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Video Games Are the Future of Education

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Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education

#141

Post by Wowfunhappy »

speeder wrote: post #59

I 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…

Hmm, The Oregon Trail comes to mind as an educational game which was quite fun, and clearly sold to a lot of institutions. Do you have any thoughts on how that came about?

Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education

#143

Post by shafyy »

speeder wrote: post #59

I 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…

We also tried to make educational games and came to a similar conclusion. The truth is, kids (or adults) don't want to play "educational" games. They just want to play fun games.

And, let's be honest, games that try to teach you math or science are just not as fun as Fortnite or Minecraft.

Now, you can make the case that some games are educational by mistake. Like Minecraft, Age of Empires, Sim City or Kerbal Space Program. But noone would see them or describe them as "educational" games.

So, what we're trying to make now are creative games. In my opinion, creativity is extremley important and there are fun ways to be creative, that are not eductional in the strict sense. For example, Lego comes to mind.

Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education

#144

Post by kubanczyk »

greenhatglack wrote: post #66
speeder wrote: post #59

I 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…

Bonner basically owns and runs Scandinavia and parts of mainland Europe, you’re going up against a few countries. It’s hard, I wish you luck. Side note: Bonnier, apart from being a media empire they can destroy your life in seconds also has a schtick where they got a few companies pretending to be startups, like the example you just posted now. Some get acquired others get started by them.

Is that strictly a bad thing? Ok, we've got industry that makes non-educational games (I'm thinking the headshooting type, truly non-boring stuff). But there is small-ish money in that market, it's just retail after all! The same industry will happily jump onto a wagon containing some REAL part of the education budget.

Create some captivating productions, spend real money, because I don't get that assumption that education deserves only cheap boring educational "games" of today.

That's a political program - deep cut of the less effective part of 19-century structures. Kids generally like learning, parents know that, and they see how bad schools are now, so political gains are waiting right there.

Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education

#145

Post by Wowfunhappy »

burntoutfire wrote: post #94
mettamage wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

@adrianhon: here's my trick. Instead of creating serious games. Teach people to be serious players! I have learned a ton from the following games: - Poker (statistics) - Any game (English) - Factorio (programming / software design) - Warcraft 3 (mental arithmetic and resource management) - World of Warcraft (market manipulation -- I created a temporary monopoly on an item and earned 500 gold within an hour as level 2…

For most people, poker will probably more likely lead into a gambling addiction (or at least a habit of regularly flushing money down the train at the tables) than an inquiry into probability and statistics. Most people are probably just not inquisitive enough to dig into the maths behind poker.

I think you need a teacher to put the game in context.

Let's put aside for a moment the optics of a school teacher having their class play Poker (even though obviously they wouldn't be using money). I can imagine a lesson plan going something like:

1. Have kids play some individual games with each other.

2. Stop the games, and go over some of the actual math concepts behind Poker. At this point, the kids are engaged and will want to learn better strategies.

3. Run through a game as a group, with the teacher asking the class what they should do each turn. Ask students to explain why they think one move is better than another, get brief discussions going where applicable, and write probabilities on the board.

4. Let the students play another round of individual games to apply what they've learned.

Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education

#146

Post by bluGill »

MattRix wrote: post #121
speeder wrote: post #59

I 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…

How does something like Prodigy fit into this? It seems quite successful at being an edu-game.

I'm not sure how educational it is. They clearly are selling to the schools first as we wouldn't have found it without our teacher assigning some activities for home schooling. I thought about paying for it, but I want my kids to spend more time outside instead of in the house... They act better for more time outside.

Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education

#147

Post by kubanczyk »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #141
speeder wrote: post #59

I 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…

Hmm, The Oregon Trail comes to mind as an educational game which was quite fun, and clearly sold to a lot of institutions. Do you have any thoughts on how that came about?

Ugh that sure were early times! Nevertheless Wikipedia says: "By 1995, The Oregon Trail comprised about one-third of MECC's $30 million in annual revenue."

And it doesn't matter how much of it was sold to institutions. What matters is how many users benefited from this game and similar ones (Railroad Tycoon, Civilization, etc. come to mind).

Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education

#149

Post by alphydan »

rvanlaar wrote: post #97
speeder wrote: post #59

I 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…

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 resource but it has to tick a lot of boxes. Not because the teachers don't love real learning ... but because our hands are tied.

We have this huge volume of content to cover in a limited amount of time and standardised tests await. If your resource doesn't use the same notation, terminology, depth ... some students may be more confused than helped (of course the very smart ones will make deep connections ... but you have to teach for everybody). It's not an easy problem to solve but more time / money for good teachers is the obvious place to start.

Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education

#150

Post by ducaale »

> It is currently too hard to make video games. Making it easier to create video games will massively increase the supply of good video games and cause a gradual revolution in education.

I don't think it is that hard to make a video game considering the many tools that exist to simplify video game creation. What is hard is making a video game that is also fun to play.

Some of the tools which let you write a video game without coding experience.

1. Scratch - https://scratch.mit.edu/

2. GameMaker - https://www.yoyogames.com/gamemaker

3. Dreams - http://dreams.mediamolecule.com/

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