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Video Games Are the Future of Education

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Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education

#181

Post by tchaffee »

gfodor wrote: post #128
tchaffee wrote: post #84

Hot takes from people with no experience in the field are only interesting to other people who have no experience in the field. It seems developers are particularly prone to this hubris. I don't find many doctors writing about the future of programming languages, or teachers writing blogs about the future of medicine. Yet you can find thousands of these hot takes from developers about the future of education. Or pick…

Modern education is such an abject failure that those “experts” you mention should be begging people from other fields for new perspectives.

Based on what criteria? Which countries? When was it better and by how much?

Also worth mentioning that everyone is the best armchair quarterback in the world. If you've got new perspectives that are so effective, start your own school and show the experts how wrong they are. Get rich by offering such a better product. It should be child's play to do measurably better than an abject failure.

Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education

#182

Post by yiyus »

chromanoid wrote: post #95
tchaffee wrote: post #84

Hot takes from people with no experience in the field are only interesting to other people who have no experience in the field. It seems developers are particularly prone to this hubris. I don't find many doctors writing about the future of programming languages, or teachers writing blogs about the future of medicine. Yet you can find thousands of these hot takes from developers about the future of education. Or pick…

Everybody can make children, so how hard can it be to educate them? /s I totally agree with you. I think especially teachers face such know-it-alls much more than other occupations. Not that I know it better, but thinking video games can replace human interaction is so silly. Probably all teachers knew it long before Hattie's meta study, the teacher is the key to good learning....

I also agree with you, but I think there are good reasons teachers face this more than other people. Everybody has been educated, all we have been exposed to the work of educators. All we have thousands of hours of experience of how the education system works. That does not make us capable of doing their work (and, certainly, it does not make us capable of doing their work better), but everybody has a relatively well formed opinion. On the other hand, most people do not have an opinion about how to improve programming languages, for example.

Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education

#183

Post by 6510 »

alphydan wrote: post #149
rvanlaar wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hear Hear, I came to the same conclusion for software that caters to teachers. Teachers don't buy that, the administration does. They don't feel the pain the teachers are having. It also applies to programming lessons. Yes, everybody thinks it's important. No, it's hard to make a living selling it.

>> Teachers don't buy that, We do. See the success of teacherspayteachers.com or tes.com. As a teacher I have spent hundreds of dollars of my own money to buy resources. Simply because I don't have the time for the admin to claim the expense. The problem is that most resources are bad, if not terrible. The ones that are good are not adapted to what you need, not customisable, etc. You may have come up with a great re…

More money for teachers might help but I think it should be an entirely separate job description. Automation [in my view] should be something invested in for a while, enough to make it work, have a period of maintenance then do it again. Gradual improvement may get stuck.

Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education

#184

Post by manfredo »

david-gpu wrote: post #137
manfredo wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this post wasn't about dedicated educational games, but rather education they occured naturally through gaming. E.g. Kerbal space program teaching basics of aerospace. One of the most prominent examples I had in my childhood was Fire Emblem for thr game boy. It's basically Kumon, you're constantly doing basic multiplication, addition, and substraction to tell whether a given unit will win in a fight. Similarl…

But how much are you learning relative to the amount of time you spend playing the game? I would expect a little of learning for a lot of time. You may as well study for a while and go play with your friends later.

At least for fire emblem it was more about practicing basic math operations. You don't really learn anything in Kumon either. You just get better at math through practice.

I think I didn't so much learn new things so much as I got an applied perspective on things that I had already learned. It's one thing to read about value added in a textbook, it's another thing to actually experience it in person buying reagents and selling potions in WoW. You can read about the benefit of fuel transferring lifting stages (aka "asparagus staging") in an article it's another thing to reach that design in KSP, and understand why SpaceX tried to do it.

Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education

#186

Post by jay_kyburz »

chromanoid wrote: post #95
tchaffee wrote: post #84

Hot takes from people with no experience in the field are only interesting to other people who have no experience in the field. It seems developers are particularly prone to this hubris. I don't find many doctors writing about the future of programming languages, or teachers writing blogs about the future of medicine. Yet you can find thousands of these hot takes from developers about the future of education. Or pick…

Everybody can make children, so how hard can it be to educate them? /s I totally agree with you. I think especially teachers face such know-it-alls much more than other occupations. Not that I know it better, but thinking video games can replace human interaction is so silly. Probably all teachers knew it long before Hattie's meta study, the teacher is the key to good learning....

