UPDATED!

A spelling error has been corrected, and further details of the Evelyn Waugh essay have been provided.

In one of his essays, Evelyn Waugh states that the advent of sound in movies had set the industry back by years*. This seems rather counterintuitive, because sound was a good thing, right? Well the thing is, before the soundtrack was invented, the mood and action of a film had to be conveyed by other means. It wasn’t all left to inter-titles (those “cards” with description and dialogue that appear between scenes in silent films). Consequently, the 1920s (especially) was a period that saw a great deal of innovation and the overcoming of technical barriers in film-making.

In a similar way, when computing in school became doable, there were people like myself who wanted to teach everybody how to use a computer, and to use ICT across the curriculum. That’s a relatively easy thing to do when you have a room of computers or a class set of laptops or a Bring Your Own Device scheme. Not quite so easy, though, when each primary school classroom boasted one computer, two if you were lucky (or pushy!). The answer? To draw up a rota so that in every lesson a different child got to use the computer. Whatever the work being done by the class at that time, the “computer pupil” would do it too, only using the computer.

For example, if the task was to write a short story, that pupil would use the word processor rather than pen and paper.

I’m not advocating asking for less money for education technology in your school on the grounds that it will make people more creative! What I am saying is that having constraints in place is not wholly a bad thing.

You would almost certainly find that introducing constraints can be of enormous benefit to your students. I once set an assignment in which my students, working in pairs, had to create a computer program that would enable the user to carry out several different tasks related to pricing and discounts. The constraints were that it should not be easy for the end user to make a mistake when entering data. Also, with no technical expertise at all, the end user should be able to get the answer within ten seconds. That’s a long time for a computer program, but that ten seconds was to include starting the program, and entering the data via a super-friendly user interface.

Another constraint I introduced, when teaching spreadsheets, was that students, when budgeting for a party, could not buy more than a certain amount of one particular item. (It may not sound like much of a constraint, but it enabled me to teach them how to use the Max function, conditional formulae, and data validation.)

To sum up, constraints may not always be a bad thing, and sometimes can even be positively advantageous.

*This comment was made in “A Pleasure Cruise in 1929”, in When The Going Was Good (Amazon associate link):