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Video Games Are the Future of Education

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Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education

#171

Post by tchaffee »

Alex3917 wrote: post #131
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…

> 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. This is definitely true about developers, and this is one of the biggest problems with HN. That said, I think this particular article is spot on. Not everything is best taught through games, but right now 99% of stuff isn't taught…

> FWIW the specific mistake you're making is thinking about this in a way that overemphasizes the context of the school system.

I am? I have spent literally thousands of hours volunteering for a free online education platform that operates entirely independently from school systems. Although some schools do use it. Some of my family was home schooled. Along with that I have actual teaching experience outside the public school system. I still don't consider myself an expert because I know far less about teaching than I do about my main gig: programming and technology. But claiming I am thinking about this in a specific way is a wrong assumption on your part.

> There’s also no contradiction between learning through games and learning by doing. Everything we do in real life has game-like properties, you just have to find them.

The article is about video games, not games. For some things there is a contradiction. If you want to learn to ride a horse or play guitar then a guitar or a real horse is the game. A video game will never come anywhere close to just picking up a real guitar or riding a real horse.

Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education

#172

Post by throwawaygh »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #154
throwawaygh wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. See "competency-based education/learning". I have some experience doing this. First, it's really hard to do in American schools because of the grade progression system enshrined in funding formulas through rigid scheduling of standardized tests by age (instead of by competency level). Second, software can keep track but definitely can't make the assessment. And keeping track isn't really valuable; teachers can do…

Ok, so many things to comment on here. Firstly, there are a lot of other countries than America. Secondly, re grade progression system, the issue is not what broken system you have now, we should strive to improve the education of our children. There are clearly a million was that software can make assessment better. Software will eventually be able to read an essay and provide feedback on how well the argument was m…

Yes to everything about the US system having some serious problems and being fairly unique relative to the rest of the world.

> Software will eventually be able to read an essay and provide feedback on how well the argument was made, as well as the nuts and bolts of how sentences are put together... Imagine for example the task is to convince an AI to buy you a pony. You have to write a persuasive essay as to why you should have a pony. The AI can...

No, it can't.

Giving good feedback on essays in high school English or History courses is AI-complete.

"Some type of feedback" is already possible (you can go buy essay graders today -- go try one), but if we go that route we'll mostly just be teaching people how to optimize for a (very broken) grading algorithm.

"'The AI' will then " is exactly how you end up with horribly shitty ML code destroying people's lives.

TBH we're not even there with high school math yet, which is a lot easier than high school essays.

I have a CS PhD, publish in AI conferences, and have taught high school. I am fundamentally absolutely certain that high-quality grading of high school English/History essays is not possible. I'm also certain that we could build "something" that "grades essays" and will have catastrophic negative outcomes for a generation of students if adopted. Students will learn how to write for one really dumb algorithm, and then there will be years of cleanup at universities and workplaces afterward teaching them how to actually write for humans.

> but to be clear, _almost all_ motivation in education is extrinsic now. Nobody is doing their math homework because its fun. They do it so they won't "fail".

My classroom experience suggests that a) this isn't true, and b) there are lots of different types of extrinsic motivation; grades are actually not the most important motivator for most students. People are really complex, and everyone has different motivators.

Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education

#173

Post by Stevvo »

joshvm wrote: post #106
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 kids] I think you can rule out any online game, or any gambling game (both will be age restricted). Saying that, teaching kids how to play cards is probably worth it. Board games are generally good for mental arithmetic, particularly Monopoly. And there are less "gambley" card games that teach statistics - Bridge, for example. Pretty much any card game which forces you to assess the odds of what your opponents h…

More toppings! There's something on that I don't like.

Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education

#174

Post by bnj »

Video games are great, but the future of education is personal relationships and caring.

There’s this (seems like mostly unchallenged) assumption that more technology improves education.

What if more (or any) technology is actually counter-productive for most learning?

I’m thinking mostly here about k-12 students, and I’m not talking about actually learning technology (which would definitely demand access) —- but everything else?

Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education

#175

Post by IggleSniggle »

scollet wrote: post #36
adrianhon wrote: post #5

The author claims “where games mostly fall short is that they’re not that transferable to the real world. The skills you learn are highly specific to that game,” but “this will change,” because the cost of game development is decreasing. But his conclusion doesn’t follow; we might get more educational games, but not necessarily ones with skills that are more generalisable. As someone who’s spent the last 15 years mak…

I somewhat disagree with both these assertions for different reasons. A. Games mostly fail because of non-transferrable skills is not an interesting point. Most books, most paintings, most music follows a uniform distribution of mediocrity. This is the role of curation and recommendation networks. Skills of discernment, reactivity, and higher cognition can be gleaned from games at a very young age. B. Designing educa…

I agree with you, and I also think whether games will be educational or not often as a great deal to do with temperament. But, like other media, put high quality, rich content with multifaceted depth is key to making an environment in which someone could learn something.

Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education

#176

Post by mysterydip »

kayhi wrote: post #153
1auralynn wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spot on. I received a small ($150k) NSF grant back in 2010 and made a semi-popular science education app/game for iPad. It was featured by Apple a few times and was even in an iPad commercial - it made basically no money.

Can you share the name and does it still exist?

If they made it in 2010, without updates, it's no longer on the App store. Apple takes down things that don't get updates.

Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education

#177

Post by TigeriusKirk »

disqard wrote: post #164
jay_kyburz wrote: post #122

I'm a game developer who just finished a few months of home schooling 2 kids, and I agree that games are the future of Education, but not for the same reason as the author. 1. I think we'll eventually have software manage the progress of our children as they learn. It will present new ideas when they are ready for them, and test that old ideas stay fresh in memory. Software can do a better job than a teacher can, bec…

Check out the PLATO system [0]. It was built in the '60s and was a connected, online learning environment which would tailor its content delivery based on the student's learning rate. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_(computer_system)

We used PLATO in some class I was in at Ga Tech in the mid 80s, I think maybe chemistry. I remember thinking it was pretty neat, but that it was simplified and I wasn't learning that much from it.

Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education

#178

Post by jay_kyburz »

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…

I think this is because developers can see where software and AI is going, and what it can do. We see our human weaknesses, and can imagine what tools could do better.

We want to build tools that will help teachers do their best.

(Also sometimes you need to just burn down the establishment and start over because everything we know is wrong. )

Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education

#180

Post by foobiekr »

mettamage wrote: post #31
adrianhon wrote: post #5

The author claims “where games mostly fall short is that they’re not that transferable to the real world. The skills you learn are highly specific to that game,” but “this will change,” because the cost of game development is decreasing. But his conclusion doesn’t follow; we might get more educational games, but not necessarily ones with skills that are more generalisable. As someone who’s spent the last 15 years mak…

@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…

I really like Factorio but I think it's a bit of a stretch to describe it as teaching programming or software design. Maybe, conceptually, data flow.

Certainly, Human Resource Machine does teach programming.

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