It basically took that game's massive, amazing and detailed map of ancient Egypt, removed all the combat and replaced it with what was essentially a huge virtual museum. You could go run around Egypt, go inside the temples & pyramids, explore the farms, cities and the Nile delta and listen to audio clips and view slideshows about actual Egyptian history.
It was legitimately really amazing and educational. It essentially piggybacked off of the colossal amount of work that goes into creating a AAA open world game's map and repurposed it to create something educational.
Would love to see more of that type of thing.
I can't help but think how awesome it would be to do that as a means of learning about WWI and WWII for example.
> Crazy Taxi
You must have been a much better Crazy Taxi driver than my friends and I...
https://store.steampowered.com/app/227300/Euro_Truck_Simulat...
Players can place items and structures as they walk from place to place and you can see stuff placed by other players as you bring each in-game area "online". These items can be storage lockers, ladders and ropes to climb up difficult terrain, charging stations for your motorcycle, or even entire roads/highways stretching across a landscape. If you use an item from another player, you can give them likes. Note that you never see another player's character.
It's such a nice experience to come back to a river you bridged with a ladder and see hundreds of likes. There's not much combat in the game because it's generally easier to avoid confrontations, and the little combat that is present is heavily geared towards non-lethal weapons.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=y79Jf1nXW_4 (7+ hours!)
The sequels have this too.
(And, if you want to see what this stuff is like, there are YouTube videos that will show you; I remember seeing one by some historians reviewing the educational mode of the Greek game, Assassin's Creed:Odyssey).
"Speedrunning as a gateway to scientific endeavours" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8_1lQ2KH50
"The Complete History of the Super Mario 64 A Button Challenge" https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL94lfiY18_CgWGQzweD_a...
It doesn't have to occur within the walls of a school for something to be considered education.
However I don't want to call it gamification because those are not designed in a game format in order to make you do something that you normally wouldn't want to do. Those are simplification or analogies to bring ideas within the grasp of the student so they can reach it with their current toolset but without mischaracterising it. So when a student calculates the trajectory of a ball in ideal condition, this is still a calculation of a balls trajectory and not something else.
While I don't wholly disagree, there's a lot of edtech out there premised on the notion that all subjects, even sometimes challenging ones, should be like playing a game for all people or you're doing it wrong. I submit that you're always going to have some percentage of students who pretty much hate math however you teach it and some percentage who don't want to read books even with relatively "fun" and easy options.
Can I find plenty of problems at all levels of education? Sure. Are there more engaging things we can do even in an environment that's largely not personalized? Of course. But everyone should have fun all the time is not really a realistic goal unless you just let kids do whatever they want.
Games do often promote the concept of winning and losing, however.
edit: the 24 card games were really great too, though maybe only if you were already inclined towards math
Nothing teaches typing better, in my experience.
I recall having trouble learning English back in high school and then having a breakthrough. The breakthrough was, I figured out how to think in English when trying to debug my errors with the teacher who actually have lived in the USA. Once it clicked, I no longer had to memorise things but predict instead. My English is still not perfect but I can have fluent conversations and almost never need to look up words, I can figure out the meaning of idioms etc.
IMHO, the gamification in Duolingo is not geared towards making you figure out the mechanics behind the language. I think edge case exploration is way to go but the gamification usually revolves around memorising.
E.g. learning Spanish from English on Duolingo is very natural, the course is built the way a baby learns a language, by practice and suggestion, with few small bits of grammar info strewn along the way. According to reports from my friends, learning Spanish from Russian on Duolingo is a completely different experience, all based on memorizing large amounts of rules before any practice even begins, and it works really poorly.
I assume that learning languages on Duolingo is all about building a chain of good courses based on languages you already know by the moment you consider another one. (Only partly joking.)
There is the company called Assimil that has small books based on this concept, where first you are filling in the blanks (not choose from preexisting options) and as the book progresses you have to fill in more and more of the sentence.
Educational games are just games that also teach fun things along the way. I grew up playing the Carmen Sandiego games and it sparked a lifelong interest in history. When I got to college I took a bunch of history classes and even did a bit of undergrad research in it (well "history" is an incredibly broad topic and not something you research, but rather focusing on a topic that I was interested in) on the side. Think interactive fiction games exploring historical settings or works of literature. Games with some light math-based puzzling.
I don't think high level academic work can ever be taught through a game, but students feel the freedom to explore high level concepts when they are comfortable and confident with low level concepts, something that games can bring across better than the underpaid, overworked teacher in a lot of schools.
"Some people find status games distasteful. Despite this, everyone I know is engaged in multiple status games. Some people sneer at people hashtag spamming on Instagram, but then retweet praise on Twitter. Others roll their eyes at photo albums of expensive meals on Facebook but then submit research papers to prestigious journals in the hopes of being published. Parents show off photos of their children performances at recitals, people preen in the mirror while assessing their outfits, employees flex on their peers in meetings, entrepreneurs complain about 30 under 30 lists while wishing to be on them, reporters check the Techmeme leaderboards; life is nothing if not a nested series of status contests."
