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Video Games Are the Future of Education

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Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education

#211

Post by xrd »

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 ;)

It's so cool that you can get this on internet archive absolutely free, inside the browser, in a JS emulator!

https://archive.org/details/msdos_Castle_of_Dr._Brain_1991

Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education

#212

Post by mcv »

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…

> "Like Minecraft, Age of Empires, Sim City or Kerbal Space Program. But noone would see them or describe them as "educational" games."

And that's the problem. Because they are educational. And because they are both educational and fun, people are much more engaged to learn from them than from "real" educational games.

People who play Europe Universalis learn way more about early modern history than they ever learned at school. As Randal Munroe pointed out, you learn way more about orbital mechanics from KSP.

If you want to make truly educational games, you shouldn't focus on the educational part, but take the educational part and wrap it in tons of fun.

Of course there are topics where this is going to be hard. I have absolutely no idea how anyone could make a fun game that revolves around German grammar. (Or do I? The best way to learn a language always seems to be to actually use it with a native speaker. Having a friend who speaks the language you're trying to learn would be a great way to do that. There might be something here.)

But something like geology could be part of a simulation where you need to find certain resources, and that's easier once you understand how those resources are formed. And then there needs to be something fun to do with those resources, of course.

Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education

#213

Post by _jjkk »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #206
_jjkk wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Learning via video games is so powerful for many kids because of the agency they're provided. Also they are intrinsically motivated to play the game and they can't help but learn. "Stop the games", "put the game in context", etc. mostly kills this feeling for many kids. Only the most skilled teachers are able to do this without making the whole thing unfun.

In this case though, you're stopping the game to teach strategies on how to win the game.

But for some kids, the mere act of stopping the game and stepping in as the authority to "teach" is enough to shut them down.

Video games are good at getting through to those who don't respond well to adults stepping in and contextualizing things all the time.

Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education

#214

Post by mcphilip »

analog31 wrote: post #136

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 th…

There was at least one masterpiece of educational software in the early 80s: Robot Odyssey. I think it was just too hard and obscure at the time to get much recognition, but I was thrilled to see a write up about its influence in Silicon Valley some years later in the Salon article “The Hardest Computer Game of All Time”

https://slate.com/technology/2014/01/robot-odyssey-the-harde...

Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education

#215

Post by barry-cotter »

ethanbond wrote: post #198
gfodor wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, richer countries buy more consumer goods and experiences. You have the relation right but the causality reversed. Large parts of Africa and almost all of Latin America are more highly educated now than 1970s Europe and poorer than it.

Richer countries buy more of everything they want. The most obvious example of economic growth not being associated with education is post Deng Xiaoping China. The huge majority had primary school education at best and the economy just kept growing and growing. On the other side look at any of the Arab petrostates, many university graduates, no real economy except pumping oil.

Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education

#216

Post by dlhavema »

kubanczyk wrote: post #147
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I played civilization a lot back in the day mainly because it was the only game my computer could play. I monitor was so crummy I think it had EGA graphics. because of this now I know what the gardens of Hammurabi and a lot of other of the wonders of the world just by building them and knowing a little bit about what they did for the civilization that actually built them.

factoria is another good one that's really really fun and can also be really really educational if you think about the materials and resources and how you combine them. also if you really want to go crazy with it learning some math will help you fully optimize your factory but it's some pretty complicated math, at least for me.

Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education

#217

Post by darawk »

deathgrips wrote: post #89
darawk wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem, though, is that the number of teachers we require makes that prohibitively expensive. We need to do both things. We need to increase the leverage of individual teachers, so that they can teach more students. To do that, we require technology. Then we can start paying teachers more.

Just fire most of the administrative workers. Everyone's a spendthrift until you want to spend money on teachers instead of administrators and multi-million dollar buildings and stadiums.

I would love to do that, and it would certainly help, but I don't think it's anywhere near sufficient to pay teachers as much as your average software engineer, for instance.

Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education

#218

Post by ses1984 »

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…

Most educational games are straight garbage. I'm sure there are some good ones but there is a lot of chaff to sort through.

Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education

#219

Post by mrhappyunhappy »

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 did the same in WoW :) Bought up all the versions of a certain item in AH and sold at extreme markup over time. As more came up on AH I’d just buy them all up and continue. This lasted for quite some time and I diversified into other items. Let’s just say I could afford anything in that game :)

Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education

#220

Post by dlhavema »

_jjkk wrote: post #207
foobiekr wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Factorio quickly demonstrates to the player the danger and cost of bolt-on / ad-hoc / spaghetti code solutions, and likewise the benefits of a bit of forethought. Doing some pre-planning of your factory's eventual layout will have you advancing through the tech tree much, much faster (and without rebuilding critical sections all the time!)

I wouldn't attributed this to programming but pre-planning in general benefits a lot of places. That goes to the comment in the article that "a bad plan is better than no plan".

I totally know what you mean a spaghetti factory is just as hard to deal with as spaghetti code... until you have bots and you can actually copy paste your factory around to cut and paste your factory it's super hard to fix the problem.

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