Video Games Are the Future of Education
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nabeelqu.co
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 the public directly, but word of mouth here is often poor, specially if your age range is narrow, for example if your target is kids between 4 and 8, the kids will play the game, love it, but parents won't tell other parents to buy it, most of their friends probably WON'T have kids the same age.
Thus if you are going for fun games, you need path 2, and to do path 2 you need a ton of exposure that is NOT word of mouth, we found out this means or you have massive marketing budget, or you have some kind of connection to media so they advertise you cheaper.
Our biggest competitors all ended being media companies themselves, for example Disney is an obvious one, but another was Toca-Boca, at first they looked like a tiny indie studio, but somehow they ALWAYS get featured in multiple magazines, store front pages and so on, eventually I found out they were created by a multi-billion media empire named Bonnier,
Since then I found that is easier to get money from creating other things, since I don't have the necessary media connections.
Well, even NORMAL games often need media connectios (for example, Jon Blow was a journalist before he made Braid, Nintendo literally printed their own magazine for a while, the indie clique that existed around TIGSource was heavily tied to CMPMedia, many of them being presenters in events, or being friends of their employees, or working for them directly, the whole thing is very "incestuous").
And, let's be honest, games that try to teach you math or science are just not as fun as Fortnite or Minecraft.
Now, you can make the case that some games are educational by mistake. Like Minecraft, Age of Empires, Sim City or Kerbal Space Program. But noone would see them or describe them as "educational" games.
So, what we're trying to make now are creative games. In my opinion, creativity is extremley important and there are fun ways to be creative, that are not eductional in the strict sense. For example, Lego comes to mind.
Alternatively, you could go Minecraft and hack in education through mods and stuff to existing games kids are already engaged in.
But I fully admit as much as I admire Maxis, I don't work in that space and unless I win the lottery I won't be quitting my job to get into educational software any time soon.
As a kid, I picked up a familiarity with history and geography that was miles ahead of my peers due to games like Total War and Close Combat, which aren’t sold as educational at all.
I think people innately want to learn whatever they need to know to accomplish their goals, and it’s way easier to give people goals and tools than it is to teach them about tools in the abstract.
Even Maxis itself actually failed, they went bankrupt and EA bought them and ditched their educational games (what remained of Maxis started to just pump out The Sims series one after the other).
But unless you are aiming at a really, really wide market, and is either lucky or get exposure help, you won't go far.
I noticed for example "Kingdom Come: Deliverance" has a LOT of information about medieval era in the Holy Roman Empire, still they aimed to be a "AAA" game, and the information is tucked inside the in-game manual.
And The Sims simplified, but made me (and probably others) aware of quantified personal needs; you need x amount of sleep per night or you'll accrue 'sleep debt' and distress, you need social contact to fill that meter, etc.
Minecraft has an educational mode / version btw, there was one game our son was playing that basically made him go out into the sea and identify various types of sea life. I mean it's all Minecraftified (?) and abstracted, but they do pick up a lot of things from it.
I'd still like him to read more books though, given that his language skills are pretty bad.
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 at school. As Randal Munroe pointed out, you learn way more about orbital mechanics from KSP.
If you want to make truly educational games, you shouldn't focus on the educational part, but take the educational part and wrap it in tons of fun.
Of course there are topics where this is going to be hard. I have absolutely no idea how anyone could make a fun game that revolves around German grammar. (Or do I? The best way to learn a language always seems to be to actually use it with a native speaker. Having a friend who speaks the language you're trying to learn would be a great way to do that. There might be something here.)
But something like geology could be part of a simulation where you need to find certain resources, and that's easier once you understand how those resources are formed. And then there needs to be something fun to do with those resources, of course.
That's the problem. I think if you define "educational" as the curriculum taught in school, this is not possible. There's no way around working a ton of math problems to get better at math. You maybe can make it a bit more engaging if you pack it in a video game, but it will never be fun for most people.
Therefore, I think, the educational role of video games must be to spark interest. For example, KSP sparks interest in aerospace engineering, and I bet there's a significant number of people who went on to study rocketry because they played KSP.
Sparking interest is an important function. In fact, I think it becomes increasingly important as a lot of material and courses are now available for little money ubiquitously. Great education starts with a spark of interest.
Let me explain in more detail:
Back in the days, an important part of going to school was having access to knowledge. Now, thanks to the internet and millions of amazing humans, knowledge is accessible all over the place, virtually for no money. Today, the motivation to learn something is therefore more important. To get motivated, first you need to know that something exists, and second you need to know if you like it or not. Before motivation comes sparking interest. And here, video games have an extremely important role to play - and unlike "educational" video games that are math exercises disguised as video games, video games that can try to achieve the spark can be genuinely fun to play.
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 making them reply with words.
There's some evidence that trying to produce language to early in your learning just ingrains bad habits. So instead you can just follow increasingly complex instructions to show that you understand. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input_hypothesis
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.
By giving them the little details, you engage the audience (well, most of them) and make the work more compelling. Medical and Crime procedurals are this in spades. Sherlock Holmes is still idolized.
Educational genres are explicitly against the Kuleshov Effect. The whole point is to get to 4. The audience is not exactly unengaged (video games are engaging by definition), but they aren't drawn in. There are no compelling mysteries or 'flaws' that they help solve with the story of the game. Just a computer holding back an answer.
The McLean was a flop, and four years later it was off the market. What happened? Part of the problem appears to have been that McDonald's rushed the burger to market before many of the production kinks had been worked out. More important, though, was the psychological handicap the burger faced. People liked AU Lean in blind taste tests because they didn't know it was AU Lean; they were fooled into thinking it was regular ground beef. But nobody was fooled when it came to the McLean Deluxe. It was sold as the healthy choice--and who goes to McDonald's for health food?
https://web.archive.org/web/20081218211703/http://www.gladwe...
Speaking of choice and marketing, wonder why McDonald’s in the US still lacks a veggie burger. Is it based on a business decision?
But this kind of knowledge acquisition only ever teaches the lowest hanging fruits, it's no substitute for drilling in the basics. Even lifetimes spent passing KSP won't bring you to a point were you could design your own rocket.
Yes. Though it can probably teach you enough that you have enough scaffolding already in your brain that you can get through a textbook without getting lost?
Only if you try to do it very naively. Most of the time, these "games" are "lets put blinky lights around match equations."
That's definitely not how you turn math and science into games. You turn them into games by making engineering games.
There was a really great paper I ran into a decade ago that looked at the theory making by players of World of Warcraft. Players were coming up with complex mathematical models for how to play the game most efficiently. THAT is how you make math a game.
The goal of the game shouldn't be "let's solve these math problems."
The goal of the game should be anything but that, and then you setup the game so that the best way to reach that goal is to use math.
Science opens the door even further, because hypothesis and experimentation is a fundamental part of playing games.
There was a recent post on here regarding the best ways to learn electricity. One of the top replies was to use some minecraft mod. I don't know anything about that mod, but that fact that it was one of the recommendations really said a lot to me.
And as a "video game"-like free alternative to 'real Lego' there are LeoCAD app + LDraw Parts Library, which are suitable for creating 'digital Lego' models by kids.[0,1,2]
[0] https://github.com/Symbian9/AWESOME-LDraw
I came to the same conclusion for software that caters to teachers. Teachers don't buy that, the administration does. They don't feel the pain the teachers are having.
It also applies to programming lessons. Yes, everybody thinks it's important. No, it's hard to make a living selling it.
We do. See the success of teacherspayteachers.com or tes.com. As a teacher I have spent hundreds of dollars of my own money to buy resources. Simply because I don't have the time for the admin to claim the expense.
The problem is that most resources are bad, if not terrible. The ones that are good are not adapted to what you need, not customisable, etc. You may have come up with a great resource but it has to tick a lot of boxes. Not because the teachers don't love real learning ... but because our hands are tied.
We have this huge volume of content to cover in a limited amount of time and standardised tests await. If your resource doesn't use the same notation, terminology, depth ... some students may be more confused than helped (of course the very smart ones will make deep connections ... but you have to teach for everybody). It's not an easy problem to solve but more time / money for good teachers is the obvious place to start.