Status is a public display of desireability. It doesn't have much to do with virtue, but everyone wants it anyway.
Don't blend those two concepts, they are separate. People who make a public display and performance out of their virtues, 'virtue signallers' miss the point. You do it in humility before God.
People who don't show off their status, get little benefit out of it.
There is some really boring stuff to slog through on the journey of a formal education.
In school, people tend to choose subjects they are fascinated with, to the detriment of the other subjects.
I think some subjects like history either benefit from actual life experience, or need some additional storytelling to appreciante.
we really don't need the "wooden straightback chairs in schoolrooms" mentality
gamification might smack of spoonfeeding, but it also might allow a much richer learning experience too.
[1] statistically speaking
There are (and could be better) environments that can isolate and focus on that. The combo of interface and specific challenge can really help communicate what's magical about engineering. Ideally that would help motivate people (versus just being a dopamine hit source).
Highly visual environments with rapid feedback seem to hit that button for me. The old bridge building game Pontifex was great, as was Besiege. I'd love to see more like that (there probably are, I've not played many games in years)
This is also how Kerbal Space Program works, to name one example of an educational game.
There's a job I was considering recently that is space-related, I almost wanted to modify my resume with "I don't have professional experience with orbital mechanics, but I do have xxx hours in Kerbal Space Program on Steam."
The game is amazing, the way it combines fun, learning, and engaging kids without ever feeling like it's a lesson. Seriously my 5 year old now has a basic understanding of set theory because of it.
It feels like educational games peaked in the late 90's and early 2000's and everything since then has been a regression that spends too much time trying to explain things to students rather than letting them discover and explore for themselves.
Some of the logic puzzles were actually still very tricky. Was very impressed.
Our solution has been a no screen time policy. Education is strictly non-digital and a lot of real world, hands on learning and dialogue with real people. And our kid has loved books since infancy.
Does it have to be so strict? I'm not sure, but I do know that our society is inundated with screens designed to addict us and if I give in a little, they just beg for more. We'll introduce screens eventually because it's inevitable, but delaying that as long as possible especially during the formative years has worked well for us so far.
Here is a TEDTalk by Drew Berry: Animations of unseeable biology. (uploaded in 2012) https://youtu.be/WFCvkkDSfIU
Here is also a more recent video by Veritasium on YT that also talks about these animations. (uploaded in 2017) https://youtu.be/X_tYrnv_o6A
So yeah, kids soak up a lot of info through games.
I took English as a foreign language in school since I was 8 or 9, so I learnt some of the basics there. But if I was faced with a spontaneous conversation, no matter how simple, I easily got tongue-tied. (I was also shy and socially awkward in general, which didn't help.)
Spending those hours in chats is when I started getting more comfortable with spontaneous communication.
I'm not necessarily a huge fan of gamification in general, which might be a generational thing, but learning as a side product of something you're interested in can be a huge boost. It doesn't have to be games, though. Lots of people probably learnt a lot of English from music or books they were engrossed with.
If playing Skyrim, you hear the target language constantly, utterances are subtitled so written and heard language can reinforce each other, and practically everything you look at is labeled in the target language. Best of all, you needn't feel so bad for spending all that time playing games!
Subtly different to UK and USA English but comprehensible by all.
Learning English at a relatively young age allowed me to talk to people literally across the ocean. This very conversation we're having right now would have been impossible otherwise.
I'm not upset in the slightest. I count my blessings.
Emphasis on streams of thinking and constructing sentences in ways that make sense to locals, is different to the formal-ish and almost toneless communication we do online.
Internet communication flattens out cultural shortcuts and cultural deepening you can do with fellow speakers in the same nation and locale.
Everything has to be expanded out so that you can 'see all the moving parts', whereas local english can be a lot more intuitive and cultural.
I'm trying to play games with another language, and while sometimes it's ok, other times you really need to know the language to understand how understand mechanics that are introduced into the game. City Skylines was a super tough game to play in a learning language, but it would have been a nice learning exercise if I had the above feature.
I was never stressed out in terms of English language (I'm from Poland) because I've rarely (never) switched game languages to any other language than English.
When I was ~10 years old I've played through whole Final Fantasy 8 which I was obsessed at the time thanks to my older brother with a PAPER dictionary on the desk (I was translating stuff that I didn't understand) and I think that was the most effective way and time when I've learned most of the English language in my life.
Now I'm trying to encourage slowly my kids and I switch game languages they play from time to time.
They pay 0.1% of what other, non-education customers pay. Because that's all they could spare and allow.
Needless to say, the servers alone cost more than what they pay. Not to talk about the massive amount of support they consume.
So if you wonder why it's not widespread - that's why.
I want to build an educational VR app for Quest, but where would it go in the store?
