One of the 9's Tricks (photo: Christy Green)
I have a 4th grader learning multiplication and division. She asks “Why do I need to know this?” For her, multiplication is a deep, abstract mystery.
My 8th grade son understands because he’s doing algebra and uses multiplication every day. But when he was in 4th grade, he asked the same question my daughter asks now.
He tried to explain why she needs to know. I tried to explain also.
I have learned that there’s no amount of explanation that will convince a 4th grader why it’s important to learn multiplication. They do it because they have to. They have teachers, and grades, and someone says they have to.
What Will Motivate People To Think About Energy?
Recently, I have been thinking about what will motivate people to do energy monitoring. (more…)
Heat, Thermostats and Serious Content (photo: Dan Zeng)
A few weeks ago I posted on the
MS Hohm blog about programmable thermostats — Energy Star no longer recommends them, but not because they don’t work, but instead because people don’t use them correctly.
Studies show that people can be lazy, intimidated, etc. But I want to discuss a significant reason pointed out in the study: people have an incorrect “mental model” of how programmable thermostats work (PDF).
A mental model is just how you picture something working — how you understand stuff in order to get through a complicated world, right or wrong. A classic mismatch of mental model and reality is that “the computer” is the the screen, rather than the part that has the CPU, Memory and Disk in it (leave it to Apple to make a computer that matches peoples’ mental models!)
Apparently a certain Alaskan Senator had the mental model of the Internet as a “series of tubes.” But I won’t go there.
My hope is that where it matters, we can get a proper mental model that helps us make good decisions. Here are some that caused people to not use programmable thermostats. (more…)