I don’t hold it against them though. Nobody was going to tell me how to teach physics.
Fun fact(?): Back when I was teacher my friend Eddie (math teacher) decided we could teach pretty sophisticated ideas to our community college students if we used this fancy program called “Mathematica.” We wrote a grant and got a good price from Wolfram and after that they introduced a pricing for community colleges. This was way back in the ‘90s- but I don’t remember the year.
The point is, nobody sold me software. I decided what my problem was and set about solving it. I suspect most teachers either (a) do that too or (b) want an accepted solution.
> 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 underlying principle of trying to teach a specific thing doesn’t go well. Yet the ones that I found that seemed to work ok had way lower “educational” focus, and it was hard to recommend over any other standard game.
Then simulations stick very well.
Minecraft is a barebone one and “teaches” a ton of true and untrue stuff. Racing simulations stuck, flight simulator stuck, hell even lego simulator stuck. I see animal crossing in the same vein, and am trying to find a serious fishing simulator as a beginner’s guide to fishing. And kids can spend hours on Streetview for the same reason.
The new Spike set looks promising.
Also when I was kind I wasn’t really able to build a good city. I understood years later this is because the game expects cities to be built in the US fashion: big residencial/commercial/industrial zones separated from each other, linked by roads, lot of roads. And square based layouts. That was totally different from where I lived so I’ve always found the cities layout that works in the game where very artificial. So there wasn’t too much to learn about city planning.
Also lincity/linticy-ng are great too, even more for a climate changing world.
Is cram school popular with kids, just because they are in cram school day after day and spend most of their time there? It definitely improves test scores.
Anyway, my point is, your quantitative feedback for fun, it is confounded by being educational ie parents anticipate it will improve test scores or whatever.
Coercion is the placebo not the treatment. That is why this article is sort of bunk. It’s adults literally discussing how to meddle with what their kids are interested in, in the exact same breath as describing how the best and most educational parts of childhood occurred in the absence of adults and their priorities.
I think I didn't so much learn new things so much as I got an applied perspective on things that I had already learned. It's one thing to read about value added in a textbook, it's another thing to actually experience it in person buying reagents and selling potions in WoW. You can read about the benefit of fuel transferring lifting stages (aka "asparagus staging") in an article it's another thing to reach that design in KSP, and understand why SpaceX tried to do it.
You're making the massive assumption that someone plays a game with the goal of learning something. Learning is something that happens subconsciously during game play and that's why games are so effective. I played KSP for a few months but I would never go out of my way to learn orbital mechanics or rocket design on my own. If you told me I need a 4-5 year degree then I wouldn't even start.
Heck, I wouldn't even start with a short technical book because I have no reason to read one. In KSP you are put into an environment where your learned knowledge is actively useful in completing game objectives. The reality is that people would just skip learning entirely.
I also take issue with the idea of hyper optimizing learning as a beginner. Most people don't know what the most effective method of learning is for a given topic is precisely because they are beginners. Even if someone wants to actively study a topic it can take quite a while to get into the mindset and find the necessary resources. You know what? Finding a good game is hard but finding a good book can be even harder! Usually the fastest way to find good books is to just read a lot of books and eventually you just happen to read a good one. Learning the same thing that the game taught you through books probably takes more time than you think simply because the book would have to be equivalent to the game.
The takeaway should be that playing a game and active studying are so far apart they might as well not even belong in the same comment.
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).
(note: I am not OP)
Making successful, novel games is very difficult. Most people/groups fail.
Adding an educational component multiplies the unlikely probability of success by a very unhelpful coefficient.
Adrenaline, story, polish -- this aspects now compete with an educational aspect.
I happened to be in the right place at the right time to benefit from the height of the education game boom in the early/mid-90s, so I got to play the fun Math Blasters, ClueFinders, Carmen Sandiegos, Incredible Machines, Dr. Brains, Zoombinis, and also a bunch of adventure games which featured some logical/observation puzzles like the Myst series (never mind others mentioned like Oregon Trail, Civilization, etc). So I'm a strong believer that -someone- could pick up the magic that The Learning Company (and Broderbund) once owned.
Even young generations, with casual gamer parents, can hold positions like "videogames are banned at home until our son is 8".
It's not about "connections." It's about doing business the old-fashioned way: advertising, and hiring a public relations agency.
Advertising is self-explanatory. But for some reason a lot of tech companies don't hire PR firms. They like to cheap out and do PR in-house, or they simply never think of it.
It's the PR firm's job to have the "media connections" you so desperately crave. Tech people are notoriously bad at public relations, so it's perfectly logical to farm this out to people who specialize in just this sort of thing. There are even boutique PR agencies for various industries, including tech. But in your case, you should have hired one of the several hundred that specialize in education.
You could have been the next Oregon Trail!
You have a fundamental misunderstanding about what a PR company does. You're thinking about an advertising agency. They're not the same thing.
Any meaningful connection is going to be too expensive for someone like GP, I am afraid.
> Tech people are notoriously bad at public relations
Please avoid (false) generalizations.
This is a false generalization. You don't have to choose a big-name New York PR agency. There are thousands of other shops that are quite affordable. Some are just one or two people, and can be surprisingly effective if you pick the right one.
#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?
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.
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 the specifications of addition over naturals is CS. But have the kids "build" some kit robot and you're a damn hero.
The most frustrating thing about education is trying to explain to voters why their child has to learn something (at a young age) that the parent doesn't understand.
You see this a lot in parental complaints about Common Core math.
Over-involved stay-at-home moms who still can't add double digit numbers without using their fingers will complain that they don't understand their first grader's math homework. The point of the math homework is to teach mental math strategies for adding numbers together.
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".
It's impossible as a school board member to say "look, it's embarrassing that 10 year old German kids are better than you at math. Sorry we failed you. We're trying to do better by your kid."
Increase test scores, keep themselves employed and friendly SB members in office, and reform the institution/field in their image (or, for the cynical ones, make them look like leaders in the field). In that order. And lots of other stuff that's not really relevant to software (e.g., maintain the physical plant, retain good teachers, etc.)
> #2 The public means people who spend money on things for kids. Likely parents.
Meh. IME parents have almost no influence in software purchasing decisions (because they mostly just don't care). Even the board doesn't really dive that deep into the administration's budgets unless they're considering a change-of-command. In fact, the superintendent might not even weigh in on software depending on the size of the district. Activist yahoos might gripe about budget items, but can usually be safely ignored. Especially for software, which is often a rounding error even in the IT portion of the budget.
This can often be a problem with education in general, not educational games specifically.
Trying to make money in education is like trying to make money in news: you can’t. Both are vital, and both ultimately no one wants to pay for.
Disclaimer: I used to work at an educational startup, which failed. No, I’m not bitter. (Well, maybe a little.)
Want to make money there? Don't try to find cures or therapies for indications a small percent of people suffer from. Just invent another beauty cream, that's where the money is. No, I’m not bitter either, just maybe a little.
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.
https://www.bonnier.com/en/news/bonniers-app-hit-toca-boca-t...
https://tocaboca.com/press-post/toca-boca-and-sago-mini-join...
I know around London there are a couple of schemes running that teach practical skills using outdated non-sexy software that nevertheless works because of its strong educational underpinnings and excellent practical execution.
The problem here is one of reward. I loved the challenge inherent with Dr. Brain; the puzzles did a great job at teaching basics of chemistry, biology, math, and I was actually accomplishing goals I was interested in. I think that the disconnect it that the people making these purchasing decisions do not remember what motivates children, what goals they are interested in achieving.
For example, I learned the ideas behind "merchanting" (i.e. arbitrage and price discovery) at a young age through Runescape, where some time and patience could leverage capital to buy small amount of coal from casual gamers on less populated servers and sell large amounts on busy servers at a 50% markup.
And it doesn't matter how much of it was sold to institutions. What matters is how many users benefited from this game and similar ones (Railroad Tycoon, Civilization, etc. come to mind).
factoria is another good one that's really really fun and can also be really really educational if you think about the materials and resources and how you combine them. also if you really want to go crazy with it learning some math will help you fully optimize your factory but it's some pretty complicated math, at least for me.
