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Comment by tubelite | Hacker News Reader

Serious question: Has anyone tried this out on actual children? How did it go? Maybe children can more easily accommodate the number of arbitrary elements and rules the game requires, because as an adult, I find the alligator motif actively confusing.

Using concrete names, people, chocolates rather than abstractions usually helps a lot in teaching, because it leverages existing mental models and reduces the cognitive burden of tracking abstract tokens and behaviours. In this case, the alligators and their eggs behave so differently from anything familiar (egg hatching to whatever the parent ate?!) that I find the cognitive burden increases to the point of giving up. IMHO, for adults, a straight-up explanation with abstract symbols would actually be easier to comprehend.

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I've been playing through Light Bot with our 7 year old. I always like when he gets to the levels where he needs to use functions, because he's learning about programming without even knowing it. He doesn't try to discern deeper meaning, he just enjoys playing the game and making the tiles light up. [1]

If you can make learning enjoyable, then the cognitive burden can be quite high, so long as the kid has fun with it.

It's the same with Settlers of Catan, supposedly a game for 10 years up. Our 7 and 9 year olds are doing just fine with it, picking up the strategy about as fast as I am, because it's fun!

The thing I'd not be sure of with the alligator game is whether kids actually find something like that fun... that's the real question in my mind. :)

[1] http://armorgames.com/play/2205/light-bot

> In this case, the alligators and their eggs behave so differently from anything familiar (egg hatching to whatever the parent ate?!) that I find the cognitive burden increases to the point of giving up.

I imagine, in this case, it's because us adults are (a) trying to figure out what exactly (what computing concept) Bret is trying to explain while we come across each rule and (b) trying to find logical explanations for everything. Children are not burdened with these things, and I'm guessing would have no problem going along with eggs that hatch into whatever their parent ate.

Personally, I think it's really cool. Real-life play-testing definitely required though!

I think I agree with the GP. I just tried to explain this to my 5 y/o (admittedly she is possibly too young).

Questions I faced:

"Which alligator is the mummy?"

"Why does the alligator want to eat the other one? Don't alligators eat people?"

"Where is the pink alligator?"

"When the egg hatches will it be a boy or a girl? Because I don't like boy alligators."

We had a lot of fun, but it didn't come anywhere close to achieving any kind of stealth learning outcomes, which seems to be its intention.

We tried it on CS students. Anecdotal evidence says some more easily understood the traditional math. Others understood the alligator approach first.

The man it was made for tried it with his daughter: http://wadler.blogspot.com/2007/05/oh-no-alligators.html

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