Video Games Are the Future of Education • Hacker News Board

Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education

#191

Post by jay_kyburz » Sun, Jun 21, 2020, 11:08 PM UTC

throwawaygh wrote: post #172

jay_kyburz wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>high-quality grading of high school English/History essays is not possible.

I didn't mean to imply we could do it now, but somebody will eventually spends hundred of millions of dollars on this and we'll get there.

Machine Learning is not what I mean when I say AI. We need AI's that actually understand text in the same way we do.

All jobs will go to machines eventually.

Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education

#192

Post by phist_mcgee » Sun, Jun 21, 2020, 11:10 PM UTC

My PhD thesis was on this very topic! https://eprints.utas.edu.au/31437/

I created a reading comprehension game/platform for 10-12 year olds. It was not easy designing the game to be fun and educational, but found stat significance for student's reading comprehension scores playing my games compared to the control. It's possible!

Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education

#193

Post by Polylactic_acid » Sun, Jun 21, 2020, 11:10 PM UTC

the_af wrote: post #152

shafyy wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 P…

They can't compete with Fortnite or Minecraft, but Castle of Dr. Brain was so good I played it back in the day and didn't think of it as educational ;)

I used to play so many of those educational point and click games as a kid. Don't remember the details well but it seems the style has died out in the last decade.

Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education

#194

Post by klenwell » Sun, Jun 21, 2020, 11:12 PM UTC

shafyy wrote: post #143

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 P…

The lesson here reminds me of one of my favorite Malcolm Gladwell essays about McDonald's failure to market healthy fast food back in the 90's:

The McLean was a flop, and four years later it was off the market. What happened? Part of the problem appears to have been that McDonald's rushed the burger to market before many of the production kinks had been worked out. More important, though, was the psychological handicap the burger faced. People liked AU Lean in blind taste tests because they didn't know it was AU Lean; they were fooled into thinking it was regular ground beef. But nobody was fooled when it came to the McLean Deluxe. It was sold as the healthy choice--and who goes to McDonald's for health food?

https://web.archive.org/web/20081218211703/http://www.gladwe...

Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education

#195

Post by Polylactic_acid » Sun, Jun 21, 2020, 11:19 PM UTC

gbear605 wrote: post #12

jimbob45 wrote: post #7

Nope. Human contact is the future of education. Rent-seeking scumbags trying to shove technology into education where it isn’t needed can find another industry to ruin.

Technology is a good replacement for existing technology. Replacing a worksheet with digital problems can work well. Replacing a textbook with a virtual lecture can work well for many students. Replacing an instructor with digital problems doesn’t work.

In my experience there is a lot of crappy and hard to use tech in education that if improved would make things much easier.

In highschool we used this system (https://www.managebac.com/) which I found to be incredibly useful and easy to use and everything was logically placed in the same application. Then when I went to uni we had about 10 cobbled together applications that were all crappy and confusing and my results definitely suffered when I failed to find important information and notices.

Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education

#196

Post by adenverd » Sun, Jun 21, 2020, 11:20 PM UTC

Video games will become a much more powerful force at sparking kids' interest and creativity in a subject, which will lead to better educational outcomes. In my experience, video games are a fantastic way to learn the initial 50% of a new subject, and to appreciate and enjoy it. Some anecdotes from my life:

- I learned programming through an in-game (Star Wars Galaxies) scripting language. That little bit of experience automating repetitive tasks set me up to excel in high school and college programming courses, which led to a career in data engineering, and now AI and robotics.

- I was introduced to game theory by a prisoner's dilemma situation in a video game (KOTOR).

- I learned economics and market forces by trading on Runescape's Grand Bazaar, and how to model and optimize a production system by managing a little island kingdom.

Not only did I learn new subjects from these experiences, but learned that I could excel at and have fun giving them my attention, on my own time and for my own purposes, without the external pressures of grades and tests. This gave me the confidence and energy to pursue them more deeply in school.

One thing that's interesting about all of these experiences is that they were all multiplayer and extremely social games (KOTOR, while a single-player RPG, was played with siblings and friends). I suspect that the social aspect was a primary motivating factor, and wonder if that principle holds for the broader population. I certainly wasn't the only kid in my class trading on the bazaar to get some extra GP.

Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education

#197

Post by 6510 » Sun, Jun 21, 2020, 11:24 PM UTC

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…

perhaps a short list of things for parents to study, a little bit of reading/study material along with some tests. Shouldn't be to hard to pick some topics and crudely compile something for parents who are interested.

4 classes per year seems entirely reasonable.

Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education

#198

Post by ethanbond » Sun, Jun 21, 2020, 11:29 PM UTC

gfodor wrote: post #188

tchaffee wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most (all) people have no counterfactual to compare against.

We can compare across cultures, though, and say that more educated ones tend to be more prosperous along nearly every dimension than less educated ones.

Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education

#199

Post by sushshshsh » Sun, Jun 21, 2020, 11:37 PM UTC

X doubt.

Whoever are putting out the most cutting edge info on technology and innovation (think WhatsApp company blog, InfoQ, the latest and greatest academic books on the things you study), that's where the first mover advantage is for getting a leg up on everybody else in learning the skills you need to be in high demand.

If you wait for someone else to digest that info and then gamify it for you, you're already too late.

Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education

#200

Post by reaperducer » Sun, Jun 21, 2020, 11:37 PM UTC

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…

You have a lot of laments about "media connections" to let people know about your business. I think you're looking at this wrong.

It's not about "connections." It's about doing business the old-fashioned way: advertising, and hiring a public relations agency.

Advertising is self-explanatory. But for some reason a lot of tech companies don't hire PR firms. They like to cheap out and do PR in-house, or they simply never think of it.

It's the PR firm's job to have the "media connections" you so desperately crave. Tech people are notoriously bad at public relations, so it's perfectly logical to farm this out to people who specialize in just this sort of thing. There are even boutique PR agencies for various industries, including tech. But in your case, you should have hired one of the several hundred that specialize in education.

You could have been the next Oregon Trail!