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Video Games Are the Future of Education

nabeelqu.co

61–70 of 392 posts

Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education

#61
post #35

If that were true, we'd have at least a few really great educational games by now. Any examples?

By now, we'd have at least a few video game educated mathematicians and scientists. Sure those fields have a credential barrier, but it's not impenetrable. Given that many kids spend more time on video games than on school, the benefits should already be measurable.

Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education

#62

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…

I came here to say something similar. Several assertions in TA are just plain wrong. Making educationa video games might sound great, but it’s so incredibly hard that you might better spend all that time and money and invest it into training teachers to be even better at their job and maybe learning how to leverage tech to support their teaching.

Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education

#63

Fuck yeah, I feel like I'm a better driver thanks to video game, and got a shit ton of culture from the pink panther game as well[1]. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZkX544i8RA

I always feel like I'm a worse driver after playing games a lot, usually it encourages speeding and "fun" behaviours rather than good, sensible, law-abiding driving. What games have you played to improve driving abilities.

I wouldn't say it improves my driving abilities, but when I started driving it just clicked really quickly. I understood I was dealing with an HUD, and some gameplay, and some rules, etc.

gf who doesn't really play video games seemed to struggle more

Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education

#64

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…

> "where games mostly fall short is that they’re not that transferable to the real world." I'd argue that this will change because the "real world" will begin to more and more resemble games. Sports are a good analogy for this. There are entire cultures and subcultures, people's entire lives based around sports.

This si true and also exactly why this isn't such a great idea. If education is done by video games, employers will need to make work like video games, and that will l, naturally, pervade other aspects of life. The skills will become transferable because people use the skills they have and don't know what they don't know.

I guess as a non-gamer I would appreciate less of life looking like a game? I am also very concerned about the lack of socialization in learning from games. Ultimately, for most people, getting along with others is by far their most important skill.

Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education

#65
Q1: Who's going to pay for it? Any idea how much of an effort it is to create a video game that teaches, let's say, statistics? Or geology? Or history? It's a bit more than writing a text book or creating a series of video lectures.

Q2: Who's going to check the assignments? That'll be people, because there's no system in the world that can correctly do anything else but check multiple choice tests and/or provide sensible feedback. We've been trying that for 40 years now, and the results are not hopeful. But if you've got people checking the answers and giving you feedback, you're not reducing the costs by much.

And about that KSP remark: while physics is one of the few areas for which you can build decent simulations, that game won't teach you the basics of combustion, control systems or material science. It just lets you play around. That's fine, but it's no replacement for a PhD.

Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education

#66
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…

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.

Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education

#67
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…

Spot on. I received a small ($150k) NSF grant back in 2010 and made a semi-popular science education app/game for iPad. It was featured by Apple a few times and was even in an iPad commercial - it made basically no money.

Re: Video Games Are the Future of Education

#69
This line again... Education only works insofar as it acculturates children to greater society (or novices to the society of some specific domain). The methods of education are social, present in the surrounding culture and mediated by teachers through social interactions. Consequently, for video games to be "the future of education", video games have to be the future of society as such. Video games are _in_ society, much like music, television and harry potter, but neither are "the future of education". Not even the printing press could upend the basic structure and process of education, only add literacy to the curriculum. Forgive me, but I just don't see "playing video games" make that list in any meaningful way.
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