It ended in a non-sequitur. Today, GPT-3 can be used to do smart autocomplete of a paragraph, but in the future, a model might autocomplete an entire book. Where is the symbiosis there? Gaming to aquire knowledge has nothing at all to do with AI replacing humans at various tasks.
I think you missed the point, because it was right there: AI tools will lower the cost of producing (educational) games, by enabling creators to rapidly generate a diverse selection of dialogues, landscapes, textures, music, [...], which the creators can then choose from or use as inspiration. This lowers the barrier for independent developers to design educational games. This isn’t hypothetical—I have aspirations to make an educational game someday (but not an infinite well of time or skill), and the likelihood of this actually happening increases as the tools improve.
Don't students deserve better resources than procedurally generated text/maths problems?
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.
The author said that AI will be used to better humans instead of replace them. Why generate educational games with AI when the AI can instead directly solve the problems that you are educating people to solve?
Video games style learning are great. But I don't know if a classroom of children systematically playing video games on a time based limit to learn a subject will be the same experience.
Freedom and pace is what makes them a great medium. That's the opposite of our education system.
My kids go to a fairly highly-rated public elementary school in the midwest U.S., and in addition to live math instruction, they also have time allotted within their class to play www.prodigygame.com
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.
I think as long as you moderate their usage and make sure they do other fun activities too, like go outdoors, play, be social and so on, they should be fine
My kid was very into Prodigy, but after a couple of months I discovered he was spending more time going around decorating his house and trying to talk to other kids through their limited chat feature. He ended up avoiding battles because he said it slowed down what he wanted to do.
The author claims “where games mostly fall short is that they’re not that transferable to the real world. The skills you learn are highly specific to that game,” but “this will change,” because the cost of game development is decreasing. But his conclusion doesn’t follow; we might get more educational games, but not necessarily ones with skills that are more generalisable.
As someone who’s spent the last 15 years 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.
That latter part is important: there's currently no incentive for the outcome the author envisions, at least not enough to produce truly great outcomes that are better than education as its exists today. Consider that many teachers have some pretty strong emotional and non-monetary incentives (they have to if they want to stick through all the bullshit) to do a good job, and it still produces educational outcomes that aren't great.
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.
> "where games mostly fall short is that they’re not that transferable to the real world."
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.
> the "real world" will begin to more and more resemble games
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.
This si true and also exactly why this isn't such a great idea. If education is done by video games, employers will need to make work like video games, and that will l, naturally, pervade other aspects of life. The skills will become transferable because people use the skills they have and don't know what they don't know.
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.
> it’s even harder to design one that’s fun and educational
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.
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)
For most people, poker will probably more likely lead into a gambling addiction (or at least a habit of regularly flushing money down the train at the tables) than an inquiry into probability and statistics. Most people are probably just not inquisitive enough to dig into the maths behind poker.
I think you need a teacher to put the game in context.
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.
While I think the intention and idea is good, you should not teach kids how to play poker. Rather, use a board game with cards and simulate somewhat similar environment but with no inclination towards real gambling whatsoever.
Sure, if the "kids" at hand are university students, you could use poker. But I find it extremely dangerous to teach kids poker theory, who as theorized by the Dunning-Kruger effect might start believing themselves to be really good at it, and then proceed to spend a lot of time and money on a pursuit that might not lead them to happiness. You can teach statistics without making any new gambling addicts in this world.
I know the majority of the students wouldn't be affected and the effect could be even positive, but for some the drive to gamble is so strong that they really go off if that predisposition is nurtured. Although perhaps they are ticking time bombs either way, so no amount of protection will save them. But yeah, you got to be careful teaching kids positive feedback loops on things that might have serious drawbacks.
That study by Dunning and Kruger did not find that 'Dunning-Kruger effect' that you are citing here. (What they found is that both more and less competent individuals err in their assessment of their own skills towards average competence. The less competent don't give themselves higher marks than the more competent give themselves.)
Btw, the kids who are worse at it would probably get their ass handed to them in the class games already anyway. Even after some training. So that's a good corrective and immediate feedback.
Learning via video games is so powerful for many kids because of the agency they're provided. Also they are intrinsically motivated to play the game and they can't help but learn.
