And despite the fact that engineering is a concrete manifestation of ideas, like you saw in the five-year-old building a robot that danced, the only way we let children study engineering is that they suffer through 12 or 14 years of mathematical abstractions. Only the kids who are the winners in mathematics ever get to do any engineering when if you watch a four-year-old they're engineering all the time. The other big idea of personal manufacturing or personal fabrication is the idea that we can use technology to solve small, personal, local problems. And one of the missteps of educational technology or ICT, if you will, is the notion that everyone in the world needs to be doing the same thing with computers. So I worked with one laptop per child, the folks making the $100 laptop for the developing world. And I can't tell you the number of people from education ministries who had Oxford or Harvard educations who caused untold mischief that got in the way of the children being able to get a computer that was for them. And that mischief manifests itself through saying things like, well, but children in Rwanda or Nepal need to run Excel. Well, why? And if you run Excel, then you can't have $100 laptop because you have to change everything in the hardware and the software to accommodate that. And that's just the prejudice and ignorance of the handful of elites in a society who got to go to a better school than anyone else in their country will have the opportunity to. And if you're in Nepal and the annual pupil spending is $40 a year, perhaps there are other priorities to learning Excel or making a PowerPoint presentation. The priority might be tracking your goats or determining if the milk you're buying is clean. And one of the things a personal fabrication has allowed is people to remotely use technology to solve the problems that matter to them as opposed to learning this artificial canon of nonsense that Microsoft Corporation created. Okay. So how do you think the... You said that education and computing should focus on the software and not the hardware. So for those who didn't attend the session, what did you mean by that? Well, as I said, software determines what you can do and what you do determines what you can learn. So I don't think you need to have a thousand pieces of software on a child's computer, but I think you need a handful of open-ended creative tools like some sort of rich programming environment like micro worlds or scratch or transform or inspire data that lets you visualize numerical data in a way that you can make sense of it that wouldn't be possible otherwise. A way to work process, a way to make a movie, a way to compose some music. Any emphasis needs to be on those domains and those skills as opposed to memorizing the menu options in the software. I can teach word processing to a three-year-old or a 80-year-old the same way. Look, you can type letters. Once you know that, you can save, you can print. That's all you need to know. Anything beyond that's an abstraction. You can figure out on your own. You know, specification, it doesn't matter. Yet in schools, we often spend three or four years teaching kids all the menu options in Word. It's just a waste of time. It's what a friend of mine, David Squires, called false complexity, that you teach all the bits of the software. It looks like you're learning something. You're really learning something when you make something beautiful, when you make something that matters, when you say something important in a coherent fashion, when you solve a problem, not when you can memorize how to change tabs or headers in a word processor. So having software that allows kids to be creative and to make things, I think, is really important. And it's especially important when people increasingly think that the web will solve all of our problems. Sure, there are apps on the web that let us do some things, and some things very well. You can't edit video that well that way. There aren't really good programming environments for kids. You can't compose music that way. So you still need software. And if we stop paying people to develop the tools we need, we won't have any tools. There's an open source movement, and they do some good work. They're very good at copying things that exist already. They're not very good at innovating or making things for children. And the stuff that's made for children is made by a hobbyist in two hours. And then because it's free, we think it's good. It's usually not good. The software that I mentioned was designed by educators and really clever computer scientists who spend a lot of time thinking about not only what features do children need to be able to learn and express themselves, but which features, if we inserted them, would get in the way of them learning. The software design process isn't just about putting stuff in, it's about taking stuff out. And the open source community is all about putting stuff in because the only way you have some sort of identity is by adding a feature. And some of the richest educational software, the best environments for children, have been carefully designed to not overwhelm the children by false complexity. Okay, so do you think really children can design games and... They've been doing it forever, and there's research to support it. It's a lot better than playing them. Kids are pleased to design games because there's a sense of pride, a sense of ownership, a sense of creation associated with it. Even if the product doesn't look like RAN Theft Auto 4, because to kids the process matters more. And the process is where they're learning anyway. And if they're working collaboratively, there may be some kid who's a better artist and another kid who's a better programmer and they can combine their talents to make something that has a product that looks better as well. But I've seen any number of really brilliant games created by kids where it's essentially stick figures moving. But all the logic behind it is really clever. The gameplay is what's really interesting, not the cosmetics of it. And we make the mistake when we think every time there's a new processor that we