Video Games Are the Future of Education

I'm actually still working on something similar but, basically, no longer trying to run a business selling educational games (more, profits from commercial development contracts with actual budgets funding the cooler projects).

One reservation I've had about Khan Academy, is a "gather college textbooks and distill them" story doesn't work well when textbooks so poorly describe domains. When MIT did a VR intro to cell biology, they reached out to people with direct research expertise. And found them very intrinsically motivated to contribute. But it's still no small effort.

Creating excellent stories, especially interdisciplinary ones, requires far more intensive domain expertise than is usually appreciated. And seems more at the scale of (neglected) societal infrastructure, than something that can be MVPed in passing.

But perhaps excellence in stories is more than is needed. At least to develop and prove the delivery mechanism. But coming from science ed, I think of misconceptions as toxins that can severely diminish outcomes.

So as I read the Boston Harbor story slide, I thought... The big heavy canvas fluttered away?!? Is there a hurricane? Was anyone killed? Did they launch a boat to recover it? Why was the label sun-weathered if it was under a canvas? Did they really use printed labels on sea cargo? I'd have naively thought branding the wood more likely. And so on.

An issue with science education graphics, is they often mix aspects done with great care for correctness, with aspects that are artistic license with little connection to reality. And students lack the background to identify which aspects are which. Creating rich ecosystems of misconceptions that compromise understanding.

But students' understanding of history is and will remain so poor, that perhaps there's little there to damage. Content might be pure upside, regardless of shortcuts taken to keep creation costs plausible. At least until we do better.

Re Gates Foundation... perhaps a useful model is that they think of patents and established companies as keys to impact at scale... and thus do things which can seem less than ethical if one doesn't share that perspective.

Some aspects of the grading might be offloaded from humans, as the range of tasks and cases is often diverse. Or multiple less skilled humans substituted for more expensive ones.

In math for instance, there's no need for a human to see a blank answer, or a clearly correct one.

A system can assess graders as well as students. Might suggest to a professor which subset of gradings by graduate students could use a quality check. Using non-AI-complete statistics like "when this person grades late at night, and takes a long time on an answer, but doesn't write much, and the student is someone flagged as being at risk, then the odds increase that the professor will want to have seen it". Or perhaps particular cases are best handled by a particular grader. Or should always get an independent cross check of two graders, to reduce grading variance and bias.

That a hybrid system might hypothetically support good grading, does not imply that that's the direction which often-unfortunate incentives will drive the tech. Years ago I saw a paper, about the post-WWII defense industry investment in CNC tech. One argument was there were other options, like recording and playing back a skilled machinist, which might have been widely deployed decades earlier. But getting rid of the dependency on skilled workmen was a management objective. Creating cheap automated grading may be far more incentivized that attempting harder and less cheap good grading.