Yeah, but what if that teacher is not Human.

There is a lot of really short sighted thinking in this thread. AI will be better than us at everything within the next few hundred years.

It's kind of a flippant remark, and not very useful, but its true.

AI will be better than a human at making me happy, and it will be better at comforting me when I'm sad. It will be better at motivating me and it will be better at teaching me and my kids things.

Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education

#187

Post by Spooky23 »

throwawaygh wrote: post #105
Spooky23 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve served on a school board and can say at a high level that parents get pretty crazy about weird things, games included. Boring stuff that checks boxes is the safe answer for an institution. If it’s fun, the school will get bombarded with complaints about taxpayers paying for games, the devil inside the computer, etc. Parents tend to not care or think about outcomes if the angry box is ticked. The best fun things…

> The best fun things are maker projects. The tangible outcome is understandable to people. The educational content/value varies though. Yeah, every parent these days seems to have the attitude "god forbid we teach more than one algorithm for addition, but it's unacceptable that you don't have CS in middle school!" And even get outright angry if you try to point out that teaching more than one algorithm that meets th…

The ignorance around math is amazing to me. When I went to a public school in NYC in the 80s, I had 1960s textbooks and a pretty poor initial math literacy — I struggled into middle school.

When I look at the common core stuff with my young son, he gets what he’s doing in a more fundamental way. In first grade, he basically “discovered” division on his own and was incredibly happy about it. Not something I would have done for sure!

Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education

#188

Post by gfodor »

tchaffee wrote: post #181
gfodor wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern education is such an abject failure that those “experts” you mention should be begging people from other fields for new perspectives.

Based on what criteria? Which countries? When was it better and by how much? Also worth mentioning that everyone is the best armchair quarterback in the world. If you've got new perspectives that are so effective, start your own school and show the experts how wrong they are. Get rich by offering such a better product. It should be child's play to do measurably better than an abject failure.

Most people will just home school their kids. I am in the US so that is what I was referring to. Not really worth the effort trying to argue the point - many people on this site went through the US educational system and would cite it as not preparing them for their adult lives, and in many cases caused immense harm to their growth as educated citizens.

Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education

#189

Post by anonytrary »

Mentorship is the future of education -- it's all about minimizing the teacher to student ratio. Video games are a creative way to present content, but also deprive students of other essential inputs for education. Saying that video games are the future of education is like saying in 1999 that MS Office is the future of education.

Maybe everyone will be consuming homework and lessons through video games, but no video game is going to completely replace real-life interaction. I'm not entirely sold on remote learning, especially for children (K-12). Getting taught remotely is like watching TV in black-and-white. It works, but it's just not the same.

Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education

#190

Post by dhimes »

alphydan wrote: post #149
rvanlaar wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hear Hear, I came to the same conclusion for software that caters to teachers. Teachers don't buy that, the administration does. They don't feel the pain the teachers are having. It also applies to programming lessons. Yes, everybody thinks it's important. No, it's hard to make a living selling it.

>> Teachers don't buy that, We do. See the success of teacherspayteachers.com or tes.com. As a teacher I have spent hundreds of dollars of my own money to buy resources. Simply because I don't have the time for the admin to claim the expense. The problem is that most resources are bad, if not terrible. The ones that are good are not adapted to what you need, not customisable, etc. You may have come up with a great re…

You do- sort of. The problem I ran into is that a lot of what we know comes from educational “gurus”- not science. So if you have software that disagrees with what the teacher thinks is the right way to teach, they won’t budge even if all the data show that you’re giving them a better way.

I don’t hold it against them though. Nobody was going to tell me how to teach physics.

Fun fact(?): Back when I was teacher my friend Eddie (math teacher) decided we could teach pretty sophisticated ideas to our community college students if we used this fancy program called “Mathematica.” We wrote a grant and got a good price from Wolfram and after that they introduced a pricing for community colleges. This was way back in the ‘90s- but I don’t remember the year.

The point is, nobody sold me software. I decided what my problem was and set about solving it. I suspect most teachers either (a) do that too or (b) want an accepted solution.

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