just have to make the fraction shinier and they'll dance better and therefore kids will learn something they're not interested in in the first place. Kids are making the software and it's been supported by research by Edid Harrell and others. If kids are making software they learn not only about computing more than other kids but they learn a lot more about mathematics and computer science and storytelling and planning and those kinds of skills as well. So before the break you were discussing the Regio Emilia and what happened there and why you mentioned this as a powerful tool for educators and cutters. So can you highlight on that? I think Regio Emilia, the small city of about 160,000 people in Italy is remarkable for their approach to education which is both subtle and beautiful as well as sophisticated and how they've been able to sustain these innovations for over 50 years or close to 50 years that students are provided and allowed to work with materials and tools that mirror the stuff they find in the real world. They have a commitment to the notion that if you give children paper cups and paper plates they never learn to handle glass and china properly. So when they have lunch they sit and serve each other family style with proper ingredients and utensils and children serve and help prepare the food and set the table and if two or three year olds are setting the table they're counting and measuring and dividing and speaking about the menu. But that's just the superficial stuff. The really subtle profoundly sophisticated work that you do Regio Emilia is listen to and observe the behaviors and the interests and the passions and the talents of the children and the teachers view themselves as researchers as investigators who are receptive to those intentions of the children and help them to continue to grow and develop in a way that's non-coercive in a way that supports them, that scaffolds their abilities and helps them move to the next level. So there are a couple of really beautiful examples that I think illustrate this point. One was the idea that I showed during the presentation of what's a very simple idea that can lead to very powerful learning. One of the things we do in traditional schools is it's Martin Luther King's birthday and we say to the kids, he had a dream, what's yours? And the implication being how would you change the world? Or how would you solve global warming? Or how would you solve human trafficking? Well those are really sophisticated problems that really sophisticated adults spend a lot of years trying to solve and maybe not solve at all. When we give children 30 minutes to solve those problems, we deny them authentic opportunities to learn and when we get as a result, it's just politically correct, parroting, not parenting, parroting, repeating, echoing of what we adults think they should say. So the approach that the regioeducators take is, isn't how would you change the world? But if you ask three-year-olds, can you build a park for the birds who come to visit? They can spend months or longer planning, collaborating, designing, measuring, cutting, hammering, nailing, gluing, experimenting with water and fluid dynamics or wind or paint and make something that they can completely get their head around. It's a problem that they can sense of. They can also get a clear sense of what else they need to know and what else they need to learn. Teachers can identify strengths and weaknesses and misconceptions kids thinking and seize the teachable moment to help them correct themselves from the inside, as Piaget said, rather than be corrected from the outside. And by extension, they end up creating something that's beautiful and that in fact does change the world, even if it's only their little corner of it. An excursion, a little project I saw a vignette of when I was in Italy in October was, teacher had an idea. Teachers have lots of ideas. This teacher's idea was they were building a new building, an international center to celebrate their approach to education. And they decided to take some of the children to see the exhibit. Now the first thing about this experience, which sets it apart from most western educational experiences, is that American teachers would take every single child to see the building. And in fact, the American educators who I was with sort of objected to the idea. They took Umbridge, the idea that you only took some of the children. You could almost hear them gasp like, you only took some of the children to see the building. That's not fair. That's not equitable. There's an injustice there. And the Italian educators viewed this very oddly. They sort of shrugged it off and said, the other kids were busy. It would have been rude to interrupt them to take them to see the building. And the idea was to go to see the building so that they could build a gift for the new building. So if you think about that, that's very much in a way that a little child thinks about the world. I'm going to give a gift to the new building. Like I would give a gift to my sister or to my uncle. And while they were there, something serendipitous happened. I talk about the importance of serendipity during my talk. The kids noticed there was this strange magic window on the wall. It was like at a 45 degree angle. And it wasn't a window at all. It was the shadow of the window being projected on a wall of old cheese warehouse. And the children became fascinated by the magic window. And why was it there? How did it get there? And why was it at that angle? And they went back to class. And now this was the genius of only taking some of the children. Because the kids who had seen it and the others were able to tell the ones who had it all about it. And they got the other kids excited about the mystery of this window. So now they took everyone back to see the magic window. And when they got there, it was missing. It's a different time of day. So the children decided to see and wait if it would come back. And they sat in for 90 minutes and waited for the window to come back. And little by little it was appearing. And they were animated and talking about where had it gone? And