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Video Games Are the Future of Education

nabeelqu.co

21–30 of 392 posts

Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education

#21

Look 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.

It is not that it needs more technology. Education is driven as much from access as it is anything else. Access to teachers is huge. But, failing that, access to educational things is pretty good.

I know my kids got better at quick multiplication from number crunchers. Pretty sure I got better at math from as seemingly non math based games as old RPGs.

Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education

#22
While yes the game industrie will change some very small parts of education, my beleef is that it will not change anything big. Most of the time the games are already there but it is just not used because of many different problems.

I think that there are some small field that will be changed to games. For example I think there will be more good typing games like Epistory typing chronicles used in education. And some simple games for counting and learning a language. But this does not mean it changes the future of education.

I'm a Game Developer my self, for 4 years now, and most of the applied games and VR companies out there are just a hype to me. But I firmly beleef that platforms like EDX and Khan Academy and others will become bigger and bigger. Some schools may introduce a few classes or years with this model and they may flip the classroom. So in other words watch video's at home do your homework at school. And yes the simplest of simplest excesses on these platforms may become little games. But i'm interested to hear from all of you how you think games may be used or are currently used in education after the hype.

Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education

#23
Love it. Especially the failed business plan I had from 8 years ago. The OP is correct, but good luck getting the education world to change. It's monitored by "moms" that don't like change, school districts that run on what is known, and a publishing industry without a single success in interactivity in the decades computers have been around. Any success has been small and anecdotal, even Khan Academy. In order to truly change our education system, we need to spend a hundred million dollars on R&D with interactive storytelling to get the breadth of material correct, then another billion developing the depth. After words, students could freely "roam" through stories and learn at their own pace. Interactive software could monitor reading and comprehension levels and adapt, it can provide real-time feedback to teachers who can "steer the ship".

I worked on this for several years, got close to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The guy in charge of their education grants eventually stole all of our ideas and put them in their next grant application process that was directed at "publishers with an existing customer base of at least 100,000 students" which means established companies.

Pearson, Britannica, McGraw-Hill, and all of the other education publishers have one goal. Maintain the status-quo. Feed their existing content-developers who are solely focused on static page-oriented content. Why change? They have billion dollar contracts with states to deliver textbooks at exorbitant prices ($100+/student/class/year).

I'm not bitter. Just disappointed. I definitely did not know what I was getting into and did not have the pedigree to chase down this business. But I did have a pretty good team and had Gates Foundation took a chance, we may have been able to prove the interactive model. That in itself would have been worth the investment.

It's dated, but still relevant. Here is Textfyre's business plan...

http://plover.net/~dave/textfyre/Textfyre%20Investor%20Prese...

Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education

#27

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 make an educational game someday (but not an infinite well of time or skill), and the likelihood of this actually happening increases as the tools improve.

Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education

#28

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…

> it’s even harder to design one that’s fun and educational

Everything that exists in either the natural or human world exists because it's part of some sort of game. So yeah it might be hard, but almost by definition it should be possible.

Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education

#29

Love it. Especially the failed business plan I had from 8 years ago. The OP is correct, but good luck getting the education world to change. It's monitored by "moms" that don't like change, school districts that run on what is known, and a publishing industry without a single success in interactivity in the decades computers have been around. Any success has been small and anecdotal, even Khan Academy. In order to tr…

Can I ask, what is the subject? Is it reading? History? Geography? Interdisipinary across some of those?

(Not trying to be adversarial, just interested.)

Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education

#30

Not the best chess example when the white queen is toast in the next move.

It's white to move

So black has made a move since being in that predicament and didn't block the queen with the g-pawn?

Either way, struck me as a little odd.

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