"Stop the games", "put the game in context", etc. mostly kills this feeling for many kids. Only the most skilled teachers are able to do this without making the whole thing unfun.
Yes, the computer stopping things is often easier for kids (and people in general) to accept than another human ordering them around. I guess it feels more like a force of nature than an agent to be argued with.
Folklore has it, that Haskell's linter hlint was created so that the author could help his wife's coding without jeopardizing their marriage. The extra indirection step helped.
[For kids] I think you can rule out any online game, or any gambling game (both will be age restricted). Saying that, teaching kids how to play cards is probably worth it. Board games are generally good for mental arithmetic, particularly Monopoly. And there are less "gambley" card games that teach statistics - Bridge, for example. Pretty much any card game which forces you to assess the odds of what your opponents have.
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.
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.
Factorio quickly demonstrates to the player the danger and cost of bolt-on / ad-hoc / spaghetti code solutions, and likewise the benefits of a bit of forethought.
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!)
I wouldn't attributed this to programming but pre-planning in general benefits a lot of places. That goes to the comment in the article that "a bad plan is better than no plan".
I totally know what you mean a spaghetti factory is just as hard to deal with as spaghetti code...
until you have bots and you can actually copy paste your factory around to cut and paste your factory it's super hard to fix the problem.
I have only used KiCad and I actually don't see the similarity.
In KiCad you start by designing a circuit schematic first. In Factorio you start building whatever you want.
You have potentially have to create your own custom parts including their physical footprint based on existing chips. In Factorio every part is already included in the "part library".
The PCB design phase automatically connects parts with traces correctly. The human designer is just responsible for the layout. In Factorio you keep the design in your head and place each conveyor tile one by one.
PCBs usually have multiple layers and it's common to have dedicated VCC and GND planes just for power transmission. Although the electric grid in Factorio is technically a separate layer, you have to extend the grid by placing transmission lines.
I will accept that the idea of non overlapping traces/conveyor belts is similar but overall the workflow just isn't the same. To be fair I haven't actually done anything beyond following a bunch of tutorials on making PCBs. I have yet to send a design to a manufacturer. It's possible that Eagle and Altium are significantly different to KiCad but I personally stick with opensource tools and even if they may have significantly worse UX I actually love the extra challenge. Just shows that other than paying bills to stay alive nothing on this planet should prevent you from learning electronic design, mechanical design and software development on your own.
I did the same in WoW :) Bought up all the versions of a certain item in AH and sold at extreme markup over time. As more came up on AH I’d just buy them all up and continue. This lasted for quite some time and I diversified into other items. Let’s just say I could afford anything in that game :)
In my case it was the egg needed for making a gingerbread cookie on Christmass. There was only one low level area that would drop them 100%. So I farmed it en-masse, no one else did.
One trend I've found interesting is take industrial design software tools (things for CAD, PCB, FPGA, etc) and then 'dumb' them down and add hostile creatures to destroy the player's designs. It's not a bad method. Literally, make simple code and add hostile bugs to it.
Coding-inspired puzzle games appeal to quite a few people.
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.
I somewhat disagree with both these assertions for different reasons.
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 agree with you, and I also think whether games will be educational or not often as a great deal to do with temperament. But, like other media, put high quality, rich content with multifaceted depth is key to making an environment in which someone could learn something.
I came here to say something similar. Several assertions in TA are just plain wrong. Making educationa video games might sound great, but it’s so incredibly hard that you might better spend all that time and money and invest it into training teachers to be even better at their job and maybe learning how to leverage tech to support their teaching.
I personally think most games just aren't realistic enough. There is this game where you use a plasma cutter to take a space ship apart. The plasma cutter doesn't actually slice panels in half. They just disappear.
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.
Nope. Human contact is the future of education. Rent-seeking scumbags trying to shove technology into education where it isn’t needed can find another industry to ruin.
Technology is a good replacement for existing technology. Replacing a worksheet with digital problems can work well. Replacing a textbook with a virtual lecture can work well for many students. Replacing an instructor with digital problems doesn’t work.
In my experience there is a lot of crappy and hard to use tech in education that if improved would make things much easier.
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.