where would it go next? And they came up with these sort of anthropomorphic ideas of how the window was behaving and where it went. Maybe it has something to do with the sun or the clouds or the birds. And shadows of birds flew through the window. And they decided that we should keep the window. And the way they would keep the window was a kid got on a ladder with a big sheet of paper and traced the window. So they could take it back to their classroom with them. And as he was tracing the window, the window moved. And eventually disappeared. And all they were left with was the memory and the tracing of this window. And they had to months of explorations of light and shadow. And created this incredibly rich environment for kids to test hypotheses. It's an experiment. And if you put three objects on an overhead projector and when you're looking at it, it looks like a bridge. How come when it's on the wall it's not a bridge anymore? And what would it have to look like on the overhead projector for it to be a bridge on the wall? And transparency and opacity and light and shadow. It became a really sophisticated micro world. A really sophisticated laboratory for exploring really powerful scientific ideas. At a level that was completely consistent with being a young child. And the teachers don't decide that every year we'll do the magic window activity. Because next year's children will have something else to wonder about. So that's why I think it's really profound. They say absolutely brilliant things about children and the defense and rights and promotion of children. They refer to children with disabilities and learning difficulties as children with special rights. The city architect spoke to us about how they changed the central plaza, the piazza in the city to reflect the values of the schools the children had attended as small children. That the city invests 18% of its annual budget on early childhood education. So it's this magical place but the ideas are profound and can be applied in any setting. And I try my best to apply them when I teach at the doctoral level as well as when I teach at preschool level. And the part that connects it to ICT is as follows. They believe you use authentic tools. That there's no reason why a three year old can't use a box cutter or nails or saw or hot glue gun or a computer. These are things that are part of their world. It would be less responsible to protect them from them than to teach them to use them responsibly. And in a way that's important and expressive and solves problems that matter to them. So unlike a lot of early childhood movements that are hysterical about computers of sapping children of their creativity or robbing them of their innocence for millions of years of brain evolution. And I've heard all of that stuff. I think that the ballerina example I shared gives a lie to that idea. It sort of contradicts the notion that you can't use computers in a way that are consistent with the values we've left out for childhood development. But the regio people view computers in exactly the same way that it's part of the world of the children and it ought to be part of the way in which they learn and make sense of the world as well. I think that sort of playful tinkering with teachers investigating and guiding and intervening only when it benefits the child is really profound and sophisticated and important and worth sharing with a larger audience. And one of the things I read recently in one of my regio books is about two teachers would work together for years and were terrific as a team. And they decided they needed to go to separate classrooms or separate schools because they were no longer arguing. And they felt that they were like an old married couple. And they had reached a point where that was no longer benefiting the children. Because it was when the teachers were trying to make sense of what are the children learning? What do they understand? What might we do next? How about Jorge or Ahmed or Susan? I've never seen that before. How do we make sense of that? How might we intervene to help the kid develop? They found that when they started getting complacent it wasn't good for the children. And I think it's really important that I sit in that as well. That there's always something we can learn. There are always ways to improve our practice. And frankly when it comes to technology there was maybe a week, ten days at most in 1987 when schools had better stuff than the kids did. It was a historical accident. It will never occur again. It will never come upon us to be receptive to the tools and the learning invitations that exist in the world around us and find ways to use them to help kids learn and grow. So who or what is Generation S? Generation S was created by a friend and colleague of mine named Dennis Harper in the 90s. Dennis had brought computers to several dozen developing countries. He was one of the original professors of educational technology in the United States. He was someone who shared many of the views that I do and came out of the sort of school of thought of Seymour Papert of embracing technology as a way of empowering the learner. And Dennis became the technology director of a school system in Olympia, Washington and the United States and said the only way I'll take this job is if I could put kids in positions of importance. And he said 92% of the people in any school system are children and that's a resource that we shouldn't waste and we should take advantage of it. Kids know how to do stuff, they're curious, they want to contribute. So he went to an extreme where his children pulled the wires, they ran the network. When the community wanted to raise money for computers, the kids created the ballot initiative, they went to door-to-door campaigning for it. When the voters voted for it, they solicited bids, they interviewed vendors. There are still high-tech vendors in the United States who shake when you say Olympia, Washington because you can imagine their horror of having to negotiate with 14-year-olds. I think this was not something they enjoyed doing. In fact, I understand the kids still have a surplus. They're