Learning By Playing 49
theodp writes "This week's NY Times Magazine — a special issue on education and technology — is tailor-made for the Slashdot crowd. For the cover story, Sarah Corbett explores the games-and-education movement, which she notes is alive and well at Quest to Learn, a NYC middle-school that aims to make school nothing less than 'a big, delicious video game.' Elsewhere in the issue, Paul Boutin writes about Microsoft's efforts to inspire The 8-Year-Old Programmer with its Kodu Project, and Nicholas Carlson reports on Columbia University's efforts to mix journalism and hard-core computer science with its unique dual-degree master's in journalism and CS. There's also an accompanying timeline that nicely illustrates how learning machines have progressed from the Horn-Book to the iPad."
QTL (Score:4, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Hidden Math in MMOs (Score:3, Interesting)
Educational games tend to be pretty pathetic
I happen to work for an educational video game company, www.bigbrainz.com and we feel that most companies rush out products to cover a ton of subjects. This approach isn't necessarily bad, but we've tried to focus on one thing, the times tables, and we do it well. The graphics in Timez Attack are amazing compared to other educational games and children really seem to love it. We also notice that when a child does well in one subject, in our case math, they tend to do better in other subjects. We hope to continue on to other subjects but we are really focusing on quality. We hope that other companies join us in our pursuit in high quality education video games and not simply games that are really flash cards on computer.
Taking Things Apart (Score:5, Interesting)
I have a three year old daughter and she was playing with an old educational toy when I realized that you could take it apart, see how it works and put it back together again. It wasn't designed for that but there were plenty of parts in it. You can't do that with most modern toys. They're just discrete pieces of silicon. Very little of interest or use is contained in them.
The problem with this type of "research" is that it's finding excuses to give kids sugar rather than discipline them so they eat real food.
Success is no longer defined by the amount of learning that is happening but by the lack of discipline problems that occur while the learning is occurring. Sugar shuts the kids up so that's success.
Schools need to stop encouraging the attitude that education begins and ends with a bell. If schools focused on reading, writing and math then students could find and learn about their own personalized interests outside of class.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:High Quality Versus Graphics (Score:2, Interesting)
But what I see in the video does not look like a game that integrates learning; it looks like a series of bribes between homework sessions.
That's interesting that you say that. That is the exact thing we are trying to avoid. :) I remember when I first heard about this company and I looked at the website and the videos and I thought some of the same things you have said. Then I started to play the game and more importantly I watched children play the game and then I saw the value in the game. Many of the youtube videos on the site are there to give a quick overview of the game and show the different levels. If you go to the teacher page and look up the setup video you will see how the game tries to be more than a bribe. We try to integrate playing and learning into the same thing. So, please try the free version, which has all the education of the upgraded version just not as many environments, and if you have any suggestions please send us an email. We love all the suggestions we can get.
Also, I haven't seen StarFall so I will have to take a look at that. Thanks for the suggestion.
Re:Hidden Math in MMOs (Score:2, Interesting)
My 5 year old has played just about every educational game you can think of. The best ones have a significant game portion that requires passing the educational parts. However, we aren't expecting the games to teach her anything, that's our job. If the games motivate her to learn, that's great. Her 2 favorite games have very little learning content, but even mastering those games requires focus, thought and patience.
She started school last month and if she does not behave well (green or blue mark), she loses access to the computer. If she misbehaves (red, orange, yellow), she loses all, 1/2 or a 1/4 of her toys. She now knows what a quarter of her toys looks like.
The most amazing thing to me is how much she knows about computers. I almost have her turning in QA style bug reports for her computer. "Well the screen froze, but if I push the windows button I can get out of the game, but when I go back it is still frozen." That was a conversation this morning.
For languages (Score:2, Interesting)
I might not be the only one, but I grew up playing games in English and I believe most of my learning experience in this language was based on the challenges those games brought on me. I mean, I was 10 or so when I finished Crystalis and Zelda on the NES and I remember finding myself thinking/playing in English when my school friends were learning "my name is...". I think there are fields (like idioms) which can greatly benefit from games, like history, geography. But in the case of mathematics, which requires a great deal of practice not so much.
Re:High Quality Versus Graphics (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem with injecting math, social politics, etc, into games like MMOs is that the problems to be solved are "constructed"—that is, the lesson to be learned has to be presented as a specific obstacle to be overcome. The criteria to get the reward behind that obstacle has to be defined; essentially, there's right and wrong answers and the reward is not generally connected to the problem in an organic way.
I'll use a simple example for illustrative purposes...remember Math Blaster? If you've ever played it, you get a math problem across the top of the screen and different answers to it fall down. You sit at the bottom in a little Space Invaders-like spaceship blasting away. Shoot the right answer, get points.
Why does this game suck? Because the problem-solving element of solving the math problems is not connected to game play; in fact, game play exists only as an artifice to get you to solve the math problems. One doesn't advance in the game because the result of the equation was useful (other than adding to your score, of course).
Contrast this with an organically presented problem, where your character is standing in a train station, confronted with having to make a decision about how to get somewhere in the game world by a certain time. The player has to run around and get the info from the train schedules, maybe it makes sense to wait for the bullet train that skips stops, maybe it makes sense to wait for a cab to come even if it costs a little extra money. In this way, game play is actually advanced by working out the problem.
Of course, this kind of game play has drawbacks. You can't usually present a binary right/wrong answer—problems that arise organically usually have solutions that present in degrees. One consequence of this is that most of the time you can't force every player to deal with the problem at all, some will find a way to avoid it entirely. The other issue is that it's hard to differentiate between solving a problem based on understanding and solving a problem by finding the answer. You could, for example, find a way for a complex calculus problem to arise naturally in your game, but you have to make sure the player's success is based on deep understanding of the solution, not the player's ability to pull up Wolfram|Alpha and get an answer.
Education or Entertainment: Transfer to Science? (Score:2, Interesting)
Why does it have to be electronic? (Score:3, Interesting)
No technology involved at all, but students are forced to learn the material in unusual ways- rather than lecture and ask them to regurgitate on a test, I've got students who will have to defend intellectual positions against attacks from other students. (And they will attack- they get bonus points for meeting their objectives, and the games are designed with winners and losers)
The short game (around the decision to de-planetize Pluto) worked pretty well and they're set to start Tuesday on the long form game about the decision to award Darwin a medal from the Royal Society. Crossing my fingers on this one- there's some stuff that's tough to understand, and I've got 16 first-years teaching it all to each other (with a little coaching outside the class :^)