My view is that technology can deliver education of equal quality to each child, and this baseline should constantly improve over time. A small fraction of children has access to high quality educators, and they might end up being highly motivated, encouraged and empowered. What about the rest?
Pay teachers more. If you are a smart person and could have a great career in industry, why would you ever go teach unless you come from a financial background that can support you (aka wealthy parents) or are extremely altruistic. If you pay teachers competitive wages that are in line with their contributions to society, you'd see better teachers overall.
This is a very valid point.Not so long time ago, teachers used to be extremely highly valued in any society because they were the ones teaching and shaping the future generations.Now teaching is mainly left to those who weren't able to do anything better.
The problem, though, is that the number of teachers we require makes that prohibitively expensive. We need to do both things. We need to increase the leverage of individual teachers, so that they can teach more students. To do that, we require technology. Then we can start paying teachers more.
Just fire most of the administrative workers. Everyone's a spendthrift until you want to spend money on teachers instead of administrators and multi-million dollar buildings and stadiums.
I would love to do that, and it would certainly help, but I don't think it's anywhere near sufficient to pay teachers as much as your average software engineer, for instance.
> 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.
Automation is something teachers could really use. There is a morass of manual labor intensive tasks which are currently required for lesson prep, for instance.
There's not much money in it though. Overworked teachers don't have a lot of cash to throw around.
The two things that fall apart for me about using games to teach children in the future is 1) learning is not just remembering facts, it's also interacting with others; and 2) not everyone learns the same way, some are not going to be self-motivated to learn via a game, nor can a game adjust itself to the particular needs of all individuals.
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.
Why is education untouchable and sacred? If robots can do it just as well I'm all for it. I don't understand what the higher purpose of keeping humans for teaching is.
The article doesn't really say how video games will be used. Will it be homework? In school? Lab time? I could see video games being an ok medium for showing examples of things, but I do find the arguments a bit strange. For example it brings up the Rutherford model. I imagine it's outdated or incomplete, but people go get physics degrees where people learn to genuinely understand that topic. It might be disappointing that school can't satisfy a person's love for a specific topic, but schools are supposed to be holistic and introduce you to many ideas. Also, this seems very science focused. I don't see how games would help with literature classes or a writing class, where the primary task is to understand a topic and construct logical arguments to defend a point (I know not everybody's classes were like this). Even in math, I don't really know how much this would help. The main way at getting better at doing proofs is grinding through proofs (which imo is fun and doesn't need a game component).
Look at what the “elites” do to educate their kids. Do they long to put their kids in front of a computer to play video games or do they pay top dollar for tiny teacher:student ratios at great facilities with competent teachers/leadership?
I can’t imagine anyone dealing with kids learning from home this lockdown and thinking education should be more technologically driven.
It is not that it needs more technology. Education is driven as much from access as it is anything else. Access to teachers is huge. But, failing that, access to educational things is pretty good.
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.
Education primarily suffers from a motivation and accountability problem. Obviously, this problem can be solved by throwing money at it, but how can it done more cost efficiently so that’s available to everyone? Online education has problems right now because the teachers provide motivation via the relationship, which will always be less evocative than an in-person interaction. It’s possible that video games could provide alternate motivation solution that would be more effective for someone.
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.
That's not to get educated, that's to drill for exams. I mean sure we call it education, but it's not, it's for making hamsters who will make powerpoint slides when they're older.
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.
> I can’t imagine anyone dealing with kids learning from home this lockdown and thinking education should be more technologically driven.
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.)
> 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.
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.
While yes the game industrie will change some very small parts of education, my beleef is that it will not change anything big. Most of the time the games are already there but it is just not used because of many different problems.
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.
Love it. Especially the failed business plan I had from 8 years ago. The OP is correct, but good luck getting the education world to change. It's monitored by "moms" that don't like change, school districts that run on what is known, and a publishing industry without a single success in interactivity in the decades computers have been around. Any success has been small and anecdotal, even Khan Academy. In order to truly change our education system, we need to spend a hundred million dollars on R&D with interactive storytelling to get the breadth of material correct, then another billion developing the depth. After words, students could freely "roam" through stories and learn at their own pace. Interactive software could monitor reading and comprehension levels and adapt, it can provide real-time feedback to teachers who can "steer the ship".
