Video Games Are the Future of Education

I just watched the movie October Sky for the first time last night. It really resonated with me as I use to make my own rocket engines. I think kids figuring out things on their own is the real way to go. It’s going to have to come from the individual for it to matter.

My kid was very into Prodigy, but after a couple of months I discovered he was spending more time going around decorating his house and trying to talk to other kids through their limited chat feature. He ended up avoiding battles because he said it slowed down what he wanted to do.

When I was in college (1982-1986), my summer job was at a computer facility that served the K-12 schools for a large county in the Midwest. They had a big room that was equipped with each kind of personal computer, so teachers could come and try them out, and demo copies of every software title that they could lay their hands on, including "educational" software. The world had not yet settled on IBM and Apple, and the Mac was still in the future.

Virtually all of the educational software was lame, amounting to Glorified Flash Cards with animated characters and other decorations. Most if not all have been forgotten.

Fast forward to the past decade or so, my kids both grew up in the Internet era. Educational software is now Web based of course. But it's still not very far removed from Glorified Flash Cards. The main new feature is surveillance, ranging from making sure that you covered the entire exercise, catching cheaters, and tracking your online behavior. Note what one of the other posts says about stuff being sold that school districts are likely to buy.

Okay, there were two "educational" software titles in the early 80s, worthy of note: Word processing and BASIC / Pascal. As I understand it, both BASIC and Pascal were created as teaching tools, but both are completely open ended and imply no specific curriculum. They also allow students to learn at their own pace if they want to, and resemble tools that people actually use in the "real world." They also fully expose you to the consequences of your mistakes.

What "educational" titles do we have today? My high school education predated the word processor. I believe that my kids learned to be good writers and thinkers because of the ability to do a lot of writing and have it read and critiqued easily. And I've never stopped learning from having a programming tool at my disposal, though it's Python instead of BASIC today. Once again, those tools contain no built-in agenda and provide total exposure to making and learning from mistakes.

My favorite educational game is Jupyter. It's not just for math and computation. It can be used for science too. Science has a peculiarity, that in order to really learn it, you have to experience how nature can prove you wrong. Building computerized experiments and measurements is one way to be exposed to this.

I believe that education is hard because it involves the brain, and we haven't figured out the brain. We'll be able to automate teaching when we can automate thinking. Meanwhile I think we can use software and automation to eliminate wasteful thinking, such as physical library searching and doing some kinds of mathematical manipulations by hand.

When I was in elementary school, my math class spent a good amount of time playing Roller Coaster Tycoon in small groups. I can't remember exactly how it worked, but I think we rotated who got to drive, while two or three other kids watched and gave advice.

While a lot of adults have fun pushing the boundaries of Roller Coaster Tycoon (e.g. designing roller coasters that smash into each other), we were very serious about it! The goal was to make a truly profitable park, and I remember having conversations about optimal ride and souvenir pricing, revenue per building, etc. (with our very limited vocabulary).

I think games need to be fun first and educational second to have any chance. We didn't realize we were learning while playing RCT, we were just excited by the challenge and the goal. The means to achieve the goal just happened to be loosely grounded in real world business practices.

Good point. Being more of a movie guy than a gamer watching some of the stuff these days on screen I keep wondering what education would be like if the people behind the Matrix or Pixar or Tom Cruise were involved in the design (alongside the pedagogical expert).