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Erin: Well, my grandmother was a big reader to the point of exclusion of anything and
anyone else. My mother's not a reader at all. She's actually dyslexic so she's like, can
I get it on tape? Well, I think in terms of the actual learning to write with your hands
and a pencil, I remember that being very challenging, probably through most of my academic career
until I got into high school.
>> Jamie: So, like penmanship.
>> Erin: Yes. Penmanship and not having chicken scratch. I remember my grandmother being like,
whatever, practice writing today. I'm like, she would make me sit down and write a page
out of her book. I actually didn't learn how to analytically write or creatively write
or any of that until I got into college and I had this crazy professor, Dr. Nelson. He
was like, don't be stupid. That's my only rule. So, he actually taught me a lot about
writing, about grabbing the reader's attention right off the bat. So, it was actually kind
of traumatic but really, really informative.
>> Ben: And so, you have a son?
>> Robert: Yes.
>> Ben: OK.
>> Robert: He was also trained to be a great gamer.
>> Ben: [laughs]
>> Robert: Because you gotta start 'em young... you gotta.
>> Ben: How old is he?
>> Robert: He is four.
>> Ben: He is four so he's gotten manual dexterity...
>> Robert: He is getting there; like his thing is DS because me and my girl, we both got
the DSes because we wanted to play and eventually he kind of just confiscated them both. And
he just, it really is a great teaching tool for him because he figures it out on his own.
Right now, he is playing Mario Party. He really loves that. And he'll play... He just
discovered multi-player. So, this big phase like he wants us to play with him and its
amazing how fast he picks it up.
I mean for a more complicated machine like say the Playstation, I had to set it up for
him and then he can go but he already knows like what to do, how to set up wireless play
which I don't even know. He says just go type this and do that and I'm like what? I feel
like what my parents felt like when I was trying to explain something simple to them.
It's passing down but it's really cool.
>> Ben: He is going to surpass you one day.
>> Robert: I'm hoping. He is getting good. He wants to play Guitar Hero. And he is not
that dexterit-ous (is that a word?) with the whole idea of like playing different keys
and then strumming. But I expect to come home one day and he is just going to be on Expert
and just going up and down the neck... I'm like "way to go."
>> Scott: My parents, God bless them, kept me away from the Atari which was a smart idea
on their part. So I knew of the Atari, the various Atari systems in the early to mid
to late 80s as just being these weird objects of mythological fascination. Like there was
the one kid in class who had the Atari, and maybe if you shmooze him enough, you'll get
that ticket to the birthday party and, in between piñata bushing and donkey-tail-on-pinning,
you'll get a chance to go play "Pitfall" or something. So I didn't do that. But, when
the Nintendo debuted in America in '87, '88, it didn't take very long for it to become
a big thing. And, Christmas of my fourth grade year, so that was '88, parents finally broke
down and got me and my brother the Nintendo, and that pretty much initiated my life in
the great console cycle.
>> Patrick: Even going back to what I said earlier about trying to dissect a larger problem
into something smaller so you can explain it a little bit better to somebody and taking
the approach of handholding them to get them to a certain point where they kind of understand
where you're talking about. It's always been something where, when I've had friends that
would come to me for any kind of help or any kind of work when it comes to math, calculus,
geometry, physics, anything like that, a lot of times they would get so convoluted by the
ideas of taking a simple derivative because it didn't have any kind of meaning to them.
Providing them the context via saying, "Here, let me show you. This is a line, and what
we care about is finding the slope of that line. Why? Because we want to find out where
this line is heading. If we have a simple trend here, let's see, can we describe this
line using various variables?" and things like that, and providing that context to them
has always been sort of beneficial to them. And the way I get to that point is by drawing
a simple X‑Y coordinate system, showing them a line, and saying, "OK, let's start
here. Understand this. Let's see where we apply it." Going from there to saying, "OK,
can we derive a function for this? Can you interpolate or extrapolate information from
this?" Then they start grasping that this is not just a method. It's a tool. It's a
way to accomplish a goal that might not be looked for in the book or by the teacher but
giving them something that they can apply for themselves. And it's always about going
back to that simplistic nature of two‑dimensional plot and eventually getting to a point where
they can more complexity that comes from that, that 2D formation of a line on a X‑Y coordinate
system.