On testing

On 1 September the start-up funding body Prototron announced that 11th-grade students at eight general education schools would soon start learning maths from EdFox’s digital interactive textbook. It is certainly encouraging that a teaching tool has been completed and is already at the testing stage. At the same time, I also wrote down a few thoughts about the doubts that inevitably come with new projects.

The formidable historian of pedagogy Andresen used to repeat this truth in his university lectures: “the teacher talks and the student listens – that was a working way of teaching back in Aristotle’s time”, and with that he summed up all the trivial and passing educational experiments and technologies that people have tried, fairly fruitlessly, to put into practice from time to time. Educational software bubbles tend to burst, because aiming to innovate all at once in user interface, didactics, logic and design is an extremely hard task to solve straight away. Not to mention the tendency of all too many start-ups to live only for their next cash injection… But let’s look at it from the student’s point of view. If I were an upper secondary student at one of these schools, soon to take the state exam and hoping to compete for a university place, I would feel a certain hesitation knowing that I am a guinea pig for a start-up. Because what happens if the experiment fails… Estcube in space may well have been very exciting, even though many things went wrong. A failure in education, though, would be something else entirely. Clearly, new things have to be tried out and tested. But test groups are usually recruited from volunteers. Have these students even been given a choice? … BUT… despite everything, every time I hear about a new attempt I am still very excited and hopeful. It would be great if home-grown educational software finally came to something :)