Future of education is already here, but not many want to recognize it.
Video Games Are the Future of Education
311–320 of 392 posts
Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems the author is not thinking about games (educational or not) in the common sense, but in way broader terms: > A video game is just: > > (a) a simulation of reality > (b) with fast feedback loops. I’d agree with both of you. “Educational” games are a hard sell. I’m a parent and the educational mini-games pushed by school is boring to death and won’t stick with my kid. It’s hard to articulate, but the underlyin…
The original Sim City also comes to mind. It teaches a lot, but is still fun.
Now it's libre, Check Micropolis.
Also lincity/linticy-ng are great too, even more for a climate changing world.
Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education
#313Earlier 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…
>Also, parents of fifth grade kids who are frustrated that they can't help their kids understand conditional probabilities, and express that frustration by telling us to "stop teaching their kids about gambling".
That's funny. Back in school my statistics/probability classes involved lots of examples showing how rigged lotteries and gambling are. Once you do the math it becomes strikingly obvious. If you don't teach people about gambling they will simply gamble because of ignorance.
Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the indirect approach is very underrated. Our kids have all learned to read ahead of “schedule” because they wanted to understand what was happening in their games, and they’re all also coming along very quickly at arithmetic because of needing to manage the economy of whatever game they’re playing. As a kid, I picked up a familiarity with history and geography that was miles ahead of my peers due to games li…
A personal anecdote: I bought my first English dictionary to understand 1992’s Alone in the Dark. I’d probably not be talking with you guys and girls if not for videogames. I had no interest whatsoever in learning English, I just wanted to beat the games. If someone assigned me the very same game for educational purposes, I’d hate it by default.
I learned English in the MMO Runescape, bartering for items and getting help on quests. I basically never had to study for any English class since primary school because I was always slightly ahead of where the class was due to obsessively playing video games.
Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education
#315Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Unfortunately, the response to that is going to be something to the effect of "Are you calling me stupid?" Many parents are not going to accept that they had a bad education and could use some catch up. Even fewer are going to accept it if the catch up in question is of elementary school level.
I guess the only way would be to have some sort of educational material that involves both parent and child.
Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education
#316Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the indirect approach is very underrated. Our kids have all learned to read ahead of “schedule” because they wanted to understand what was happening in their games, and they’re all also coming along very quickly at arithmetic because of needing to manage the economy of whatever game they’re playing. As a kid, I picked up a familiarity with history and geography that was miles ahead of my peers due to games li…
A personal anecdote: I bought my first English dictionary to understand 1992’s Alone in the Dark. I’d probably not be talking with you guys and girls if not for videogames. I had no interest whatsoever in learning English, I just wanted to beat the games. If someone assigned me the very same game for educational purposes, I’d hate it by default.
Actual great learning games do exist, but the real awesome ones are rare.
See this 2012 thread on a truly awesome algebra learning game, and this stays relevant to this day. To the best of my knowledge, it is still the best and fastest way to learn how to solve an equation for x. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4188579
Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education
#317The 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…
I personally think most games just aren't realistic enough. There is this game where you use a plasma cutter to take a space ship apart. The plasma cutter doesn't actually slice panels in half. They just disappear.
Minecraft is a bad game for learning to how to craft in real life because there is this work bench thing that does everything from basic wood working to building industrial machines. You don't need a hammer, screwdriver, drill, bench vice, manual saw, etc. There are some mods that force you to use basic chemistry to do things like create sulfuric acid or electrolysis to separate hydrogen and oxen in a long chain [0] to finally get a 4x multiplier on your ore. Those were a learning opportunity but the rest of the game just isn't like that.
There are games like cataclysm dda that at least require you to have the right tools to craft something but that game is already hard enough as it is even though its crafting menu is a huge oversimplification.
The closer these games get to reality the better they teach you about the real world.
Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education
#318I 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…
Making games, especially ones that sell at any volume, as the blog suggests, is extremely hard. And that's why the 'Educational' market is traditionally believed (or possibly, 'percieved') to be very tough (i.e. Professor Layton, or Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego).
Those games will always exist.
But what the blog author appears to allude to, is a latent category of games, that already exist, but he believes their true market value to be hidden.
Kerbal Space Program appears to be the most overt example of the class of games the author identifies, but I'd argue that most of the EA licensed sports games offer a similar experiential quality (I'd worked at a sports analytics company and know, for example, that FIFA rankings are used as a starting point for some lines of investigation).
I also remember learning more about cars from Gran Turismo, than from any other source of information I had access to. Including the internet.
As a lifelong video-game enthusiast, the article resonated with me, as I've always believed this potentially educational property of great video-games to be one of the most valuable parts of them. Though to date, it feels like successful manifestations have proven to be surreptitious, rather than prevalent, or even recognised at all for such qualities.
Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "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…
> I have absolutely no idea how anyone could make a fun game that revolves around German grammar. WWII is a pretty common setting for games. Making the German protagonists communicating only in German would be a first step to incentive learning the language.
Have an English language game where enemies talk in German, where being able to understand them gives you an advantage, for example because you know what they're about to do.
Then mix and match for different languages.
Of course the things they say should be more detailed and diverse than just some standard sound clips.
Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "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 makin…
> But honestly, humans don't learn languages by understand their grammars with the logic part of their brain.
As a native German speaker, I disagree. For me, the German grammar (in particular the declination system) is what I would consider the type system of the German language. So yes, I do think a lot about German sentences in terms of types/grammar that are/is involved.
EDIT: When I was a pupil at school, the only thing that I loved about the German classes (for native speakers) were the grammatical concepts. At that time, I really couldn't understand why these weren't taught in math classes ...