I mean, I would not buy it either unless it is something super special or I am dealing with a problem.
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.
Create some captivating productions, spend real money, because I don't get that assumption that education deserves only cheap boring educational "games" of today.
That's a political program - deep cut of the less effective part of 19-century structures. Kids generally like learning, parents know that, and they see how bad schools are now, so political gains are waiting right there.
Toca Boca was part of their venture arm [0] until 2016. They invest in companies with growth potential. Sometimes those companies are early stage companies, sometimes they're a bit older.
I've never heard that the Bonnier group goes around destroying lives. Do you have any examples of them doing so?
As someone who’s spent the last 15 years making “serious” or educational games, the larger problem is that while it’s hard enough to design a good game that’s fun, it’s even harder to design one that’s fun and educational. So hard that most designers simply don’t bother, especially since it isn’t that lucrative.
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 20 player, culture -- I met a South African person who spoke Afrikaans while I spoke Dutch)
- The Werewolves of Millers Hollow / Maffia (politics, lie detection -- or lack of it, the difference between bad actors and ignorant people doing the exact same thing)
- Imperial 2030 (investing)
Let's put aside for a moment the optics of a school teacher having their class play Poker (even though obviously they wouldn't be using money). I can imagine a lesson plan going something like:
1. Have kids play some individual games with each other.
2. Stop the games, and go over some of the actual math concepts behind Poker. At this point, the kids are engaged and will want to learn better strategies.
3. Run through a game as a group, with the teacher asking the class what they should do each turn. Ask students to explain why they think one move is better than another, get brief discussions going where applicable, and write probabilities on the board.
4. Let the students play another round of individual games to apply what they've learned.
There are some decent puzzle video games out there. I grew up playing The Logical Journey of the Zoombinis, which was essentially a series of puzzles where you had to figure out the rules (Mastermind style) or your blue fellas wouldn't make it to the promised land. Some of the puzzles were genuinely hard and it was one of the few standout educational games I remember. I like this Steam review:
> This game is exactly how I remember it. And that's a good thing. Zoombinis is about a group of refugees who look for home on a new land. You get to meet many racist locals who discriminate you based on your appearance and you can work as a slave by making countless pizzas for an insufferable anthropomorphic tree stump. 10/10. Highly recommended.
I wondered about general RPGs or adventure games, but while those are fun (and good for language), the puzzles tend not to be that educational IMO. A lot of the time your performance depends on how well you can guess what the developer intended - these are not perfect worlds, but you play as if they are, so actions you might expect to perform often don't work. I definitely used GameFAQs a lot growing up.
That said - I did learn about the concept of reliably seeding PRNGs to make enemies drop the best loot in Golden Sun.
Certainly, Human Resource Machine does teach programming.
Doing some pre-planning of your factory's eventual layout will have you advancing through the tech tree much, much faster (and without rebuilding critical sections all the time!)
Zachtronics does some very good abstract ones. Quite a few of his games are even outright gamifying assembly programming. Things like factorio are on the more 'applied' or concrete end of the spectrum.
My friend went to school for statistics because of it.
I expect you'll find that investing for real is very different from investing in a game. Investing for real means trying to control your irrational impulses such as greed vs fear of loss.
While I do think student-driven activities within game-like feedback systems have a lot of promise for education, the educational system today could not use them effectively, and developer incentives today are not aligned with the outcome. However, you don't necessarily need actual software to come up with these systems. Consider Rafe Esquith's classroom economy, where students paid rent for their desks, could get income for different extra credit activities, and could buy other students' desks so they collected the rent instead of the teacher. Not a bad way to teach a whole host of complex economic issues without any software, and he did it for fifth graders. https://www.thinkadvisor.com/2012/05/22/teachers-charge-stud...
Imagine if all teachers were incentivized to experiment with these kinds of systems, and if they had the support to design and implement them, software or not.
A. Games mostly fail because of non-transferrable skills is not an interesting point. Most books, most paintings, most music follows a uniform distribution of mediocrity. This is the role of curation and recommendation networks. Skills of discernment, reactivity, and higher cognition can be gleaned from games at a very young age.
B. Designing educational games can be a layer cake of complexity with the veneer of entertainment. I may be an outlier, but calculating expense sheets in Total War and following traffic laws in GTA were very formative experiences for me. They aren't the primary goals, but effective systems around the primary goals.
There is a glut of puzzle and puzzling games for people of all ages to enjoy, now more than ever. I don't buy the argument that developers aren't trying. I think people are walking in with biases and summarizing games as a whole.
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.
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.
Especially as the kids whose brains grew up on videogames are already becoming decision makers and shaping society in their own image. Not saying that's a bad thing, either - the world is probably better off resembling a video game than a bad trip.
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.
Everything that exists in either the natural or human world exists because it's part of some sort of game. So yeah it might be hard, but almost by definition it should be possible.
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.
That's because they don't care, not because they are more humble. Similarly, I don't see many programmers opining about surgerical techniques or scalpels or whatever the medical equivalent to PL design might be.
There are lots of doctors and lawyers who opine about education. And not just opine, but also shape policy. Go check the professions of the SB members in the closest wealthy suburb. I guarantee there will be at least one doctor/lawyer/business owner with zero education experience. Not just stating opinions, but spending considerable resources to win an elected office and shape local education policy. SB members with some prior experience in education are much more likely to humbly defer to the administration than lawyers/doctors/etc. IME.
And there are lots of teachers posting hot takes about covid or policing.
I don't think hubris is unique to programmers. You just see it more often because you hang around programmers.
OP is saying that we are trying to integrate or otherwise assimilate other fields. you know, the software is eating the world thing.
now doctors you just gave as example aren't trying to do that, are they?
This is definitely true about developers, and this is one of the biggest problems with HN.
That said, I think this particular article is spot on. Not everything is best taught through games, but right now 99% of stuff isn't taught at all, and a lot of the stuff that isn't taught could be taught through games.
FWIW the specific mistake you're making is thinking about this in a way that overemphasizes the context of the school system.
There’s also no contradiction between learning through games and learning by doing. Everything we do in real life has game-like properties, you just have to find them.
I am? I have spent literally thousands of hours volunteering for a free online education platform that operates entirely independently from school systems. Although some schools do use it. Some of my family was home schooled. Along with that I have actual teaching experience outside the public school system. I still don't consider myself an expert because I know far less about teaching than I do about my main gig: programming and technology. But claiming I am thinking about this in a specific way is a wrong assumption on your part.
> There’s also no contradiction between learning through games and learning by doing. Everything we do in real life has game-like properties, you just have to find them.
The article is about video games, not games. For some things there is a contradiction. If you want to learn to ride a horse or play guitar then a guitar or a real horse is the game. A video game will never come anywhere close to just picking up a real guitar or riding a real horse.
I totally agree with you. I think especially teachers face such know-it-alls much more than other occupations.
Not that I know it better, but thinking video games can replace human interaction is so silly. Probably all teachers knew it long before Hattie's meta study, the teacher is the key to good learning....
There is a lot of really short sighted thinking in this thread. AI will be better than us at everything within the next few hundred years.
It's kind of a flippant remark, and not very useful, but its true.
AI will be better than a human at making me happy, and it will be better at comforting me when I'm sad. It will be better at motivating me and it will be better at teaching me and my kids things.
Also worth mentioning that everyone is the best armchair quarterback in the world. If you've got new perspectives that are so effective, start your own school and show the experts how wrong they are. Get rich by offering such a better product. It should be child's play to do measurably better than an abject failure.
Let parents have vouchers to attend my school and I will.
Obviously the idea of a silver bullet doesn't work. The term "media mix" exists for a reason. Popular franchises are conveyed through lots of different media and the same is also happening in education. Video games are just adding to the "media mix" not replacing it.
I think it's worth clarifying that I did not compare video games to cryptography. I compared programmers brainstorming about education to junior programmers brainstorming about cryptography.
