Niche PowerPoint Parties Are What’s Keeping Us Educated in 2020
Shared on TikTok, Zoom, and Twitter, PowerPoints are everyone’s favorite way to discuss their most eccentric intellectual theories.
In the past few months, global education has been largely disrupted. For students all across the country (and the world), life has completely changed as institution after institution has closed campus and switched to remote learning. Many of these students are taking advantage of their extra free time to have a new kind of educational experience, wildly different than the ones they’ve been afforded within traditional institutions: a PowerPoint party.
Blurring the lines between education, entertainment, and socialization, PowerPoint parties have been largely popularized by kids and teens on TikTok. Basically, the idea is that you gather a few of your friends on Zoom or another virtual hangout platform and each person presents some sort of niche(i.e., weirdly specific) idea or argument to the group. PowerPoint parties have also been done in-person, but as people have begun to follow social distancing more and more, these are now done usually only by families or people already living together. Below is a viral TikTok of one PowerPoint party:
As you can tell, these aren’t the kind of boring PowerPoints you’d see in your 101s. With topics such as “Why Stars are Star Shaped,” “Barb Weber [Peter’s Mom on The Bachelor] Sucks,” and “Why Grape Jelly is Essential on Grilled Cheese,” these PowerPoints are very weird, specific, and often draw upon memes, cultural elements such as television and music, or just random facts of the universe.
But nevertheless, making and presenting these PowerPoints still requires intellectual and academic skills — persuasive techniques (pathos, logos, ethos, anyone?), synthesis of information, understanding of one’s audience, etc. And the fact that the arguments many choose to present are so absurd (see examples below) makes it that more challenging (and rewarding) to convince one’s audience to buy into them. On the flip side, they require the audience to suspend their disbelief and really be open to new, if ridiculous, ideas.
These and other PowerPoints show how learning doesn’t always have to be such a serious activity — it can be fun and even completely silly. Moreover, they show the incredible amount of creativity and curiosity that young people have, even in the difficult times we are now experiencing. In fact, they enable kids to develop the skill of investigation, of learning about things that may seem completely useless or silly to others at first. This is something that I don’t think is encouraged enough in schools, but somehow, when kids are on their own, their curiosity and willingness to take intellectual adventures skyrockets.
In fact, the presentation is typically something that’s dreaded by students — having to stand up in front of the whole class and trying to convince them of something as the teacher looks on, scribbling notes on their rubric in such a way that makes it impossible to tell what they’re thinking. But with PowerPoint parties, that sense of stress and fear of failure is removed and replaced by joy and humor. People know the topics they’re presenting on are quite ridiculous — and so it’s okay if they fail or mess up. The low-stakes environment makes learning fun.
Ultimately, this may be just another thing that adults brush off as adolescent nonsense, shaking their heads in disappointment as their kids make a weird niche PowerPoint on “Which Teletubby Would Win in a Fight” or “Late 2000’s Webkinz and What Their College Majors Would Be.” But I think they should give this newly popular social activity a chance — it allows kids to explore the oddities and questions of the world in a fun, relaxed way. It allows for a productive fusion of education and entertainment, in which they can learn from the TV shows, celebrities, childhood memories, historical figures, even household items that are a part of their lives. It allows for a sort of intellectual play, which, despite its benefits, is not encouraged enough by traditional education. I think writer Sam Kern has summed it up pretty well: ‘
Yup. In fact, they’re more than alright.
