This is an interesting question. It makes me wonder if I missed something important by not playing a team sport or something of that nature, but at the same time I’m somewhat skeptical that the coordination skills you learn from those places would transfer to more productive activities. Do you have anything further to say about this, or want to suggest some articles or blog posts on the topic?
I’m going to have to give it a full five minutes somewhere over the weekend.
Disclaimer: did not do 5 minutes by the clock. Did do 10-15 minutes of discussion and intermittent thinking since.
Desiderata:
Learn how to work with other people towards a goal
Requires skills which can be improved
Short feedback loops
Clear outcomes
Minimally competitive
The best candidate I have come up with is FIRST, the robotics team. This is still a national competition, but the competition is effectively just a show and the competitive activity is tiny compared to the cooperative activity. The goal is to build a robot as a team, so it lends itself instantly to improvable skills, short feedback loops, and clear metrics. It is cooperative mostly in the division-of-labor sense—you can’t expect one or two kids to be able to do all the work. It also strongly incentivizes skill transfer, because the less skilled kids want to succeed and the more skilled kids need them to succeed for the robot to work.
I first considered things that were not sports, like drama or dance. These turn out to be extremely competitive, but at the front end; you need to win the role or a position on the team before the coordination even begins.
I considered intellectual activities, like Math Olympiad or Chess, but these tend to be highly individual and so entail minimal coordination—even team events are mostly just aggregations of individual performance. They largely consist of people just being measured against one another.
There are explicitly social, group activities like Model U.N, but these are plagued by being unclear about the skills involved, have unclear outcomes and no short feedback loops. Even stuff like the Boy Scouts really only do coordination by teaching that being cooperative is a virtue.
Lastly there are clubs of various kinds, which often relax the competitive aspect but usually also abandon any specific notion of skill development or feedback; they are just people hanging out who all enjoy the same thing.
On the flip side of the coin, this is a really good point:
I’m somewhat skeptical that the coordination skills you learn from those places would transfer to more productive activities.
I noticed while thinking about this that the things I think are the most valuable about sports—apart from the exercise and the concept of the team—were either not emphasized or not articulated at all. Stuff like how to think about working with someone else and how to beat something that is thinking about beating you weren’t really a factor. This makes me wonder if there is an entirely different way to present sports that would improve their transfer-ability. Sports is still about hierarchy; it’s only transferable value is that it shifts the perspective from hierarchy-among-individuals to hierarchy-among-groups.
There seems to be an opportunity to add value here, but it is not clear how.
This is an interesting question. It makes me wonder if I missed something important by not playing a team sport or something of that nature, but at the same time I’m somewhat skeptical that the coordination skills you learn from those places would transfer to more productive activities. Do you have anything further to say about this, or want to suggest some articles or blog posts on the topic?
Did you come up with anything?
Disclaimer: did not do 5 minutes by the clock. Did do 10-15 minutes of discussion and intermittent thinking since.
Desiderata:
Learn how to work with other people towards a goal
Requires skills which can be improved
Short feedback loops
Clear outcomes
Minimally competitive
The best candidate I have come up with is FIRST, the robotics team. This is still a national competition, but the competition is effectively just a show and the competitive activity is tiny compared to the cooperative activity. The goal is to build a robot as a team, so it lends itself instantly to improvable skills, short feedback loops, and clear metrics. It is cooperative mostly in the division-of-labor sense—you can’t expect one or two kids to be able to do all the work. It also strongly incentivizes skill transfer, because the less skilled kids want to succeed and the more skilled kids need them to succeed for the robot to work.
I first considered things that were not sports, like drama or dance. These turn out to be extremely competitive, but at the front end; you need to win the role or a position on the team before the coordination even begins.
I considered intellectual activities, like Math Olympiad or Chess, but these tend to be highly individual and so entail minimal coordination—even team events are mostly just aggregations of individual performance. They largely consist of people just being measured against one another.
There are explicitly social, group activities like Model U.N, but these are plagued by being unclear about the skills involved, have unclear outcomes and no short feedback loops. Even stuff like the Boy Scouts really only do coordination by teaching that being cooperative is a virtue.
Lastly there are clubs of various kinds, which often relax the competitive aspect but usually also abandon any specific notion of skill development or feedback; they are just people hanging out who all enjoy the same thing.
On the flip side of the coin, this is a really good point:
I noticed while thinking about this that the things I think are the most valuable about sports—apart from the exercise and the concept of the team—were either not emphasized or not articulated at all. Stuff like how to think about working with someone else and how to beat something that is thinking about beating you weren’t really a factor. This makes me wonder if there is an entirely different way to present sports that would improve their transfer-ability. Sports is still about hierarchy; it’s only transferable value is that it shifts the perspective from hierarchy-among-individuals to hierarchy-among-groups.
There seems to be an opportunity to add value here, but it is not clear how.