I think you've missed one big point of the article. Videogames will become the reality of education when they become easy to make, so that it doesn't require an army of programmers to implement.
We want to build tools that will help teachers do their best.
(Also sometimes you need to just burn down the establishment and start over because everything we know is wrong. )
I can’t imagine anyone dealing with kids learning from home this lockdown and thinking education should be more technologically driven.
However, it’s worth recognizing that the wealthy are not necessarily optimizing educational value. A cynical way to look at it might be to say that they are really ensuring the scarcity of graduates and limiting internal competition to make their kids look better.
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.
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.)
Kids don't want to read and read less then they used to.
My kids did learned more from lockdown online classes then from games. I can tell this one with certainty. It was less then they are normally learning in school.
The biggest failure of education today is that its oriented towards an outcome (tests / uni) that is dubious at best, detrimental at worst
OP is correct to identify dev cost as holding the key to software-based education. Here is why:
Education today is the remnant of the industrial assembly line model. That worked out great...for fridges and cars.
Children are not fridges. Children are not cars.
This education where 1-size-fits all produces the worst outcomes. It holds back brilliant students and leaves the challenging cases behind.
Software will solve all that due to (eventual) low cost customization.
In order for this to work, many planets have to align. In particular, some idealists have to let go of the model where all students should learn x topic. The entire curricula must be on the table
In other words, society must come to accept that 1) learning will not be uniform ie some students will get more out of school than others and 2) students will pass on topics we take for granted. Biology , civics, algebra etc....all gone, provided that students can explore AND dive deep into an alternative topics they care about, whether that is mechanics, geology, philosophy etc.
In short. Kids today are going to school memorizing some info, yet learning nothing. Thet should instead be able come out masters of topics they are interested in, if indeed that's all they care about.
This would be prohibitively expensive to do with teachers as it would require a 1:1 ratio.
Software can guide that journey.
I know my kids got better at quick multiplication from number crunchers. Pretty sure I got better at math from as seemingly non math based games as old RPGs.
I discovered where “New York” is, what “Nuclear War” is and what a “Crime Syndicate” is, all from the story cutscenes.
I also later learnt that, in real life, big bosses don’t just disentegrate after being defeated.
1. I think we'll eventually have software manage the progress of our children as they learn. It will present new ideas when they are ready for them, and test that old ideas stay fresh in memory. Software can do a better job than a teacher can, because the lessons can be tailored to the student. (rather than the whole class at once)
2. The software can do a better job at encouraging a student to "want" to do the tasks. Teachers can use praise, rewards, and sometimes punishments, but software can open up a whole world of other things. What happens next in a story? Leveling up characters or objects you care about? Competition? Mystery Boxes?
It was never fun to grind through killing 100 Goblins, but you did it so that you could get the magic sword at the end.
The hard part is not software development. The hard part is finding things that students want to work towards, then give them so much of it that they want to do it all day long for 13 years.
I think you're taking exactly the wrong lesson from that. It wasn't fun to grind through the goblins, but it wasn't challenging either. You did it because you could turn your brain off. I opine that if it did require thinking then the world would now be overrun with goblins...
On the contrary, games usually inspire work by precisely _being challenging_. That's what normally keeps people coming back to play them for their own sake (the autotelicity of games).
2. There's a lot of research on extrinsic motivation in K-12 education. I'm skeptical, to say the least.
Firstly, there are a lot of other countries than America.
Secondly, re grade progression system, the issue is not what broken system you have now, we should strive to improve the education of our children.
There are clearly a million was that software can make assessment better. Software will eventually be able to read an essay and provide feedback on how well the argument was made, as well as the nuts and bolts of how sentences are put together. Software never gets tired after reading 30 other essays. Never grumpy, never phones it in. Teachers are human.
We study intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation in the games industry as well, but to be clear, _almost all_ motivation in education is extrinsic now. Nobody is doing their math homework because its fun. They do it so they won't "fail".
But I agree that just bolting some lame point system on top of exiting work is mostly a waist of time. The work and rewards need to be tightly coupled and the hard part is to blur the line between intrinsic and extrinsic motivations.
Imagine for example the task is to convince an AI to buy you a pony. You have to write a persuasive essay as to why you should have a pony. The AI can respond to your essay with their own arguments. You can then respond to their augments and pushing the discussion forward. You could do it every day in 10th grade. How good would you be at persuasive writing?
> Software will eventually be able to read an essay and provide feedback on how well the argument was made, as well as the nuts and bolts of how sentences are put together... Imagine for example the task is to convince an AI to buy you a pony. You have to write a persuasive essay as to why you should have a pony. The AI can...
No, it can't.
Giving good feedback on essays in high school English or History courses is AI-complete.
"Some type of feedback" is already possible (you can go buy essay graders today -- go try one), but if we go that route we'll mostly just be teaching people how to optimize for a (very broken) grading algorithm.
"'The AI' will then <do thing that we spend years teaching people how to do well>" is exactly how you end up with horribly shitty ML code destroying people's lives.
TBH we're not even there with high school math yet, which is a lot easier than high school essays.
I have a CS PhD, publish in AI conferences, and have taught high school. I am fundamentally absolutely certain that high-quality grading of high school English/History essays is not possible. I'm also certain that we could build "something" that "grades essays" and will have catastrophic negative outcomes for a generation of students if adopted. Students will learn how to write for one really dumb algorithm, and then there will be years of cleanup at universities and workplaces afterward teaching them how to actually write for humans.
> but to be clear, _almost all_ motivation in education is extrinsic now. Nobody is doing their math homework because its fun. They do it so they won't "fail".
My classroom experience suggests that a) this isn't true, and b) there are lots of different types of extrinsic motivation; grades are actually not the most important motivator for most students. People are really complex, and everyone has different motivators.
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.
Better assessments won't magically lead to better education if the system continues to ignore the results of those assessments. The US education system doesn't need better assessments, it needs to start actually using the assessment results that it already has.
I'm most hopeful we will see this in maths. I know this has been talked about for 40 years with computers, since Papert's Mindstorms (highly recommended if you haven't read it). But the potential to teach math through immersion as you would a native language IMO = the potential to leap society forward exponentially.
Why hasn't it been built yet? Lots of comments in this thread already about the blocking incentive model and education system. 100%. I'd look instead outside the system, to something like Minecraft. Obviously, we don't want to privatize education into the hands of some monocultured tech platform. But a diversity of games that teach different things to people at different levels? That supplement social education? That are fun first? eg. Here's a basic word game I built that everyone seems to enjoy, and is also a great vocab lesson: (https://apps.apple.com/app/esoterica/id1505210583).
If we can find the right models to support such a diversity (we're certainly not there yet), I see great promise in that future.
Quote:
Poland’s government will add the computer game This War Of Mine to the official reading list for children in schools, the prime minister has announced during a visit to the developer of the game, Warsaw-based 11 bit studios.
“Poland will be the first country in the world that puts its own computer game into the education ministry’s reading list,” said Mateusz Morawiecki, quoted by Polsat News. “Young people use games to imagine certain situations [in a way] no worse than reading books.”
Games should supplement traditional education, not attempt to replace it. They should fill in the gaps and extend what can be taught. Teach the scientific method through a mystery game where you have to compound evidence to validate a theory (or better yet, invalidate it - equally valuable). Instead of math word problems have characters with problems you can solve using various methods - don't make the player do the math, train them to identify the right tool to use (a geometry problem, an algebra problem, a calculus problem).
Fill in those educational gaps that people only improve by stumbling in the dark.
Where I think video games can excel is in more niche applications like Kerbal Space Program, not teaching something like European Literature.
[1] https://joseruiperez.me/papers/journals/2019_Science_MOOCPiv...
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...
For the MOOC example, what I meant by engagement was, "Week over week, does the student return?" or Weekly Active Users as a percentage of total students at the start of the course. For a MOOCs, the number of students disengaging is so high, that there is obviously a problem, and this is what I meant to communicate. Thanks for the article!
