Hard fun pp. 6, 53

Hard fun is a name for a fundamental principle of learning which comes from the children themselves. Carol Sperry, director of a pioneering computers-in-schools project supported by IBM and the Silicon Valley Technology Center at the Gardiner Academy in San Jose California, described to me the following scene: One kindergarten section was waiting to take the place of another section that had just had its first encounter with the computers. A student recognized a friend coming out of the room and asked: "what was it like?" The friend replied, "it was fun," then paused and added "it was really hard." The teacher who overheard this conversation said that its meaning was perfectly clear from the friend's tone: it wasn't "fun" in spite of being "hard," the fact that it was "hard" made it all the more "fun." Since then I have listened to children with an ear sensitized by this experience, and have come to know that the concept of hard fun is widely present in children's thinking.

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