Image from Wikipedia Commons

Ten pin bowling has always been an activity that encourages people to pay for the privilege of performing a repetitive task capable of being serviced by mechanical automation and no input of raw material. It has a similar business model to one armed bandits in casinos, but without the need to pay jackpots.

Traditionally, bowling has also been seen by bowlers as a skilled sport with some social benefits. Just for fun, I’d like to treat ten pin bowling in this post as if it were an academic subject, like a GCSE.

Let’s say that the skills and knowledge acquired by the bowlers is valued by society. Let’s assume that attainment in these skills are seen by society as being measured by the point scores achieved by bowlers.

Bowling has been through cycles of boom and bust. The scoring system has always been a little complex, with points being given for each pin knocked over, but bonus points being awarded if you are able to knock over all ten pins with either one or two balls. The arithmetic required the ability to add integers of 10 or less to a number less than 300. One of the boom cycles of the game came with the advent of computer scoring, where the machine took over the job of recording the number of pins knocked over by each player and adding all the bonuses.

The ball is bowled down a lane, which is between two gutters. The gutters serve the purpose of stopping balls going from one lane into another, and reduce the width of the lane to only that strictly necessary for the reasonable targetting of the pins. Beginners would find that most balls would end up in the gutters and not hit the pins, and therefore the first problem to be solved in bowling is how to direct the ball with suffiicent accuracy to avoid the gutters. This meant that children would quite naturally be frustrated in their early experiences because most of their efforts would be unrewarded by the sight and sound of pins being bowled over.

A recent innovation in bowling has been the provision of bumpers- retractable rails which can be raised to prevent balls from falling into the gutters, ensuring that each ball bowled resulted in a score. This innovation has also been responsible for a sharp rise in bowling activity.

In my analogy, computerised scoring and bumpers are examples of ‘technology’ that have been introduced to the ’subject’ of bowling. In terms of attainment, automatic scoring has done little to change the attainment by students, but has made the subject much more popular. Bumpers have also increased the popularity of the subject, but has raised attainment considerably.

From the point of view of bowling establishments (is the analogy for bowling establishments politicians?) the technology is all good. It has transformed the teaching of the subject and raised attainment. From the point of view of the students, it’s probably all bad. The automated scoring has removed the cross curricular arithmetic element from the subject altogether. The bumpers have removed all the skill-score-attainment-skill feedback loops in the activity. Because children with no skill at all- subjectively, bowlers from the early days would rank them as total beginners- can attain higher scores than children with considerable skill because of the bumpers redirecting all poorly bowled balls to the pins, there is no natural urge to improve. The subject no longer encourages independent learning as it once did. As a result, bowling establishments are now home to children who make no progress at all in the activity. Instead of making a contribution to hand-eye coordination, patience, acquisition of skill etc, bowling has been reduced to a subject where parents hand over their childcare responsibility to pin placing, ball returning, automatic scoring machines.

Of course all this is tongue in cheek. But I find it unnerving to note that in society, ‘going bowling’ is treated as a mildly amusing, harmless pastime now just as it ever was, and nobody seems to have noticed that something apparently so simple has so completely lost its once probably genuinely educational value.