This is one of the reasons I don't particularly care for motivation studies, as I believe it's only a temporary method to generate traction. Once learning becomes difficult, it requires a higher order of motivation I call "discipline" to maintain.
But back to MOOCs, there is work on MOOC forum analysis[1]. In short, forum activity and the people you associate with in an educational forum can have a significant impact on your grade. Note this study was post-hoc analysis, but students that primarily discussed non-course relevant topics were more likely to fail the course.
There is also the fact that MOOC students come from a variety of life experiences. Students of different countries have different cultures and as a result, will behave differently [2]. France, for example, only wanted to view the course in [2], not engage.
I think the beauty of a MOOC is the accessibility and automated feedback feature that from their design. Beyond that they suffer from a lot of human conditions that can't really be controlled without removing or reducing those features. Plus, as I mention, there isn't a lot of cog psych research on "discipline" yet to identify the qualities that encourage its development besides Duckworth's "grit" (if I'm wrong I'd love to be pointed towards them).
That's the problem with the MOOC industry. Those guys produced content at the production level of the average high school or college class, endless talking head video. They thought that all the advantages of scale accrued to them - they got to make cheap content and sell it in huge quantity. Didn't work.
In highschool we used this system (https://www.managebac.com/) which I found to be incredibly useful and easy to use and everything was logically placed in the same application. Then when I went to uni we had about 10 cobbled together applications that were all crappy and confusing and my results definitely suffered when I failed to find important information and notices.
I think people who are self-motivated think that because they learned on their own, everyone should be able to as well and all everyone needs is the tools to self-learn. I don't think that's true.
There's not much money in it though. Overworked teachers don't have a lot of cash to throw around.
> 1. The things you learn by yourself stick; the things that are “taught” to you do not stick.
Yes, but no. That you teach others sticks, and that's where human contact comes in, and it's something sorely lacking in the institutional education system.
The former offers a voice of caution, and is written by the former head of MSR Asia.
The latter is filled with historical examples of "x is the Future of Education" (for x ∈ {"radio", "television", "computers", ...}) each of which has failed to replace human instruction, showing that there's something about human interaction that appears to be crucial for education.
The point of the article is to give games and software more "room" opposed to what's right now in education, meaning only boring teachers that will simply go through their lessons without a sliver of passion.
While a lot of adults have fun pushing the boundaries of Roller Coaster Tycoon (e.g. designing roller coasters that smash into each other), we were very serious about it! The goal was to make a truly profitable park, and I remember having conversations about optimal ride and souvenir pricing, revenue per building, etc. (with our very limited vocabulary).
I think games need to be fun first and educational second to have any chance. We didn't realize we were learning while playing RCT, we were just excited by the challenge and the goal. The means to achieve the goal just happened to be loosely grounded in real world business practices.
Consider: "AI will make humans vastly more effective by automating tedious tasks." Sure, but which humans? If games are indeed "the future," let's pay teachers even less than we do now, or fire them --that will be the response. That's in fact what Graham says --"I had examples to work from, but no teachers or classes." Let's be real here: Graham's father was a nuclear physicist, he likely grew up rich, and he attended Ivy League schools. Maybe he "didn't need teachers" because, I don't know, his home life was very supportive and he knew how to engage in the dominant, elite American culture? I like Graham here, but c'mon man.
This is called Active Learning and there are decades of work that have gone into demonstrating it's effectiveness. Also see: Constructivism. Although the majority of k-12 education still emphasizes passive learning, constructivist approaches to learning are being taught around the world and in the U.S. (Papert's work is a good resource for those who are curious)
> 3. Schooling mostly fails at giving you this deep understanding.
I think calling 'schools' (so many, not sure what type this person attended) a failure is a bit harsh. The type of freedom in learning that the author is arguing for is HARD at scale. It requires smaller classes, more engagement from teachers, and an entire re-evaluation of how academic achievement is measured. We humans are still evolving...we'll get there. A good start would be to pay teachers more. A better start would be to prepare parents to support active learning in the home.
> 4. Video games will become a core component of education.
They already are: https://clalliance.org/
The general sentiment of this article is fair, but if you are going to make a statement about education you should reference educators rather than bloggers and biographers.
Edit: One more thought about the PG tweet...
"you'll surprisingly often have to teach yourself. I had to teach myself Lisp, how to write essays, and how to start a startup. I had examples to work from, but no teachers or classes."
First, I would argue that school provides us with the ability to teach ourselves. Paul taught himself Lisp, but did he learn how to program at all in school? Probably. He had to teach himself how to write essays, but surely school taught him how to write? Also, there are plenty of schools that offer writing classes...usually electives. Startups, well...that's silly...that's why we have MBA programs. Actually, I am not sure what PG's point is with this tweet. Is it a critique of the educational system in the U.S. or a reflection on missed opportunities from his youth?
Freedom and pace is what makes them a great medium. That's the opposite of our education system.
This is basically a turn-based RPG, but to make each turn successful, you solve a math problem whose difficulty has been selected based on your past performance. They also play it at home, and I believe it has strengthened their math skills and given them a way to go at their own pace rather than that of the classroom. They earn levels, avatar mods, pets, and many other things to keep them coming back.
They also occasionally play chesskid.com at home as recommended by their chess teacher.
One thing I worry about is whether exposing them to such addictive games so early in their development will cause behavioral or even neurological side effects. I have heard about similar studies of teenagers revolving around drug use [1] but I don't know of any studies around video games (which also can cause addictive behaviors) and/or around children younger than teenagers. I would love to hear from others on HN about this.
Maybe everyone will be consuming homework and lessons through video games, but no video game is going to completely replace real-life interaction. I'm not entirely sold on remote learning, especially for children (K-12). Getting taught remotely is like watching TV in black-and-white. It works, but it's just not the same.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guru%E2%80%93shishya_tradition
I worked on this for several years, got close to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The guy in charge of their education grants eventually stole all of our ideas and put them in their next grant application process that was directed at "publishers with an existing customer base of at least 100,000 students" which means established companies.
Pearson, Britannica, McGraw-Hill, and all of the other education publishers have one goal. Maintain the status-quo. Feed their existing content-developers who are solely focused on static page-oriented content. Why change? They have billion dollar contracts with states to deliver textbooks at exorbitant prices ($100+/student/class/year).
I'm not bitter. Just disappointed. I definitely did not know what I was getting into and did not have the pedigree to chase down this business. But I did have a pretty good team and had Gates Foundation took a chance, we may have been able to prove the interactive model. That in itself would have been worth the investment.
It's dated, but still relevant. Here is Textfyre's business plan...
http://plover.net/~dave/textfyre/Textfyre%20Investor%20Prese...
On the status quo, to me it's unbelievable how these large ed-tech companies (McGraw Hill, Pearsons) can sell the same text book, year after year, in subjects that only need refine every few years.
(Not trying to be adversarial, just interested.)
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.
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.
With that said, we need to when and how to apply it. I would conjecture that education can't be the byproduct, it has to be the goal. And that educational and fun are difficult in the product of each. Given that I have only given three examples and others would be hard pressed to add more, that (STEM) educational games are less .1% of the games market. I would argue that many of nextgen indie games are educational in how they help the player handle feelings and life changing events.
The most effective educational games will probably have to be funded by the state and implemented by interdisciplinary teams of academics and game developers.
Only fully finished exapunks, which somehow didn’t scale as harshly wrt time investment.
After looking more into these a month or two back, it seems like they’re very hit or miss with people, and only manage a smaller impact in terms of people playing them.
You learn, at very high level, how society progressed from sticks and stones to the modern age, and what level of sophistication technology was based on the date. Different forms of government, many other things.
- I learned programming through an in-game (Star Wars Galaxies) scripting language. That little bit of experience automating repetitive tasks set me up to excel in high school and college programming courses, which led to a career in data engineering, and now AI and robotics.
- I was introduced to game theory by a prisoner's dilemma situation in a video game (KOTOR).
- I learned economics and market forces by trading on Runescape's Grand Bazaar, and how to model and optimize a production system by managing a little island kingdom.
