So it is probably a “tragedy” that millions – maybe billions – of children are forced to learn things that they are not interested in and fumble in life for absence of motivation and inability to persist.
Khoula concluded with this punchline: “Because we believe that to be able to deliver an idea to kids, you need to send them that idea through something they like. So if they are into social media, they are into technology and AI subjects, we can reach them through these interests.
For the benefits of maybe thousands or even millions of parents and educators, I am publishing excerpts from Annie’s excellent article done in 2013. In recent years, she says, researchers have begun to build a science of interest, investigating what interest is, how interest develops, what makes things interesting, and how we can cultivate interest in ourselves and others.
Silvia himself explains that when people think of Knowledge Emotions, they usually think of the obvious ones, such as happiness, fear, anger sadness etc whereas his module looks at Knowledge Emotions as a family of four emotional states that foster learning – surprise, interest, confusion and awe which come from events that are unexpected, complicated and mentally challenging and they motivate learning in its broadest sense, be it learning in the course of seconds, such as finding the cause of...
Three characteristics – novel, ie something new and unusual, complex but comprehensible, Paul Silvia says. One reason that growing knowledge leads to growing interest is that that new information increases the likelihood of conflict – meaning coming across a fact or idea that doesn’t fit with what we know already. It triggers a virtuous cycle – more learning leads to more questions, just like the question on social media we posed to Khoula Al Mujaini at the beginning of this Special Report, which in turn enabled us to know more.