Wired article below explores a trendy sounding educational approach…for a few years down the road. But when we compare/contrast between robots and children we can perhaps see more clearly what children do to “learn”. Often we need a mirror held up to ourselves to actually see who we are, and how we “work”.
Children, by contrast, react with ease to new environments and challenges. “Not only do they go out and explore to find information that’s relevant to the problems they’re trying to solve,” says Gopnik, “but they also do this rather remarkable thing—playing—where they just go out and do things apparently for no reason.”
Does our educational system understand the value and importance of “playing”?
Children are curiosity-driven agents building a complex model of the world in their brains, allowing them to easily generalize what they learn. When robots are programmed to learn from a strictly scored goal—with points for good behaviors and demerits for bad ones—they’re not encouraged to do things out of the ordinary.
Giving robots a sense of curiosity—play without a real purpose—could help them also deal with the unknown.
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