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...
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.
Skimming the deck, one concern I'd have is understanding the effort required to gather domain knowledge.
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.
Domain knowledge is exactly the part that needs to change. The current "publishing" domain experts are very likely long-term employees of the existing publishers and they "see" content in a textbook fashion. They probably know they have X words, Y images, and have to convey Z elements in each chapter. I doubt publishers ever reach out to actual domain experts.
In my vision, I would have had experienced interactive authors work with actual domain experts and educators to develop stories that included XYZ, but also the additional depth that a story can provide.
One of my education advisers was an established history teacher in Illinois and he basically said he stacked the textbooks at the front of the class and never used them. Every day he would tell a story and provide his own materials. He considered the textbooks a huge waste of time and provided very little in the way of usable knowledge.
I could pull together a half dozen interactive writers for under a million a year. Engaging with domain experts would be challenging, but not without funding to trade. Add education staff, programmers, testers, and a group of parents and students for outreach and you have a solid group to develop something profoundly different and likely significantly better than what the average 3rd through 8th grade student endures.
Textfyre was way ahead of its time. Many people told me that and I still don't know how to fund it. It would require someone or some entity that thought it was a valuable effort.
I'm on my third startup and I've often told people, if I ever hit it big with one of my ideas, I am likely to swing back to Textfyre and bootstrap it.
Cool slide deck: I like the idea of using NLP as an interface to students! You folks were a few years ahead of the deep learning word models, so there was, and still is, a lot of promise in this approach.
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.
I always feel like I'm a worse driver after playing games a lot, usually it encourages speeding and "fun" behaviours rather than good, sensible, law-abiding driving.
What games have you played to improve driving abilities.
Euro Truck Simulator 2 (and American Truck Simulator from the same studio) both reward safe and sensible driving along with spatial awareness (trailers are LONG) and simple economics (your trucking company is a business and you can grow your company size).
Poor driving (speeding, running red lights, passing unsafely) is very quickly and sometimes harshly punished.
I wouldn't say it improves my driving abilities, but when I started driving it just clicked really quickly. I understood I was dealing with an HUD, and some gameplay, and some rules, etc.
gf who doesn't really play video games seemed to struggle more
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.”
No,they are not the future. The fact that we now need 'interactive' lessons with tablets,apps,smart boards and all other gimmicks,while at the same time motivation keeps declining, attention span is at all time low and etc. On top of it,the curriculum of most educational programmes getting more and more watered down. Video games aren't the solution.
By now, we'd have at least a few video game educated mathematicians and scientists. Sure those fields have a credential barrier, but it's not impenetrable. Given that many kids spend more time on video games than on school, the benefits should already be measurable.
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.
Neat idea! When I played through your Quantum Game levels, the confetti in Level 3 kept raining while I was playing the next level. Thought you might want to know (and fix) that.
> 1. The things you learn by yourself stick; the things that are “taught” to you do not stick.
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.
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?
For all the shallow criticisms and outrage at the quality and mechanization of education, I share the same angst, but as KSP, Factorio and Zachtronics have shown that is there is place for educational games.
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.
Zachtronics (and probably Factorio too, I've never played it) games always feel like programming in disguise. I'd be interested in seeing if there are educational games that can gamify more than just programming/automation. (I suppose KSP gamifies orbital mechanics)
Loved the Zachtronics games, but at a certain point they hit the issue with becoming 5+ h investments into a single problem, and cross the boundary to tediousness.
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.
Video games will change education in the way that books changed education (speculation I know). They're not a replacement for human discourse, for the teacher-pupil relationship, for social fitting, etc. But they make learning scalable and accessible in a way it wasn't before.
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.
The language in this article about knowledge you "feel in your body" is only briefly mentioned is the concept of "tacit" knowledge, further developed here:
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.
> you can play through a game of Civilization in a few hours/days. There is no analogous real-life experience.
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.
391 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 308 ms ] threadWith 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.
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.
[1] https://grantome.com/grant/NIH/R01-MH105488-01A1
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
It's fun learning by yourself, though a little of hand-holding could get you up to speed faster.
I believe "Besiege" could be a great way to teach mechanics and physics as well :)
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.
