Nye's Digital Lab is a weekly scribble on creativity in an age of rapid change.

This week I am investing in the most powerful educational technology I know.

T Shirt

She was waiting outside my classroom door with tears in her eyes.

A graduate student. Smart, reliable, shows up to everything. When you see a student crying in a hallway, your brain runs triage. Family emergency? Failed review? I asked her what was wrong.

It was the t-shirt.

Back up a day. We held a town hall. Town Hall's are boring events where you need to relay information like registration deadlines, degree requirements, and career resources. The stuff that wrecks a student's year if they miss it. And they miss it, because nobody comes to town halls. Especially grad students.

So I did what I do. I played techno music, loud, and I threw t-shirts into the crowd. It was a bribe. I'm not proud of it.

Actually that's a lie. I'm definitely proud of it.

But not everyone gets a shirt. I had a couple dozen for a full room. They went to a lucky few, and I watched students who I never before saw raise a hand for extra credit dive over chairs for twelve dollars of cotton with a logo.

The student at my door had been there. She showed up, like she shows up for everything, and the shirts flew past her. And she was wrecked because of it!

It's easy to dismiss this. Grad student cries over free t-shirt. But the tears weren't about the shirt. The shirt was proof.

Proof you belong.

She had done everything right for years, and a piece of cotton thrown at random said more about membership than her transcript ever had.

A t-shirt can't teach you anything. It has no learning outcomes. It would not survive a curriculum committee. I've spent plenty of time writing content, and to my knowledge nobody has ever cried like this over a class syllabus.

We pour everything into what students should learn. Sequence, scope, assessment. It matters. But it's all supply-side. Almost nobody works on the demand side. On wanting. We have a word for that energy, and academia treats it like a dirty word.

Hype, baby.

Rocket Ships, Not Vectors

Students tell me all the time that they don't like math.

I never believe them.

What they hate is how math was handed to them. Worksheet, symbol, test, repeat, with no reason attached. We have a crisis of bad math teaching in this country. Somewhere around seventh grade the subject became a wall of notation guarding answers to questions they never asked. It's like they chose to be an artist, so they stopped doing the math and science. So they stopped asking!

I learned averages from baseball cards. Hits divided by at-bats, three decimal places. Hit .300 and you were a god. (Wade Boggs, Kirby Puckett, Lenny "Nails" Dykstra) I was nine years old doing division with real intent, because I needed to know if my guy was in a slump. Nobody called it math. It was ammunition for trading at the comic shop.

I learned acceleration from animation. Drawings close together, the ball moves slowly. Spread apart, it's flying. Ease out of the arc, snap through the bottom. That's rates of change, drawn in pencil by people who swear they're bad at math.

Math sticks when it answers a question you actually have. You forget it when it's just a series of things you study for.

Take vectors. Arrows on grid paper, components, dot products. Technically true. That's one way to think on it.

Now ask: how does a rocket ship steer in space, where there's no air to push against?

Suddenly thrust has a direction and a strength. You're adding pushes together. (Shhh, it's called "Dot Product") You're learning why you burn sideways to raise an orbit. A video game about exploding rockets has internalized more orbital mechanics than a thousand lecture halls.

My game design students who "don't like math" fight through trigonometry at two in the morning because they can't get their character to aim at the mouse position. Same trig. Different story.

Stop teaching vectors! Start the hype on how rocket ships move. How zombies pathfind to the player, or how robot vampires swarm flocking behavior. The vectors show up on their own, because now they have a job to do. That's how you get people who build things.

Nobody dreams alone about rocket ships, tho. Which brings me back to the loud music.

The Hype

There are committees for curriculum. Systems for process. Dashboards for retention. Serious people work hard on all of it.

Now find me the office of hype. The person whose job is making students feel they've joined something worth bragging about. If your school is lucky enough to care about community, you might have a student affairs office that is scrambling for funding.

Meanwhile, outside the campus gates, entire industries run on engineered desire. Sneaker drops. Game launches break the internet. Sports franchises that get twenty thousand people to wear the colors for a losing team. The same student who skips a town hall about their own graduation will camp overnight for a pair of Nikes.

I believe culture is the delivery mechanism.

A student who feels like part of a crew grinds through linear algebra at midnight to keep up with the crew. A student who feels like a customer reads the syllabus for the minimum and delivers exactly that. Same course. The difference is the tribe.

Watch where learning actually catches fire. Game jams. Final projects. The workload is brutal, worse than anything I'd put on a syllabus, and students love it, because there's a countdown clock and a team name and someone screaming when the game finally launches.

Fun. Stakes. Belonging. I am concerned when academia calls those "distractions." But fun is what rigor feels like when you actually want the outcome.

This is why hype is critical. We need builders who are hyped! Compliance produces people who pass the course. Culture produces people who keep building after the course ends. That's the only outcome that ever matters.

And hype is cheap. I didn't need a strategic plan. I need a bass heavy techno track and a box of shirts, and for twenty minutes the room has a pulse.

This year, I'm bringing more shirts. And I'm turning the music up.
Somebody has to own the hype.

Might as well be the teachers.

Make it Happen.

Nye Warburton is an artist and educator from Savannah, GA. These essays start as live improvisations. Transcriptions are ingested into a personal database, and then written and augmented with a variety of generative tools.

A number of last years essays were printed in Nye's Digital Lab, Vol 1, available at http://nyewarburton.com/book

More from the Lab

• The Boss Fight Pedagogy - You can't have the automation, until you learn to beat the boss.

• I never thought I could - On teaching against self doubt

• Confronting the Backlash - On the student hatred of AI