It ended in a non-sequitur. Today, GPT-3 can be used to do smart autocomplete of a paragraph, but in the future, a model might autocomplete an entire book. Where is the symbiosis there? Gaming to aquire knowledge has nothing at all to do with AI replacing humans at various tasks.
I think you missed the point, because it was right there: AI tools will lower the cost of producing (educational) games, by enabling creators to rapidly generate a diverse selection of dialogues, landscapes, textures, music, [...], which the creators can then choose from or use as inspiration. This lowers the barrier for independent developers to design educational games. This isn’t hypothetical—I have aspirations to…
Video Games Are the Future of Education
111–120 of 392 posts
Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can I ask, what is the subject? Is it reading? History? Geography? Interdisipinary across some of those? (Not trying to be adversarial, just interested.)
I'm happy to offer any details. The goal was interdisciplinary because that's how teachers have to teach these days. They don't have enough time to teach each subject separately so they mix things together. But it would be relatively straight-forward (not easy) to build weekly story-based content that contained geography, history, science, politics, and more. Textfyre was going to align our stories to Common Core Sta…
Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education
#113I own a educational game company. Long story short: it doesn't sell. At my company we identified, at least if your target is kids, two ways to sell edu games. 1. Sell them to institutions, like governments, schools, companies, whatever. Thing is, the features they look when choosing a game to buy, are ones most likely to make the game unfun, the end result is often boring stuff noone WANTS to play. 2. Sell them to th…
Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education
#114Look at what the “elites” do to educate their kids. Do they long to put their kids in front of a computer to play video games or do they pay top dollar for tiny teacher:student ratios at great facilities with competent teachers/leadership? I can’t imagine anyone dealing with kids learning from home this lockdown and thinking education should be more technologically driven.
> I can’t imagine anyone dealing with kids learning from home this lockdown and thinking education should be more technologically driven. With the possible exception of the social aspects, lockdown distance learning seems like a waste of time vs. self-directed learning. Which could be as simple as letting kids do things outside and around the house. Or maybe providing bookmobiles and mobile libraries, maybe even a sm…
Kids don't want to read and read less then they used to.
My kids did learned more from lockdown online classes then from games. I can tell this one with certainty. It was less then they are normally learning in school.
Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education
#115Hot 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…
That's because they don't care, not because they are more humble. Similarly, I don't see many programmers opining about surgerical techniques or scalpels or whatever the medical equivalent to PL design might be.
There are lots of doctors and lawyers who opine about education. And not just opine, but also shape policy. Go check the professions of the SB members in the closest wealthy suburb. I guarantee there will be at least one doctor/lawyer/business owner with zero education experience. Not just stating opinions, but spending considerable resources to win an elected office and shape local education policy. SB members with some prior experience in education are much more likely to humbly defer to the administration than lawyers/doctors/etc. IME.
And there are lots of teachers posting hot takes about covid or policing.
I don't think hubris is unique to programmers. You just see it more often because you hang around programmers.
Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education
#116I own a educational game company. Long story short: it doesn't sell. At my company we identified, at least if your target is kids, two ways to sell edu games. 1. Sell them to institutions, like governments, schools, companies, whatever. Thing is, the features they look when choosing a game to buy, are ones most likely to make the game unfun, the end result is often boring stuff noone WANTS to play. 2. Sell them to th…
Is cram school popular with kids, just because they are in cram school day after day and spend most of their time there? It definitely improves test scores.
Anyway, my point is, your quantitative feedback for fun, it is confounded by being educational ie parents anticipate it will improve test scores or whatever.
Coercion is the placebo not the treatment. That is why this article is sort of bunk. It’s adults literally discussing how to meddle with what their kids are interested in, in the exact same breath as describing how the best and most educational parts of childhood occurred in the absence of adults and their priorities.
Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education
#117I own a educational game company. Long story short: it doesn't sell. At my company we identified, at least if your target is kids, two ways to sell edu games. 1. Sell them to institutions, like governments, schools, companies, whatever. Thing is, the features they look when choosing a game to buy, are ones most likely to make the game unfun, the end result is often boring stuff noone WANTS to play. 2. Sell them to th…
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Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
- Eve Online (spreadsheets)
- KSP (orbital mechanics)
It's fun learning by yourself, though a little of hand-holding could get you up to speed faster.
I believe "Besiege" could be a great way to teach mechanics and physics as well :)
Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education
#119The list of games with widespread educational impact of some sort is already much larger than most people think. As is usually the observation when edutainment of any sort is written about, the point is really that there are many important fields of education excluded from this revolution. Part of that is probably that the cross section of people that are interested in making a game and those who understand the topic well enough to start with is often not large. Persisting cultural relevance for your creation is very rare, which can be crushing. That a game like Snake Pass exists exposing more people to the uniqueness of snake movement is a near miracle.
Games aren't currently categorized by what a player can learn from them, just as movies rarely are. Sometimes even putting into words what you came away with after an experience is difficult, but you know your perspective on yourself or the world changed in some way. Check any of the movie or game storefronts and see if they have any comprehensive sections to let you filter by what people thought they learned from them. Valve is the most well positioned to implement something like this through Steam, because they rapidly iterate with experiments and have a strong variety of games available with an engaged audience willing to do the tasks necessary.
At the moment, you have to guess what you might learn based on the genre or first impressions. Even still, the ratings for a product aren't there to rate educational value and the time played doesn't tell you how long you have to spend in the game to get that learning experience. You can have a 1-2 star game teach you something priceless, while a 5 star game is a nearly vapid lifeless husk of manipulation. Stores like Steam almost need a completely separate perspective view with its own ratings, own tags and own reviews to make these aspects of games more discoverable. There are people that would be more than thrilled to populate that information in good faith.
I think there are hidden riches waiting to be described when people are encouraged to explain to others what it was that they learned rather than what bugs they encountered or whether the production quality was bad and changes like that could over time apply meaningful pressure to add more important educational moments into their games for measurable marketing value.
Being father's day, it wasn't that long ago that my dad was reminiscing about old TV shows where every episode tried to deliver some moral education. How hard is it to find those old episodes categorized by what it tried to teach? Seinfeld was also saturated with educational value through a bevy of unique situations. South Park is probably more educational than Big Bang Theory, because oddly enough I see BBT as more of a facade.
In short, it's not only the standard academic teachings that are underserved or have poor discoverability in all media and I do think continuing to neglect the explicit identification of this value as newer generations pass up old media of all types will have a cascading cost that will impact generations of families.
The side effect is that there will be some educational value that will be polarizing, like inauthentic diversity education that could become an avoid flag for many (for both good and bad reasons). That could be a good thing if it pressures political activism in media to be less overt in order to have more widespread subtle impact without preaching to people louder than the art itself is able to genuinely speak.
There are exciting times ahead and I'm optimistic of the many educational avenues that will be opening up as people wake up to how they learn over the course of their lifetime, be it calculus or empathy.
Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education
#120I own a educational game company. Long story short: it doesn't sell. At my company we identified, at least if your target is kids, two ways to sell edu games. 1. Sell them to institutions, like governments, schools, companies, whatever. Thing is, the features they look when choosing a game to buy, are ones most likely to make the game unfun, the end result is often boring stuff noone WANTS to play. 2. Sell them to th…