Walking into it by Andrew Schultz
Now this is charming. Walking into it is, on one level, an implementation of tic-tac-toe. In fact the only way you interact with the game is by playing tic-tac-toe. But there’s a very important, indeed crucial, framework: you are playing against a kid you met somewhere in the streets. And the point is that you want to make him feel good; you want to make him feel smart. So winning the game isn’t the point. But neither is losing. If you lose in an obvious way, the kid notices this. So you must lose in an unobvious way: by setting up the kind of situation where you will lose no matter what you do.
After this initial loss, the game subtly shifts into a masterclass of tic-tac-toe where you and the kid explore all the six ways in which you can get into a losing situation. In the end, what makes the feel good, what makes him feel validated, is not that he has defeated you; but that through your mentoring he has been able to grasp the game, to understand it. He has become aware of his own powers of comprehension.
A charming and highly original story about learning and teaching.