Carmen Sandiego

I remember when I was a teacher way back in my younger years, I used to book class time in the computer room, so that my students could play, “Carmen Sandiego”. Remember that game? It was a brilliant tool that I was able to use to reinforce concepts of geography and world landmarks. But, through playing the game regularly, I was also able to help students to see that their decisions were important, and that errors in the decision making carried consequences.

I remember that my students thoroughly looked forward to our computer room time, and used their time wisely, because, it was a big deal to complete a mission during our allotted class time.

The game was based around the mission of tracking down the international jewel thief known as, Carmen Sandiego. In order to track her down successfully and bring her to justice, you had to interpret a sequence of clues to locate her whereabouts in the world. With each piece of information, the students needed to extract clues and follow them. For example, one piece of information gathered from a witness at the scene of the crime, might be, “I heard someone fitting her description, mention that she needed to meet a contact by Big Ben!” The students would then investigate, deduce and discover that Big Ben, is a clock in London. Ah ha, they need to get to London to continue their search. Ok, Carmen, we’re coming to getcha!

At each point of the game, if correct choices were made, clues would continue, and so forth, until you located where Carmen was hiding. Mission complete! But, if you made the wrong choice and followed the wrong path, no clues would come. At this point, the game taught you to back track and assess your choices to get you back on the path. But, I remember some students had trouble following some of the clues, resulting in them continuing further and further along the incorrect path, only to discover themselves further and further away from their target, and out of class time to complete the mission.

These days, I cover the same concept with Lego and MBot Robotics. Students are taught how to program their robots to successfully complete missions. Each mission is simply a track or a map requiring students to use their knowledge of programming, and a range of commands, to make decisions that will get them to the finish line of each mission. For example, the robot may need to turn right and travel a certain distance to make it to the next turn. However, if the command taking them left instead of right is used, then obviously, the robot will go off in the wrong direction. It’s simply, then, a matter of re-entering the right turn on their next go.

Errors and mistakes are encouraged in this program, simply to redirect students to view mistakes and boo boos as their friends, and not as enemies, or worse, ‘the end of the world’. They simply go back and make the appropriate corrections, and away they go. With this simple concept of mistakes being our friends who lead us to better choices and winning decisions, I can begin to build a foundation for resilience: sometimes bad stuff can happen, but it’s not necessarily the end of the world. A solution could be just around the corner.

Life is like that sometimes, we can draw life parallels from both of these games can’t we? We can journey for many of our years to discover that we were never on the correct track, and be disillusioned by the time wasted by our errors. But, like both games, wrong paths, aren’t necessarily the end of the world. In some cases, there are answers and solutions that can lead you on a better path, a way better path than you may have been on previously.

What paths are you taking at the moment? Are they the correct ones?