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Video Games Are the Future of Education

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Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education

#241

Post by Balgair »

foobiekr wrote: post #180
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…

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 is very close to Eagle and other PCB designing tools.

Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education

#242

Post by throwawaygh »

6510 wrote: post #197
throwawaygh wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> 4 classes per year seems entirely reasonable.

Suggesting upper middle class stay-at-home moms should take night classes because their addition skills are worse than your average second grader sounds like a great way to _spectacularly_ lose a school board election. These people are king makers in local politics.

Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education

#243

Post by eru »

mcv wrote: post #212
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…

> "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…

Geology is a big part of Dwarf Fortress. They take their different stone types very serious.

About 'German Grammar': check out Heaven's Vault https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaven%27s_Vault

But honestly, humans don't learn languages by understand their grammars with the logic part of their brain. Games would be ideal to produce comprehensible input, and test players on their comprehension via actions, instead of making them reply with words.

There's some evidence that trying to produce language to early in your learning just ingrains bad habits. So instead you can just follow increasingly complex instructions to show that you understand. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input_hypothesis

Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education

#244

Post by Kye »

Balgair wrote: post #239
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…

There's an old adage in screenwriting: Don't give the audience 4, give them 2+2. This is the Kuleshov Effect [0] for scripts. By giving them the little details, you engage the audience (well, most of them) and make the work more compelling. Medical and Crime procedurals are this in spades. Sherlock Holmes is still idolized. Educational genres are explicitly against the Kuleshov Effect. The whole point is to get to 4.…

The progression of the Sherlock subplot in Star Trek: The Next Generation is a good example of this. It starts with Data trying to solve a case too fast, then ends with the computer creating a holographic life form to outwit Data.

Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education

#245

Post by Balgair »

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…

One trend I've found interesting is take industrial design software tools (things for CAD, PCB, FPGA, etc) and then 'dumb' them down and add hostile creatures to destroy the player's designs. It's not a bad method. Literally, make simple code and add hostile bugs to it.

Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education

#246

Post by eru »

usrusr wrote: post #221
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…

Every game that contains an element of simulation that strives for realism is educational in that you walk out knowing a lot more about the simulated topic than before, often more than you ever wanted, and often more than what's in the sim. E.g. when I was playing counterstrike I found myself embarrassingly well-read in the Wikipedia pages about the history of modern firearms. Who would have guessed that "the Startga…

> But this kind of knowledge acquisition only ever teaches the lowest hanging fruits, it's no substitute for drilling in the basics. Even lifetimes spent passing KSP won't bring you to a point were you could design your own rocket.

Yes. Though it can probably teach you enough that you have enough scaffolding already in your brain that you can get through a textbook without getting lost?

Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education

#247

Post by msla »

reaperducer wrote: post #200
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 neve…

Do you have any hints on how to pick a good PR firm? The last thing anyone needs is to hire one who thinks it's a really neato idea to buy a few weeks' worth of pop-unders on the OANN website.

Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education

#248

Post by eru »

esperent wrote: post #159
greenhatglack wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Bonnier, apart from being a media empire they can destroy your life in seconds I've never heard that the Bonnier group goes around destroying lives. Do you have any examples of them doing so?

I took that more as a comment on media empire than on Bonnier specifically?

Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education

#249

Post by msla »

anticsapp wrote: post #229
mysterydip wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What's the max time in updates allowed?

Better question: Is there a fixed answer, or does it vary arbitrarily?

Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education

#250

Post by eru »

manfredo wrote: post #184
david-gpu wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But how much are you learning relative to the amount of time you spend playing the game? I would expect a little of learning for a lot of time. You may as well study for a while and go play with your friends later.

At least for fire emblem it was more about practicing basic math operations. You don't really learn anything in Kumon either. You just get better at math through practice. I think I didn't so much learn new things so much as I got an applied perspective on things that I had already learned. It's one thing to read about value added in a textbook, it's another thing to actually experience it in person buying reagents a…

Yes, that applied perspective is extremely important.

Especially for more abstract topics like, why does a market work better at discovering information than central command-and-control?

A game can't help but have some mechanisms. The mechanisms don't necessarily reflect reality, but they have to bear more weight of themselves than eg just a story does.

Game design shows at least some unintended consequences.

Especially the more simulation type games like Sim City where the game world ticks along without your input, as compared to more heavily scripted player focused games like an FPS.

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