Category: Teaching

One reason I love bouldering is that it’s game-like. No matter how much experience a climber has, we’re all at a certain level with certain climbs (they’re actually called “problems”) that currently challenge us. It’s like playing a well-crafted video game: the levels you’ve finished are easy, the levels ahead of you are frustratingly hard, but the level you’re currently on is a good match of difficulty for your skill level; and you can feel the flow.

I recently started learning a new programming language and I find it similarly game-like. Every new technique is a new challenge. Every new algorithm is a new challenge. The easy stuff is boring, the crazy theoretically stuff is frustrating, but the next chapter in my book is just right.

And like video games, in bouldering these problems are codified. So I can say, “I can do all the V0’s in this gym, and I’m working on the V1’s” and other climbers know something about my abilities.* Codified problems exist elsewhere too. Here’s some to help people improve their skills playing Go.

I’d love to see graded problems for interaction design. They would make it fun to solve problems, alone or socially, and communicate to each other our level of ability. “But Victor,” you might say, “interaction design problems don’t have a defined solution like a boulder.” Actually the boulders don’t either. People can solve the same problem different ways, but there are rules everyone must follow that give the game useful constraints. As long as you follow the rules and get to the top you’ve solved the problem. Some climbers are more elegant than others, and the same would be true in interaction design.

* The Moonboard is like graded problem-meets-Github, a single wall with over 800 bouldering problems contributed by various route setters.

Someone just brought it to my attention that a student named Feng Xia who received a Master of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from Ohio University in 1998 did so with a thesis paper that steals from others’ works, including my master’s thesis. It’s so bad, that after cobbling together various works, Feng couldn’t be bothered to normalize the citation format, or even make the number of citations match the number of references listed.

Yet, this made it past the thesis committee.

Why bring it up? One, because if Ohio University doesn’t take the ethical path here I’d like the Internet archive to show what happened.

Two, I want to gloat a little that large established institutions with extensive accreditations don’t necessarily provide any better quality — and sometimes much, much worse — than my little Smart Experience.

Just for decoration, here’s some graphs from my thesis I drew by hand circa 1994, probably in MacDraw, with proper references.

A friend about to give her first keynote speech asked my advice on how to approach it, then suggested I post the advice for others to see. So here it is:

1. Keynote content has a large burden. Ideally it provides context — or at least controversy — for the rest of the event. It should have big ideas of where we’ve been or where we’re going, but also be grounded in the practical in a way that makes it relevant to attendees. It isn’t very difficult to strike this balance, but probably different topically from what we do day-to-day, so give yourself extra time for research and imagining.
2. The keynote speaker also becomes an implicit ambassador of the event. While some may board their private jet immediately following the talk, I found that I felt I should continue the keynoter persona throughout the event, answering questions and socializing with everyone, including the organizers.

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