Sure, if the "kids" at hand are university students, you could use poker. But I find it extremely dangerous to teach kids poker theory, who as theorized by the Dunning-Kruger effect might start believing themselves to be really good at it, and then proceed to spend a lot of time and money on a pursuit that might not lead them to happiness. You can teach statistics without making any new gambling addicts in this world.
I know the majority of the students wouldn't be affected and the effect could be even positive, but for some the drive to gamble is so strong that they really go off if that predisposition is nurtured. Although perhaps they are ticking time bombs either way, so no amount of protection will save them. But yeah, you got to be careful teaching kids positive feedback loops on things that might have serious drawbacks.
Btw, the kids who are worse at it would probably get their ass handed to them in the class games already anyway. Even after some training. So that's a good corrective and immediate feedback.
"Stop the games", "put the game in context", etc. mostly kills this feeling for many kids. Only the most skilled teachers are able to do this without making the whole thing unfun.
Video games are good at getting through to those who don't respond well to adults stepping in and contextualizing things all the time.
Folklore has it, that Haskell's linter hlint was created so that the author could help his wife's coding without jeopardizing their marriage. The extra indirection step helped.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoombinis
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.
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!)
I totally know what you mean a spaghetti factory is just as hard to deal with as spaghetti code... until you have bots and you can actually copy paste your factory around to cut and paste your factory it's super hard to fix the problem.
In KiCad you start by designing a circuit schematic first. In Factorio you start building whatever you want. You have potentially have to create your own custom parts including their physical footprint based on existing chips. In Factorio every part is already included in the "part library".
The PCB design phase automatically connects parts with traces correctly. The human designer is just responsible for the layout. In Factorio you keep the design in your head and place each conveyor tile one by one.
PCBs usually have multiple layers and it's common to have dedicated VCC and GND planes just for power transmission. Although the electric grid in Factorio is technically a separate layer, you have to extend the grid by placing transmission lines.
I will accept that the idea of non overlapping traces/conveyor belts is similar but overall the workflow just isn't the same. To be fair I haven't actually done anything beyond following a bunch of tutorials on making PCBs. I have yet to send a design to a manufacturer. It's possible that Eagle and Altium are significantly different to KiCad but I personally stick with opensource tools and even if they may have significantly worse UX I actually love the extra challenge. Just shows that other than paying bills to stay alive nothing on this planet should prevent you from learning electronic design, mechanical design and software development on your own.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
There's not much money in it though. Overworked teachers don't have a lot of cash to throw around.
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.
Either way, struck me as a little odd.
I can’t imagine anyone dealing with kids learning from home this lockdown and thinking education should be more technologically driven.
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.
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 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.
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...
(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.
Domain knowledge is exactly the part that needs to change. The current "publishing" domain experts are very likely long-term employees of the existing publishers and they "see" content in a textbook fashion. They probably know they have X words, Y images, and have to convey Z elements in each chapter. I doubt publishers ever reach out to actual domain experts.
In my vision, I would have had experienced interactive authors work with actual domain experts and educators to develop stories that included XYZ, but also the additional depth that a story can provide.
One of my education advisers was an established history teacher in Illinois and he basically said he stacked the textbooks at the front of the class and never used them. Every day he would tell a story and provide his own materials. He considered the textbooks a huge waste of time and provided very little in the way of usable knowledge.
I could pull together a half dozen interactive writers for under a million a year. Engaging with domain experts would be challenging, but not without funding to trade. Add education staff, programmers, testers, and a group of parents and students for outreach and you have a solid group to develop something profoundly different and likely significantly better than what the average 3rd through 8th grade student endures.
Textfyre was way ahead of its time. Many people told me that and I still don't know how to fund it. It would require someone or some entity that thought it was a valuable effort.
I'm on my third startup and I've often told people, if I ever hit it big with one of my ideas, I am likely to swing back to Textfyre and bootstrap it.
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.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZkX544i8RA
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
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.”
Interestingly, both are open-world sandboxes, not plot-driven games. They're really gamified simulators.
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.
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?
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.
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.
This is pretty much exactly what happens in Sudbury schools: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_school https://sudburyvalley.org/
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.