Maintaining Interest

If you have children you are probably familiar with a certain pattern that goes something like this:

• Your child is exposed to a [sport/musical instrument/game] via a [friend/tv/school] and decides [he/she] really wants to do that activity.
• You sign up the child for expensive lessons, and they attend with great enthusiasm initially.  They practice their [sport/musical instrument/game] constantly.  After a while it becomes part of the routine.
• One day the kid has a fit when they have to miss [friends birthday/baseball game/movie] because of the activity, and announces they don't want to do it anymore.  
• After a few weeks or months of fighting it you withdraw the kid from the [sport/musical instrument/activity].
• Your child announces that they desperately want to do a different [sport/musical instrument/activity] and it will BE DIFFERENT THIS TIME!

I think every parent has gone through this a few times, and it's a constant battle with any child.  Our older boys, Niko and Sebatian, have been in Boy Scouts, soccer, piano lessons, karate and I'm sure a few others.  Soccer is new so they are still in the enthusiasm stage.  Boy Scouts and karate are both in the "done" phase.  Boy Scouts in particular makes me sad because they had a lot of friends they don't see anymore, but the constant battle with the children made it impossible to enjoy the experience.  The exception to the rule is piano lessons, which the boys still attend with the same enthusiasm they had when we signed them up years ago.  What makes it different?

In the book "A Theory of Fun for Game Design" Ralph Koster posits that we stop having fun when playing a game when we stop learning, or when the learning becomes to hard.  As an example most people lose intrest in a game like Space Invaders fairly quickly, because it's gameplay doesn't really change.  Once you figure out a few patterns, you're done.  On the other hand many people, myself included, don't play more elaborate role playing or strategy games that require 500 page manuals to understand.  It's simply too hard to get started.  A game like Angry Birds hits the sweet spot for almost all gamers precisely because it's easy to get started and it's gradually increasing challenge ensures everybody keeps learning through playing.

Kostner's idea is relevant to parents because he applied the idea of learning to something we don't normally associate with learning, video games.  In video games the skill you are learning is the game itself, but what we take that idea and apply it to actual learning.

Looking back on the past for Niko and Sebastian they lost interest in karate because they didn't go enough for it to provide a consistent challenge.  Eventually they were doing the same thing over and over again, so they got bored, and once some of their friends started saying soccer was cool and karate was lame they didn't want to do it anymore.

Boy Scouts, for all its virtues, had a similar problem.  Boy Scouts go camping, then go camping again, and again and again and again...taking up many a Friday night and weekend with activities that grew repetitive.  The children are supposed to learn skills during this time, but as parents we found that the kids were probably relying on the parents too much to do the hard work to learn anything.  For instance they still can't put up a tent.

With piano lessons the boys have an incredible and patient teacher who does a fantastic job of giving them music that challenges without discouraging.  As such even though lessons are on Friday afternoons after school, when many of their friends are getting ready to attend dances or whatever it is eight graders do these days*, they rarely if ever complain.  If they do say anything they ask if we could make it a different day, but quitting never enters their head.

If you've made it this far you probably are wondering what this has to do with Leilani and her Spanish lessons.  Well every once in a while Leili says she doesn't want to go to Clase de Español, but in the end she always wants to go and always has a great time, because her teachers intuitively understand the Theory of Fun.  She learns a little bit more each week, without being overwhelmed, and tells me all about it when she's done.  Hopefully we can keep it that way.

* The use of this phrase proves I am old.