There’s no educational section in the store. So can I get any sales for an educational app?
Oh well, I still like the idea though. One of the biggest benefits was that certain trainings are either very expensive just due to materials, etc, or are very dangerous (high-voltage electrician stuff for example), and doing it virtually would have a much lower risk and cost less.
Games are limited in the sense that they teach frozen symbols and mechanics. Great for learning a large number of mechanics, engineering concepts and 'settled science'.
Getting your hands on broad concepts, blank paper and a relationship with a master/teacher/prof will always be necessary to teach higher concepts.
I will also note that youtube, khan acamedy, and comment sections have done a lot of education, intentionally or otherwise and do a decent job at conveying the master's perspective on the topic being discussed. Video is education that can be done at a low cost vocally and visually, rather than developing it into a game, one of the most expensive and difficult art forms.
There have been companies that specilized in educational games in the past yet they are no more. In the late nighties there were a few that were giants. If I remember well Software Toolsworks was one of them. It got acquired but now it's gone.
I suspect the reason we don't see more of them is that education in the US is mostly free so it make's little sense for parents to spend money on something they already have. And teachers don't want to introduce something that threatens their lively hood and way of working. It's just a guess on my part.
This is wholy untrue, my mother has several decades in elementary education and they would love something like that. The problem is that teachers and schools often don't have the autonomy to acquire these things, a teacher can't buy 20 copies of a game for students as even at 10 bucks that's 200 dollars. So at the budget level required to make games available you then have to go up to the district level. (Stop me if this next part sounds familiar) the District administration is pretty far removed from the students that will be using the product and the teachers using it to teach. Because of this technology companies are incentivized to build their product to the wishes of the district administrators rather than for the students and teachers using the product. This process is helped by the trips, gifts, and "favors" the sales people can use while pitching to the district level decision makers.
So the district goes with the product that checks off the most items on a big checklist, as well as if they are a bad administrator, gives them more control over the students and classrooms. Meanwhile the product that was actually purchased doesn't actually help the students, or facilitate learning because it turns out it is way easier to put together a "study" that shows "leading educators" (who were former district administrators) assure that it will increase X metric by Y%.
Sorry, had to get this off my chest.
I built a math program in Newark that worked stunningly well because it took the level assessment/lessons/testing from Khan and gamified it.
Not gamification in the electronic badge/"you did it!!!"/points sense, but contests between kids, with teams rooting each other on and parents helping run the show.
Education needs genuine praise and involvement to inspire children to put in the necessary effort. But videogaming the experience is a solution in search of a problem. We need less isolation and more coaching.
For anybody interested in the space, I strongly recommend "What Videogames Have to Teach Us About Learning And Literacy" (James Paul Gee)
At one level, even the idea of studying computer games as literary texts is quite tricky, as they tend to be expensive, require expensive hardware, require teachers to have played them (would you expect a teacher to teach a book/film without having read/watched it?), and everyone's experience of it diverges.
At the other end, the idea of a massive game (like the "Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" from "The Diamond Age" where you learn everything as you explore the game world sounds very appealing, but is a massive undertaking even for a game company (you're talking about codify most of the curriculum), so would need massive state funding. Parents tend to want things done at school as they had to do them at school (even if those were crap), so you'd struggle to find schools actually willing to take this on board (and that's before the resistance you'd get from teachers).
To me, the less explored area is games (or computer assistance) that explicitly teach how to know and master your own emotions and how to get on with other people.
Edit: also games to teach basic household finance, critical thinking, and practical probability. (Academic probability teaching totally slides by unacademic people.)
Life skills, in short.
(Though of course, 2015 was seven years ago... old enough to remaster again?)
https://www.legendsoflearning.com/interested-game-developer/
The problem is that we need interactions with live humans to explore these subjects. Gaming in the metaverse won't do the job.
I did play many MS DOS learning games as a kid and i think they were helpful. (math blaster would be one that i remember the most)
[1]: https://tigyog.app/d/C-I1weB9CpTH/r/everyday-data-science
So not crazy, people have been having for centuries (i.e. the game part predates "computer game" part).
I don't want to say there can't be a real breakthrough that makes this a much bigger educational impact, but it's probably important to remember that as an area lot of smart people have tried this pretty hard (including your characterization of open-world + encarta) , and results are not that impressive, so far.
https://deepfuture.tech/podcast/video-games-optimized-learni...
So the “decreasing attention span” is a myth.
I think accessibility will depend on what we can run in the browser. And what we can run in the browser will depend a lot on where JavaScript goes.
"attention span is short" -- b/c we have stopped rewarding its development. The answer is insisting people develop longer attention windows, not trying to stuff real learning into atrophied attention windows.
I remember loads of educational games from my youth.
Fix that first. Because without that, education only serve to create decoys/rubber stamps/plants.
With skill you can put a lot of information into a shorter song. Chain those short sentences together and you can educate and entertain across a rythym.
Just saying it's possible.