Not Your Old-School Systems Thinking: Using New Media to Learn by Play
by Janice Molloy
As we reported in a previous blog post, the MacArthur Foundation is funding a research project on the development of systems thinking in middle-school students called "Grinding New Lenses: A Design Project to Support a Systems View of the World
." Indiana University professor Kylie Peppler, one of the principal investigators along with colleague Melissa Gresalfi, generously took time from her whirlwind schedule to answer questions about the project by email.
JM: How did you become interested in systems thinking?
KP: I became interested in systems thinking because of my interest in design, games, and learning, and particularly the work of Katie Salen and Mitchel Resnick. Systems thinking appeals to me because I'm interested in the interconnectedness of ideas, building bridges between seemingly different domains, and finding ways to be a vehicle of change in a time when it's badly needed. Systems thinking prepares us to see and act on the world around us.
JM: Why do you think it is an important area for students to learn about and experience?
KP: The 21st century requires youth to think across the disciplines. While schools are set up to teach disciplines as separate and distinct, as adults we are asked to think across and apply these skills, knowledge, and dispositions in our everyday activities. Schooling is increasingly fragmented and doesn't allow young people to develop the type of interdisciplinary thinking necessary for today's workforce. Systems thinking then becomes one way to unify the curriculum and to encourage youth to see patterns in all disciplines but especially science, mathematics, history, literature, and the arts. Additionally, as youth come to understand systems and how they operate, they are well positioned to act on them for change.
JM: Can you talk a little about the idea of having kids create their own simulations? How do you see this developing and why do you think it's important for students to learn through "play"? What do you think they will take away from the process?
KP: Much of the prior work on complex systems has focused on kids playing with variables on a pre-designed system, including termites, traffic jams, or other systems that are of interest to kids but with which they have little first-hand experience. As we move into new media and begin to use some of the latest tools available, we can now allow kids to create their own systems and teach them the language of systems thinking. This is an important distinction, mostly because kids can build simulations of systems that are important to them, but they can also "play" with the entire system, which is the case in game design. Games are really systems that kids have deep experiences with in their entirety. With these other systems, kids have little to no experience. I'm hoping that this is a generative distinction in our upcoming research. We're very interested in understanding the contribution of games and design to the development of a systems thinking disposition in young people.
JM: I notice from your website that you are a visual artist. What do you see as the connections between art and systems?
KP: In my view, the arts, design, and systems are interrelated in important ways. Artists and designers tend to have a good sense of the "way things work" precisely because they have built, tested, and evaluated their ideas many times over. In a sense, they are constantly building models of the world around them and finding ways to communicate their ideas to large numbers of people in a visual language. I am also interested in environmental art, media art, and other artistic forms that have addressed the notion of "systems" in their work directly, whether that be an environmental system or in highlighting digital media as a complex system.
JM: What kind of response have you received from colleagues and others about this project?
KP: There has been an overwhelming amount of excitement and enthusiasm for the work. There is a clear need; many teachers, schools, and after-school centers are anxious to be beta-testers of the curriculum.
JM: What is your hope for this project over the longer run, in terms of the implementation of the curriculum standards and beyond?
KP: We have pretty modest goals at the moment but are hoping that our designed curriculum modules will connect to a variety of curriculum standards, particularly in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) disciplines, language arts, and the arts. In the longer run, we're hoping that the curriculum modules will be taken up in classrooms and after-school centers across the country, leading to a greater understanding of systems at an early age in this next generation of youth. We're also hoping that teachers are inspired to adapt the curriculum modules to their local context, incorporate new tools and platforms as they become available, and share these ideas with others in the teacher wiki that we will be setting up.
Janice Molloy is content director of Pegasus Communications, managing editor of The Systems Thinker newsletter, and program director of the annual Systems Thinking in Action conference.
Photo of Kylie Peppler courtesy of Indiana University