Not only did I learn new subjects from these experiences, but learned that I could excel at and have fun giving them my attention, on my own time and for my own purposes, without the external pressures of grades and tests. This gave me the confidence and energy to pursue them more deeply in school.
One thing that's interesting about all of these experiences is that they were all multiplayer and extremely social games (KOTOR, while a single-player RPG, was played with siblings and friends). I suspect that the social aspect was a primary motivating factor, and wonder if that principle holds for the broader population. I certainly wasn't the only kid in my class trading on the bazaar to get some extra GP.
I think the author falls into the trap of "transmissionism". There's a universe of facts out there and students learn them one after another by interacting with the environment (directly, via a teacher, via simulation, via textbook, whatever).
But take an example like learning how to cook a medium-rare steak. "Cook the steak until it feels like the flesh on your cheek."
What does it mean to "learn" that lesson? Anyone can say it out loud, obviously, even someone who has never cooked a steak.
The lesson about becoming sensitive to what a medium rare steak feels like when touched. What "simulation" or "video game" can capture that without reaching Matrix-like levels of fidelity?
As Carl Sagan said: "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe."
When you simulate, you're creating _some_ universe first, but you have no way of knowing if it's faithful to _our_ universe.
Better to start with the actual environment and help people improve the way they pay attention, react to the feedback they're already receiving without realizing, build better tools to navigate unfamiliar terrain, etc.
Let our universe work for you rather than having to invent the universe before you even start.
People might object to the steak example or might try to carve out things that require "physical" knowledge, but I think people underestimate how much of programming is like learning to cook a steak.
What are you going to "simulate" in order to develop a coding student's ability to detect "code smells", for example? Developing that sense isn't just about memorizing the 198723 things that count as a code smell. Most programmers can't even explain _why_ something is a code smell in a simulatable way, which is why we describe via metaphor to a sense rather than an acquired skill.
But unlike our sense of smell it's _obviously_ acquired. Nobody's born with the ability to detect code smells.
Anecdotally, I see many drawbacks in using video games for learning. With my kids doing remote-learning, most of the math is taught/practiced with math games -- most of these have advertisements. It's so easy for kids to tab to another site/app that's more interesting. I can only imagine that if I had YouTube a click away from my studies as a 12-year-old, I'd get absolutely nothing done.
I also disagree that learning always needs to be "fun" and that we have to sugar-coat everything, including education, for kids. I don't understand why we can't teach kids to deal with difficulty -- to work on learning -- and then be proud of themselves when they've accomplished something.
I created a reading comprehension game/platform for 10-12 year olds. It was not easy designing the game to be fun and educational, but found stat significance for student's reading comprehension scores playing my games compared to the control. It's possible!
I think that there are some small field that will be changed to games. For example I think there will be more good typing games like Epistory typing chronicles used in education. And some simple games for counting and learning a language. But this does not mean it changes the future of education.
I'm a Game Developer my self, for 4 years now, and most of the applied games and VR companies out there are just a hype to me. But I firmly beleef that platforms like EDX and Khan Academy and others will become bigger and bigger. Some schools may introduce a few classes or years with this model and they may flip the classroom. So in other words watch video's at home do your homework at school. And yes the simplest of simplest excesses on these platforms may become little games. But i'm interested to hear from all of you how you think games may be used or are currently used in education after the hype.
Point being, it’s a tough nut to crack, but I’ve seen the potential!
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.
It's been a lot of fun watching videos of automatic wood/food/etc farms. These people are really learning how to think and design solution based on the world they're in. Some of these inventions are simply ingenious.
Plus, you can do actual code as well, I'm guessing after he's tired of grinding he'll decide he needs to learn how to get things done a bit more systematically.
There's also the economic aspect of it, thinking about how different resources are connected, how trading happens, etc.
Whether it works it hard to say though. Video games are a double edged sword, you can sit for years without learning how to code. You need some way of creating intellectual progress. Plus you need to actually put time into school to pick up credentials, and that competes with whatever else you spend time on.
To me, this isn't about producing educational video games, as much as adding video game elements to existing products and making something new and compelling to the consumers.
An example of this would be Duolingo (https://www.duolingo.com/), it's not a game, but it acts like one by introducing mechanics from games into it's identity such as the concept of leveling up, completing levels, earning points... They also do this on a visual level that feels mostly gratifying for it's users.
Of course educational games also have a place, but they're mostly disdained by children
This is close to how we teach STEM, but games tend to start breaking their own patterns (or the contextual clues for the patterns) in a smoother way. (E.g. portal where you’re gradually asked to think more and more (laterally) “with portals”)
So if we take a dichotomal view on education vs learning, we can say that games will encourage you to learn more effectively (in the context of the game, typically)
I suspect this can be helped with the concept of gameplay loops/cycles.
What games are good at is aiding the reinforcement cycle at the core of learning a skill.
(This cycle is also in any technical skill.)
Games are fun as long as they avoid this repetition and reiteration cycle feeling like a grind. Which is where Educational(tm) material quickly becomes stuck.
Grind is, in a sense, a qualifier of your experience. How the repetition feels to you. If you’re “grinding” with a purpose, and it’s paced so your progress feels steady towards a self-elected goal, then it does not feel like grinding.
If it’s dry-repetitions, then you feel the grind. And that’s the trap of educational (I think)
(The ideas here are still mostly half-cooked, but hopefully it can add to the discussion)
I know the head of the largest gaming magazine in Turkey, who quit his job years ago to consult Turkish game companies as well as the government to build such games. The government basically funded everything but the result is still below what they wished for.
Reforming education is hard. So is building video games. Now they had two problems. Reminds me regex. :)
The games that taught me real lessons were always those hardcore, for fun ones.
Back in the day (2005), we didn't have Turkish translations for DnD rulebooks. I pirated PDF scans and read all of them (very slowly) to be able to play as a DM for my friends. That is still the most challenging reading comprehension practice I've ever done for the English language.
I played the entire Monkey Island series with a dictionary open. Finished Starcraft BW multiple times just to be able grasp the story. Played Medieval Total War with many factions just to see what had been the differences among them during those times. Started researching the cold war after playing MGS3 since it was otherwise a really opaque thing to look at as a kid from Turkey. I owe my almost reflex-like analytical skills to those games where number crunching is the deciding factor for success, such as WoW with its auction house, Dota with its item combinations, Cities Skyline with balancing resources, and all those other tycoon games that I don't even remember.
Finally and most importantly, I'm a computer engineer today because Starcraft BW, Heroes 3 M&M and Warcraft 3 had world editors that can produce maps even for "multiplayer". Thank you Blizzard and 3DO, I owe you people big time <3.
So far my favorites are the Dragonbox games [1].
And a question for you: while I do share that games are the way to learn things (our instinct for playing, shared with other animals, is precisely so we can learn), do you know any good investors in that sector? My experience is that three words to turn-off an investor is "a game", "educational" and "for the public good". :)
The question is very practical: I develop Quantum Game with Photons (https://quantumgame.io/) and looking for investors to make it a fully viable game and educational platform.
There are a lot of XYZ Mechanic Simulator games which I think have potential to be effective learning tools. They won't teach you muscle memory, but a good one can distill a lot of experience into a shorter timeframe than normal. A mechanic simulator can teach you engine diagnosis and repair quickly because you can fast-forward the slow, mundane parts. You can also pace the 'lessons' for better retention, building incrementally on concepts.
We've already seen this be successful in aviation and racing.
On that vein, I've been wishing for a Zachtronics-style game that teaches electronics, starting with LEDs and resistors and moving on to more complex circuits.
I don't think it is that hard to make a video game considering the many tools that exist to simplify video game creation. What is hard is making a video game that is also fun to play.
Some of the tools which let you write a video game without coding experience.
1. Scratch - https://scratch.mit.edu/
2. GameMaker - https://www.yoyogames.com/gamemaker
3. Dreams - http://dreams.mediamolecule.com/
It's free, and children (ages 8 through 13) have made thousands of games on there. A hand-curated selection is at [1]
With collaboration I can't see how is possible there aren't already enough problem-solution sets for pottery much all subjects.
