What an Unscripted Move actually looks like

People ask me what I actually send.

It is one page. It has their name on it, a number in the corner, a date it was issued and a date it is due. It takes me about ten minutes to write and most of that is reading their answers again.

Here are two of them, both for my own children, so nobody's privacy is being spent.

The six year old

He is into cars, police, robbers and secret codes, and he wants to know how things move.

The goal: make the car go further.

Build a ramp. Send the car down. Mark where it stops. Then change one thing and do it again. Only one thing, or you will not know which change did it.

You are done when you can tell someone exactly which change made the car go the furthest.

Nobody will tell you what to change. That is the job. Try something, see what happens, try something else.

If you want it harder: write the getaway plan in a code that only you and one other person can read.

That is the entire brief. Notice what is not in it. No worksheet, no boxes, no steps. The one instruction that matters is change one thing, because a six year old will want to change everything at once, and isolating a variable is the actual skill hiding inside a toy car.

The last line on the page says: your first ramp will not go far. That is why you get more than one.

The eleven year old

She is into film editing and Greek myths, and she and her sister have been designing a Rick Riordan theme park on paper for months.

The goal: build the Riordanverse in Minecraft.

The design is already hers. This is the other half, making it exist somewhere people can walk around in.

You are done when someone who has read the books can walk through it and name where they are, without you telling them.

Nobody will help you with the how. That includes the screen time part. She had told me, unprompted, that what she would have to work out was how to build the things and how to manage her screen time so she did not get a headache. So that is hers to solve. I am not giving her a rule for it. She can invent one and find out whether it holds.

If you want it harder: build one thing that is not in the books, but should be.

And at the bottom: you will not be able to build all of it. Choosing what to leave out is the actual work.

What they have in common

Neither of them is a subject I chose.

Both came out of what the child said when asked, and in both cases the hardest part was already sitting in their own answer. He wants the car to go further. She wants to build the thing without frying herself. I did not have to invent any difficulty, only decline to remove it.

And neither has a right answer at the end. There is nothing to mark, nothing to hand in, and nobody to be graded by. Which is the whole point, and it is also why they cannot be bought as a course.