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Comment by excsn | Hacker News Reader

All this confirms is that kids are unfocused and need someone to focus their attention. Remote learning requires you to take responsibility and takes getting used to. Parents generally aren't going to get involved in students learning, clearly, as this confirms.

If you aren't motivated in some way, you will not do well. In person school was boring for me and wouldn't have made a difference for me since I always looked up youtube videos to learn math and science anyway. We can see here that remote learning needs more work and time in order to catch up to in person school scores.

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I disagree.

"kids are unfocused and need someone to focus their attention" is simply not true on its own. I think it needs the caveat of "focus their attention on things they're not interested in".

"Remote learning", or sitting in front of a computer and using it for a few hours in a row, is something many children do willingly and must be pried away from with continual arguments, see video games.

I argue the problem, generally, isn't the fact that students need to sit at a computer, but that remote learning, much like current in-person learning as you say yourself, is simply boring.

The fact that school is less addictive than modern video games is not as slam-dunk of an argument against schools as you seem to think it is.

A) I never said modern. Video games have been enthralling to people for decades.

B) The word "addictive" gets bandied about very freely when it comes to video games. Unless we're talking about loot boxes or pseudo (or not so pseudo) gambling in video games, there's a pretty big difference between video game "addiction" and an alcohol/nicotine addiction.

My hobbies are not "addictive", and nor are the things I find boring "anti-additive".

Video games are designed primarily for the person playing them to want to be there, to learn what the games world has to teach, and in some cases to draw as much money out of the whales as possible.

Standardised schooling is designed primarily to be quantifiable and scaleable.

If my kid gets addicted to the right video games, they WILL learn more than the same time classes.

Case in point? Paradox interactive grand strategy titles. You'll learn more history and geography in a CK2 campaign than a whole year of the average 8th grade history/geography course.

Of course, we always assume children get addicted to video games that don't teach anything.

I agree. But also, we shouldn't throw around the word "addicted" so freely. Aside from the argument of if it's really an addiction, there's the issue of framing:

Addicted to video games or simply absorbed in an interactive medium?

Uninterested in learning or simply bored by the un-engaging monologue?

> Case in point? Paradox interactive grand strategy titles. You'll learn more history and geography in a CK2 campaign than a whole year of the average 8th grade history/geography course.

What proof do you have about this?

Stuff like this sounds highly attractive – "If we just designed the right games, our kids would learn as they play", but it's about as useful as your CEO saying "I could just have my 16-year old write that program, he learns programming at schools".

Curricula to teach specific subjects have been designed by professionals to carefully cover learning with reinforcement over time. They don't stop being valid just because you played a game one time that you think you enjoyed a lot.

And when we test students a few months later on what they learned and remembered from that carefully designed curriculum, what do those outcomes look like?

Curricula are typically designed for learning, not to guarantee outcomes on standardized tests.

"But...we want a way to measure!"

Keep thinking that way and you'll end up with a test prep industry for fourth grade. Take it from an immigrant who comes from that culture and hopes American schools don't get it any time soon.

If you really want to measure progress on history and geography, you have to measure minor intangibles like whether your kid can find their neighborhood on a city map, or can recognize similarities between strategic problems in history and the problems that they face. I at least have not heard of any meaningful attempt to measure minute aspects like this, but would be interesting if there were any.

(can't reply to the comment since it's too deep)

Oh I agree with you that more standardised testing is not a solution, nor is more of what is already the default in North America.

That being said, "But...we want a way to measure!" and "Curricula are typically designed for learning" are not opposed to one another. How do you know if learning took place without some sort of measurement?

I'm not advocating for standardized testing; measure however you want. Measure by having a conversation with the student about the topic and see if they can make coherent sentences, if they can articulate what they learned, if they remember what they learned.

But you still need to measure somehow, even if it's not quantitative.

At the end of a semester of learning a new language (e.g. French or Spanish for high schoolers), can they pronounce they alphabet? Do they know the alphabet? Can they use basic phrases and sentences. If they can't, then that class was a failure.

This is anecdotal, but I learned a lot of history and geography by playing the Total War games - Shogun: Total War, Rome: Total War, Medieval: Total War.

I'm not sure how to go about proving the benefit that the OP mentioned, but I am willing to put my money where my mouth is at least when it comes to the education of my own children.

> Shogun: Total War...I am willing to put my money where my mouth is

Well, let's see.

This is a totally honesty-based exercise, but could you write two paragraphs upon the causes of the Tokugawa Shogunate's policy of isolationism (Sakoku), and its short- or long-term (pick your favorite) effects upon the relationship of Japan with the rest of the world?

I am actually interested to see how far you can extend the understanding from the game. In my opinion, this is a reasonably broad question which any adult who has studied the highlights of the history of the period that that game covers should be able to answer to some degree.

Haha, this feels a lot like homework and my policy through university and graduate school was to simply not do assigned homework.

Nevertheless, let's give it a shot.

This is my impression based not only on the game, but also from subsequent content I have been exposed to after having played the game (based on my interest in the game factions - Oda, Hojo, Toyotomi, Uesugi, etc.).

Upon exposure to foreign culture (after the landing of the black ships), the shogunate worried about the influence of foreign ideas on its populace. They also recognized the value of foreign technology (e.g. guns in the game). So they limited foreign interactions to mercantile activity on the island of... the name escapes me (something-jima).

This policy continued for... a couple of centuries? But started to fall apart before the era depicted in media such as The Last Samurai.

Now I will admit that my understanding of the events and impact is somewhat superficial. It may also be inaccurate, in which case I am sure you will correct me. But my understanding would have been non-existent if not for the game.

I learned so much about space from KSP. Strategy and tactical games gave me skills useful at work, but those are hard to describe.

anecdotally, fighting games and mmos pretty much taught me how to actually study and develop a skill set. mmos in particular also serve as a very good proxy for the kind of team management environments you encounter irl.

>Stuff like this sounds highly attractive – "If we just designed the right games, our kids would learn as they play",

the act of playing and improving at a game is in fact an exercise in the generalized learning process and one that i would argue is often better designed than most curricula. good level design is pretty much the artform of pattern recognition and syllogism.

School was boring too, you were just forced to do it (personal opinion)

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