This way the publisher can own copyright on a massive set of problem-solution pairs and only employ one person for a short time? Seems to be financial optimisation rather than educational improvement.
Duolingo (language learning app) has generated materials and so often they're just slightly weird until they've been used, tested live by students, reported 100-times (or whatever), and finally corrected by the app operators.
It's good eventually, but if I were paying I'd be annoyed that there's not a bit more human effort put in.
With Open course materials it seems we'd already have enough materials to go around.
Interestingly, both are open-world sandboxes, not plot-driven games. They're really gamified simulators.
Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23465862
The article rightly prizes tacit knowlege, but does not lay any argument for why games would give us tacit knowledge.
Tacit knowledge is primarily gained only by experience, and I don't see how games give us that in ways that the majority of folks would can say they had unambiguously helped us in the kinds of real world tasks we care about.
--- shorter feedback loops: you can play through a game of Civilization in a few hours/days. There is no analogous real-life experience.
--- non-severe failure consequences: If you fail in Kerbal Space Program, there is no Challenger explosion
--- repetition: Real life usually doesn't provide similar conditions to make for valid experiments. Games can do exactly that
--- breadth of experience: In the same way books transport us, and let us visit other places and situations, games can do the same.
If it's not analogous to real-life experience, you haven't gained any tacit knowledge that useful for real life.
> If you fail in Kerbal Space Program, there is no Challenger explosion
If you're involved in launching Challenger, you don't (and wouldn't) learn how to do so by playing Kerbal Space Program.
> In the same way books transport us, and let us visit other places and situations, games can do the same.
Yes, just like music - but that is a different thing than gaining tacit knowledge that can be used in a real-life situation. Lets not confuse arts with professional development.
But the game itself seemed very interesting.
Some games are used to train soldiers, as far as I know.
I also read, that companies should hire MMORPG clan leaders, because they usually know how to lead ppl.
Creating while using stuff you are learning seems to have a strong "ownership" feel.
> #1-3 happened despite formal schooling
How did they learn to read? Plus I've never met a school that didn't encourage kids to read.
> Making it easier to create video games
Yes, video games are getting harder. And will continue to. GTA 5 cost half a billion and it's easy to see how it could be better. Until we have amazing AI it won't change and then nothing in this blog counts.
> Another insight is that making things easier has nonlinear effects.
This is where the blog gets it totally right and what Education really needs. Just nothing to do with computer games.
[1] Naomi Clark: Why Tom Nook symbolizes village debt in 18th century Japan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BgEnbXPZX4s
This is pretty much exactly what happens in Sudbury schools: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_school https://sudburyvalley.org/
Whoever are putting out the most cutting edge info on technology and innovation (think WhatsApp company blog, InfoQ, the latest and greatest academic books on the things you study), that's where the first mover advantage is for getting a leg up on everybody else in learning the skills you need to be in high demand.
If you wait for someone else to digest that info and then gamify it for you, you're already too late.
There’s this (seems like mostly unchallenged) assumption that more technology improves education.
What if more (or any) technology is actually counter-productive for most learning?
I’m thinking mostly here about k-12 students, and I’m not talking about actually learning technology (which would definitely demand access) —- but everything else?
I feel game design technics can be applied to know-how and know-what learning, but for know-why learning, we need more advanced AI.
It was a surprisingly engageming and effective way to learn CSS Grid and I'm almost certainly going to buy the author's next course on https://mastery.games/
Virtually all of the educational software was lame, amounting to Glorified Flash Cards with animated characters and other decorations. Most if not all have been forgotten.
Fast forward to the past decade or so, my kids both grew up in the Internet era. Educational software is now Web based of course. But it's still not very far removed from Glorified Flash Cards. The main new feature is surveillance, ranging from making sure that you covered the entire exercise, catching cheaters, and tracking your online behavior. Note what one of the other posts says about stuff being sold that school districts are likely to buy.
Okay, there were two "educational" software titles in the early 80s, worthy of note: Word processing and BASIC / Pascal. As I understand it, both BASIC and Pascal were created as teaching tools, but both are completely open ended and imply no specific curriculum. They also allow students to learn at their own pace if they want to, and resemble tools that people actually use in the "real world." They also fully expose you to the consequences of your mistakes.
What "educational" titles do we have today? My high school education predated the word processor. I believe that my kids learned to be good writers and thinkers because of the ability to do a lot of writing and have it read and critiqued easily. And I've never stopped learning from having a programming tool at my disposal, though it's Python instead of BASIC today. Once again, those tools contain no built-in agenda and provide total exposure to making and learning from mistakes.
My favorite educational game is Jupyter. It's not just for math and computation. It can be used for science too. Science has a peculiarity, that in order to really learn it, you have to experience how nature can prove you wrong. Building computerized experiments and measurements is one way to be exposed to this.
I believe that education is hard because it involves the brain, and we haven't figured out the brain. We'll be able to automate teaching when we can automate thinking. Meanwhile I think we can use software and automation to eliminate wasteful thinking, such as physical library searching and doing some kinds of mathematical manipulations by hand.
https://slate.com/technology/2014/01/robot-odyssey-the-harde...
What games have you played to improve driving abilities.
Poor driving (speeding, running red lights, passing unsafely) is very quickly and sometimes harshly punished.
gf who doesn't really play video games seemed to struggle more
GAME PAGE https://eastbayimmersivegames.itch.io/sheng-tian-episode-1
COMMUNITY FEEDBACK https://www.reddit.com/r/ChineseLanguage/comments/hb762z/10_...
Thanks for sharing. Thanks HN for putting this in the front page ;)
It is possible that software is the future of US K-12 education. I could see huge success for a piece of software inspired by DuoLingo's gamification and Khan Academy's bite-sized quick-"I get it"-gratification content design.
But if you understand the institution of US K-12 schooling -- test scores, funding formulas, etc. -- you quickly realize that this is a quite dystopic future. We will raise an entire generation whose only skill is consuming software that relentlessly optimizes for their test performance. Whole hoards of students who can ace a very particular test on Algebra but never really understand deductive reasoning or the concept of a variable/function. As bad as US schooling is today, and as mediocre as the teaching profession in the US might be, humans-teaching-humans at least provides some check on the system and enables real learning.
So, stepping back, the tech elite's attitude toward US education scares me. It's going to do to our schools what that particular set of neo-liberal MBA programs did to so many iconic American businesses.
Conflating education and the US K-12 schooling institution causes many smart and driven people to:
1. under-estimate the effectiveness of good teaching, and
2. fantastically over-estimate the role of self-directed learning in their own lives[^a].
These two errors result in critics of US education over-estimating the effectiveness of (and under-estimating the dystopian potential of) depersonalized/scalable solutions to education.
--
[^a]: I want to say a bit more about #2. My opinion on this topic changed when I read through a bunch of my old code from middle/high school. I noticed that my programming ability took three significant step-changes during that time. The first happened during the time when I was taking Algebra 1 in 8th grade, when I went from mostly simple CRUD programs to really understanding how dynamic programming worked. I went from building PHP/SQL websites to being able to use data structures other than lists/hash tables and design algorithms for things other than CRUD operations. The second happened during the time I was taking Geometry; that's when I started really understanding how to decompose problems and compose solutions. The final step-change happened during my first programming internship during Junior year. So, I was entirely "self-taught", but clearly something in my formal education was driving my programming ability in ways I didn't realize without explicit and rather time-consuming reflection. And that final step-change was basically intense 1:1 tutoring from a mentor.
I flag this argument as thought provoking.
Though... I've reservations about it, as I believe students are being failed far more pervasively and profoundly, than is almost ever suggested. First-tier astronomy graduate students so lack integrated understanding of their field, that they are pervasively mistaken about the simple color of the Sun. Harvard freshman are described as having had such "good" teachers, clearly presenting well-organized information, that students now lack both skills and willingness to wrestle with a body of knowledge and build their own understanding.
I still buy a conservative argument, that things could still be horribly worse. As much education around the world illustrates. And certainly, subculture groupthink and reality disconnect is a well trod path to disaster. And being unable to see the flaws in ones own community is ever popular. So I'm delighted by a reminder to check the mirror.
