81–90 of 392 posts
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…
I would have way more tolerance for these articles if they started with "I have never studied education, I have not taught children, I haven't done the homework or any reading on pedagogy, but I would like to do some thought experiments on hacking education...".
Brainstorming can be useful and bad ideas should be welcome during brainstorming. I understand why it is embraced on HN. But it has to be closer to the end of the spectrum of experts brainstorming than it is closer to the end of the spectrum of monkeys randomly typing a work of Shakespeare.
Imagine junior programmers brainstorming the future of cryptography. It's just going to be cringe. Nothing significant is going to come out of it. Of course they should do it between themselves. And that's where it should end.
As far as why video games are not the future of education, there are many things worth learning that are best learned by doing them, not by taking part in a simulation. Speaking and understanding a language, playing a musical instrument, painting, public speaking, tying knots, soldering electronics, using shop tools, and many more. All things I learned in public school and many of which I still use. My public school wasn't amazing. I could point out many flaws. But the good teachers I had were pretty amazing. Take that human out of the picture and replace it with a video game and I would have learned far less.
If you want to know the things that could immediately be improved about public education and have a measurable positive outcome, talk to teachers and get ready for some pretty obvious answers that are generally going to require more money.
Does that mean video games don't have any future in education? Of course not. But they are nothing near the silver bullet promised by the author.
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…
How is it any different from selling any other non-entertainment service? #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 mone…
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 are maker projects. The tangible outcome is understandable to people. The educational content/value varies though.
Perhaps, but if there is one thing we know, it's that massive online courses do not work well as we have currently tried them. Students don't come back year to year, and engagement throughout the course is very low [1]. Using a video game might help solve the engagement problem, but I would be hard pressed to think benefit of using a video game (increased engagement in the learning process) would be worth the 10-100x…
Engagement and enjoyment are tricky metrics because they often report positive numbers; however, when compared to less engaging or less enjoyable methods they can perform worse for the end goal of learning. They can create motivation to learn the topic, which I support, but at some point that benefit has a ceiling effect.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Yanjin_Long/publication...
Perhaps, but if there is one thing we know, it's that massive online courses do not work well as we have currently tried them. Students don't come back year to year, and engagement throughout the course is very low [1]. Using a video game might help solve the engagement problem, but I would be hard pressed to think benefit of using a video game (increased engagement in the learning process) would be worth the 10-100x…
I simply don't believe this. My father said there is a hidden club in the military, and those not in the club don't know it exists. You join that club when you get shot at. It irreversibly changes your perspective.
I don't believe anyone can understand heroism without being in that club.
I'm not a member, though I have been threatened at gunpoint.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pay teachers more. If you are a smart person and could have a great career in industry, why would you ever go teach unless you come from a financial background that can support you (aka wealthy parents) or are extremely altruistic. If you pay teachers competitive wages that are in line with their contributions to society, you'd see better teachers overall.
The problem, though, is that the number of teachers we require makes that prohibitively expensive. We need to do both things. We need to increase the leverage of individual teachers, so that they can teach more students. To do that, we require technology. Then we can start paying teachers more.
So far my favorites are the Dragonbox games [1].