The future of schooling may lie with video games

Neal Stephenson offered a tantalizing look at where the potential for adaptive AI teaching lies with the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer in "The Diamond Age"

"A book that is powered by a computer so advanced it’s almost magical, and it teaches children everything. It does this through a fully interactive story. It teaches you how to read, how to do maths, it teaches you morals, ethics, even self-defence."

http://mssv.net/2006/05/01/the-young-ladys-illustrated-prime...

My two kids learned english (we are Mexican and live in Mexico) by playing videogames and watching cartoons. Although their mother and I both speak english, we never spoke to them in english and they never took any kind of english lessons.

They both started playing videogames when they were two years old. I found out that games like Super Mario 64 were more educational than most PC "educational" games. Finding the 100 coins in a Super Mario level turned out to be an excellent way to learn about numbers and counting.

A few months ago they started playing World of Warcraft and since then I've seen a great improvement in my youngest (11 years old) son's skill for written communication.

As a finance professor I've thought about how to incorporate some of this thinking into my teaching. I do some, having my students implement trading strategies in a simulator that we learned in class, but at the university level it seems that everyone is better off if I cut the crap and just teach them what they want to know, "chalk and talk" style.

I realize this doesn't scale well, but on some level I'm paid to teach small groups not online masses so I don't think my students are paying for me to be an "adviser" or "facilitator".

I like classroom games for teaching economic concepts like comparative advantage, equilibrium interest rates, and the like, but it's not clear those concepts are what I should be devoting time to in introductory corporate. For International finance games seemed to be a better fit.

Hey, don't submit 'printer friendly' links, it robs the content provider of what teensy money they /can/ make from putting their stuff online.

The effect of computer games on education is probably also tied to when the person is exposed to the particular games.

As a kid, my best friends and I spent ages playing every manner of strategy game out there, from Red Alert to Alpha Centauri. In retrospect, we've come to the conclusion that those games taught us invaluable lessons about what it takes to analyze new situations for optimum strategies, and how to balance competing demands of time, resources, attention, and effort in the pursuit of several related goals at once.

Of course, this doesn't apply so well for studying quantum mechanics, but for learning project management, it's amazing.

There's probably a way to teach almost anything using a computer. The problem is in how to present this to the kids.

In school, computers are an afterthought, and aren't really part of the curriculum in any meaningful way (except those couple of classes on Word and Excel, which you do use).

In the best scenario, a teacher will seat the class in the computer lab, then tell them to do research on the web for a report for an hour. Usually though, a visit to the computer lab involves running some buggy "multimedia addon" that ships with the textbook. It is always of awful quality, and, if it runs at all, can be "explored" in about 5 minutes, with the kids wasting the rest of the time hiding a Flash game or YouTube from the teacher. Finally, since "this won't be on the test", most students don't care.

Here's what would work: a resource with voluntary participation. Something for interested students to explore on their own time. Yes, most kids would rather not do something that "feels like more work". I also know I would have enjoyed something like this at that age.

It doesn't even have to be a game in the classic sense. Usually trying to fit educational content in a game just feels fake and contrived, and the result is neither educational nor fun. Kids aren't dumb, and see right through that. In fact, different subjects may require different platforms.

This sounds like a great open-source project. A Wikipedia-style set of learning materials. Someone make this please :)

The future is not necessarily just video games. If we can get education to be intrinsically motivated, rather than motivated with external stimuli like grades, then that would be so much more efficient.

Frankly I don't even think video games would work for all types of people, just as the current system doesn't work for all types of people.

As long as we can get people to have fun while learning, or learn the things they like, however they do it would be fine.

Computer games can also improve your eyesight:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16857-shootemup-video-...

I haven't been this jealous of a High-School curriculum since one of my friends told me of his "School Without Walls" course. Keeping the boredom out of learning seems so pivotal.

computer games , and educational software in general could make learning more fun , more personalized , and probably much more effective.

But , one of the most important things children learn in school is to concentrate on boring things , which is very usefull in most jobs.

So probably a balance should be kept between interesting, fun learning , and boring learning.

Not really a game, but I recently started learning Italian through Rosetta Stone. The interactivity, and engagement makes it highly effective. When I was in school I took French, but I had a hard time picking up the language. I feel I know more Italian from the 3 lessons I've completed then I learned from an entire year in French. Sorry if my comment sounds like a commercial, these are just my honest feelings...