still money they're holding on to because they're so stingy. And when kids were in a position where they felt they could contribute to the school or to their community and share their knowledge with others, it benefited teachers. Professional development often doesn't work because it's in an artificial context. You go downtown, you go to another building. When it's in your classroom and there's a kid who can help you and when it's the kid's role, it's their job, it's their project and part of their schoolwork to help teach you to use technology in your classroom, you're going to get the help you need when you need it, where you need it. And that goes for technical support as well. Well, Dennis was smart enough to recognize that he was charismatic as a leader and he could do this, but maybe other people couldn't. So he created a curriculum called Generation Yes where the children learn the things we want them to know about technology and about using it responsibly. They also learn how to share what they know, how to teach. They learn what an educational standard is. And they then partner as their project with a teacher who needs help. And the genius of this is that if there's some teacher who year after year after year isn't using computers, the kids know who those teachers are. And what are they going to say when a child comes up to them and says, I'm here to help? They're going to say no. They're going to say, okay. And over time, the teachers get the help they need and then they become more responsible, more professional, you know, more modern educators. So that model has been used in lots of schools around the world, including places in Malaysia. Dennis was involved recently in creating the first school in Liberia in 20 years. And it's been a very successful model where there's longitudinal research to demonstrate that not only did the teachers say it's been beneficial in their own learning, but the students say remarkable things about what it meant to them personally to be able to contribute, to feel like they were part of the school as opposed to just some transient passenger who was passing by. And it's cost-effective. 90% of tech support is, did you plug it in? Or how about you try rebooting? And you've got kids around who could do that. Some schools build it to the point where they use the help desk software and the online mentors that are provided to do an extraordinary level of support where kids are on call. They get pagers in some schools where the kids are doing the sort of IT support that adults would be doing in a company. And it's not just free labor. It's not just child slavery. The children gain benefit from learning how to share what they know with others and how to make a contribution to not just some faraway land but to actually enhance their school because if they make their school better it eventually serves them well as well. So my final question. Why did you say that a good prompt is worth a thousand words? I probably didn't give enough time to this, but over time I've seen dozens about hundreds of times where I run a robotics workshop for four, five, six hours. And at the end of six hours people are able to construct a robot, have it work the way they had hoped, write the software to control it, deal with sensors and friction and gearing and all kinds of sophisticated engineering issues in a day. Or the girl creating the ballerina or the boy who programmed the phonograph. Those were the first things they ever did with the materials. And I started wondering how is it that if you worked through the two years worth of curriculum that's often prepared for these materials you wouldn't be able to create anything that's sophisticated. How is it that me saying to a little girl hey how about you build a ballerina or having a list of one line prompts like build a machine that walks a dog or build a phonograph could lead to such fabulous results without direct instruction, without testing, without quizzes, without teachers interrupting constantly. And my hypothesis is that if you have a good prompt, appropriate materials, sufficient time and a supportive culture, good prompt, appropriate materials, sufficient time and supportive culture you can solve problems that are much more sophisticated than you would have thought you could solve otherwise. And that's a challenge for schools because all four of those ingredients are self-evident. They're really clear. Everyone knows what more time means. Everyone knows what supportive culture means. Everyone knows what appropriate materials or a good idea is. If a school can't create a space, a context in which those four variables exist then they know what to do. But over and over again I've demonstrated and seen that if those four ingredients, if those four variables, requirements are present people can learn and do at an extraordinarily high level in ways they would not be able to achieve if they were merely taught. And I said earlier in the presentation that learning is natural. And you watch babies learn, you watch children develop language. There's any number of examples we have in our lives where we learn in a natural fashion, where it's important, where it's relevant, where it's contextual, where it feels good, where it's satisfying, where it's a value to others. And school is often devoid of those characteristics. And if you don't believe that learning is natural then you have to create all sorts of tricks and coercive tactics to get people to learn. And if you look at a traditional mathematics curriculum, there's a quiz on Wednesday, a review on Thursday, a test on Friday. Most of the children will know nothing on Monday again. And that's an example of we taught them but they didn't stay taught. But it's not an example of learning. And if we sort of focus on less rather than more and create experiences where you can explore a good challenge or prompt and have the materials and the time and the range of expertise and support of culture that's necessary for you to solve the problem that matters to you, you'll have a deeper, more sustained, successful learning experience. Thank you so much for doing this interview.