Dr Pangloss

I recently had a revelation. I was in Oakdale Junior School, Essex, watching a class of ten and 11-year-old pupils taking part in their weekly "game learning" session—that is, playing a brain-training game on 30 handheld Nintendo games consoles. The room was buzzing with quiet activity as pupils strove to beat each other—and us. Neither their teacher nor I got the best mental arithmetic score in the room. They were loving it, and told me so after at great length. It was then that the penny dropped. I realised that what I had taken for a novelty—maybe even a gimmick—was in fact the reverse: a simple recognition of new realities.

To me, the idea of using games consoles for learning maths still has a whiff of science fiction about it. As pupil after pupil patiently told me, however, for them it was something different: a welcome slice of their "real" lives transplanted into the often-daunting world of school. With this kind of technology in their hands, even the weakest member of the class felt entirely at home. So at home, in fact, that they competed to come back in break times to take more maths tests.

As Donald Hirsch explores in this issue (here), engaging young minds is the most urgent challenge modern schools face. Anyone who thinks of technology as a magic wand that can be waved to banish ignorance is sure to be sorely disappointed. But what I saw in Essex was very different. This was a triumph of convergence: where, for a while, the tools of leisure, socialisation and learning coincided.



We're only going to see more of this, as interactive white boards, Google maps, global video links, hand-held digital camcorders and mobile internet devices make their way through classrooms. All of these have an extraordinary potential for engaging pupils on their own terms—and present an extraordinary challenge to traditional education. I had been thinking about learning and technology the wrong way. It wasn't about miracles and light. It was first of all about acknowledging, as Oakdale's head teacher put it to me, that "it's part of who they are, now."