Video Games Are the Future of Education

Real education, understanding the beauty of nature and mathematics, you need to teach yourself. Sometimes you will find inspiration in school, but mostly you are learning how good attitudes like keeping organised and doing your preparation.

There's not much money in it though. Overworked teachers don't have a lot of cash to throw around.

With the possible exception of the social aspects, lockdown distance learning seems like a waste of time vs. self-directed learning. Which could be as simple as letting kids do things outside and around the house. Or maybe providing bookmobiles and mobile libraries, maybe even a small budget to allow each kid to buy some affordable paperback books from an educational publisher like Scholastic, or cheap used books.

Perhaps schools could focus on providing resources and support for whatever students might actually want to learn (perhaps from a broad list of options) at their own pace, rather than forcing a particular curriculum at a pace dictated by the school.

Technology-wise I am not sure that the current lockdown remote classes are more beneficial than, say, playing video games (or other games) for a couple of hours a day, which would also probably be more fun and social (though single player games are also fine) and more enjoyable for parents as well (especially if they get to play a bit too.)

#1 Institutions means administrators with budgets.

a) What do they want their budgets to do?

b) These things are presumably on networked computers. Can you aggregate and present data to those purse-string holders to justify their expense on an ongoing basis? Do your stats make their spending look smart?

#2 The public means people who spend money on things for kids. Likely parents.

a) Do you just get parents to buy things to get their children to stop asking for them (unlikely for educational software) or do you figure out what else parents expect as a result?

b) Do you show parents results? On an ongoing basis do you show them progress? Maybe text them in the middle of the afternoon when their kids achieve something meaningful?

The goal was interdisciplinary because that's how teachers have to teach these days. They don't have enough time to teach each subject separately so they mix things together.

But it would be relatively straight-forward (not easy) to build weekly story-based content that contained geography, history, science, politics, and more. Textfyre was going to align our stories to Common Core Standards. This would have allowed for stable content delivered to all fifty states. The platform also would have had embedded testing. When you complete a story, you've passed the test!

Despite what many people have claimed, Common Core Standards are just measurements http://www.corestandards.org/, NOT content itself - don't get me started on the confusion people have brought to the education world by attributing content publishing to Common Core. The funky math is just a different way of doing math. It has nothing to do with Common Core itself. The real argument is that some states/parents don't want their kids measured nationally. "My Timmy in Texas can't possibly be compared to your Joey in California! They're different worlds!"

We potentially could have replaced several textbooks between 3rd and 8th grade, significantly reducing educational costs and improving outcomes. The crux of the plan is that it needs millions of dollars to prove the model. We needed to develop a proven and approved 36 week set of stories that aligned with existing teaching methodologies, train teachers, develop the platform, security, etc. No small thing.