But while things could be made much worse, I don't think people appreciate how profound a disaster we are already living. And are thus severely underestimating the potential payoff of improvement. And are thus severely underinvesting in it. But as you point out, the incentives around what form that investment takes, are scary at present. My reservation is, the status quo seems underappreciatedly scary too. I've a not-quite joke, that if by some miracle you could raise everyone's science understanding to that of Harvard freshman, it might be good for societal equity, but it would seem a pity, that you didn't try for something less badly broken.
I always wanted to play through a final fantasy in French.
But, yeah, I could see China using video games in re-education camps, sure.
Either way, struck me as a little odd.
Some examples of how it has helped me improve:
* Situational awareness and object tracking. Looking at the minimap frequently so I know the last location of each enemy and predicting where they will be moving based on the current state of the match. As a result, I've gotten much better at driving and I feel considerably safer since I can keep track of everything in my surroundings. The car's mirrors are basically your minimap while driving. This same algorithm applies to other real-life situations as well.
* Communication. I've learned how to communicate more effectively to push the team towards victory. It might feel satisfying to insult someone for playing poorly, but that's rarely a winning strategy. Bad players are usually ignorant and they lack a deep understanding of how to play the game. If you provide constructive criticism in a non-hostile or aggressive manner your allies will most often try to integrate that information. Of course, there's all sorts of people, and if someone is unwilling to listen then you just have to play around them as best as possible. Sometimes this means you have to take bad engagement and try to turn things around. This is just learning how to better interact with people.
* Self-awareness and self-responsibility. It's tempting to blame your allies when you make a mistake or a bad call. Sometimes it's definitely their fault, but recognize that you're not perfect and you also make mistakes. Own your failures, don't let your ego get in the way of your growth. Your allies will take your calls more seriously if they see that you're open and honest. Learn to take criticism. Sometimes it's justified and other times it's not, try to integrate the lessons when it's reasonable.
Ever since I started weight training daily I've also experienced improvements in my reaction time, which has had a direct and positive impact on my gaming skills. When I'm hyper-focused on a game, it feels like it's moving in slow-motion and I have way more time to think through each decision.
When I started playing this game I could barely keep track of fights with all of the enemies and spells flying around everywhere. My cursor would frequently get lost in the turmoil and I would just try to spam my abilities into the blob of lights and animations. Now I can largely keep track of each hero, their abilities, and the timings of everything.
> Computer graphics are now being extended into the area of play. There is a popular game, sometimes called Pong, which simulates on a television screen a perfectly elastic ball bouncing between two surfaces. Each player is given a dial that permits him to intercept the ball with a movable “racket.” Points are scored if the motion of the ball is not intercepted by the racket. The game is very interesting. There is a clear learning experience involved which depends exclusively on Newton’s second law for linear motion. As a result of Pong, the player can gain a deep intuitive understanding of the simplest Newtonian physics — a better understanding even than that provided by billiards, where the collisions are far from perfectly elastic and where the spinning of the pool balls interposes more complicated physics. This sort of information gathering is precisely what we call play. ___And the important function of play is thus revealed: it permits us to gain, without any particular future application in mind, a holistic understanding of the world, which is both a complement of and a preparation for later analytical activities.___ But computers permit play in environments otherwise totally inaccessible to the average student.
> A still more interesting example is provided by the game Space War, whose development and delights have been chronicled by Stuart Brand. In Space War, each side controls one or more “space vehicles” which can fire missiles at the other. The motions of both the spacecraft and the missiles are governed by certain rules — for example, an inverse square gravitational field set up by a nearby “planet.” To destroy the spaceship of your opponent you must develop an understanding of Newtonian gravitation that is simultaneously intuitive and concrete. Those of us who do not frequently engage in interplanetary space flight do not readily evolve a right-hemisphere comprehension of Newtonian gravitation. Space War can fill that gap.
> The two games, Pong and Space War, suggest a gradual elaboration of computer graphics so that we gain an experiential and intuitive understanding of the laws of physics. The laws of physics are almost always stated in analytical and algebraic — that is to say, left-hemisphere — terms; for example, Newton’s second law is written F = m a, and the inverse square law of gravitation as F = G M m/r2. These analytical representations are extremely useful, and it is certainly interesting that the universe is made in such a way that the motion of objects can be described by such relatively simple laws. But these laws are nothing more than abstractions from experience. Fundamentally they are mnemonic devices. They permit us to remember in a simple way a great range of cases that would individually be much more difficult to remember — at least in the sense of memory as understood by the left hemisphere. Computer graphics gives the prospective physical or biological scientist a wide range of experience with the cases his laws of nature summarize; but its most important function may be to permit those who are not scientists to grasp in an intuitive but nevertheless deep manner what the laws of nature are about.
> There are many non-graphical interactive computer programs which are extremely powerful teaching tools. The programs can be devised by first-rate teachers, and the student has, in a curious sense, a much more personal, one-to-one relationship with the teacher than in the usual classroom setting; he may also be as slow as he wishes without fear of embarrassment. Dartmouth College employs computer learning techniques in a very broad array of courses. For example, a student can gain a deep insight into the statistics of Mendelian genetics in an hour with the computer rather than spend a year crossing fruit flies in the laboratory. Another student can examine the statistical likelihood of becoming pregnant were she to use various birth control methods. (This program has built into it a one-in-ten-billion chance of a woman’s becoming pregnant when strictly celibate, to allow for contingencies beyond present medical knowledge.)
The list of games with widespread educational impact of some sort is already much larger than most people think. As is usually the observation when edutainment of any sort is written about, the point is really that there are many important fields of education excluded from this revolution. Part of that is probably that the cross section of people that are interested in making a game and those who understand the topic well enough to start with is often not large. Persisting cultural relevance for your creation is very rare, which can be crushing. That a game like Snake Pass exists exposing more people to the uniqueness of snake movement is a near miracle.
Games aren't currently categorized by what a player can learn from them, just as movies rarely are. Sometimes even putting into words what you came away with after an experience is difficult, but you know your perspective on yourself or the world changed in some way. Check any of the movie or game storefronts and see if they have any comprehensive sections to let you filter by what people thought they learned from them. Valve is the most well positioned to implement something like this through Steam, because they rapidly iterate with experiments and have a strong variety of games available with an engaged audience willing to do the tasks necessary.
At the moment, you have to guess what you might learn based on the genre or first impressions. Even still, the ratings for a product aren't there to rate educational value and the time played doesn't tell you how long you have to spend in the game to get that learning experience. You can have a 1-2 star game teach you something priceless, while a 5 star game is a nearly vapid lifeless husk of manipulation. Stores like Steam almost need a completely separate perspective view with its own ratings, own tags and own reviews to make these aspects of games more discoverable. There are people that would be more than thrilled to populate that information in good faith.
I think there are hidden riches waiting to be described when people are encouraged to explain to others what it was that they learned rather than what bugs they encountered or whether the production quality was bad and changes like that could over time apply meaningful pressure to add more important educational moments into their games for measurable marketing value.
Being father's day, it wasn't that long ago that my dad was reminiscing about old TV shows where every episode tried to deliver some moral education. How hard is it to find those old episodes categorized by what it tried to teach? Seinfeld was also saturated with educational value through a bevy of unique situations. South Park is probably more educational than Big Bang Theory, because oddly enough I see BBT as more of a facade.
In short, it's not only the standard academic teachings that are underserved or have poor discoverability in all media and I do think continuing to neglect the explicit identification of this value as newer generations pass up old media of all types will have a cascading cost that will impact generations of families.
The side effect is that there will be some educational value that will be polarizing, like inauthentic diversity education that could become an avoid flag for many (for both good and bad reasons). That could be a good thing if it pressures political activism in media to be less overt in order to have more widespread subtle impact without preaching to people louder than the art itself is able to genuinely speak.
There are exciting times ahead and I'm optimistic of the many educational avenues that will be opening up as people wake up to how they learn over the course of their lifetime, be it calculus or empathy.
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.