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."
Hidden Math in MMOs (Score:5, Insightful)
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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
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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 an
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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 pl
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I've been disappointed with the availability and quality of toddler friendly games available for PC/Mac and the game consoles I have. I did find a downloadable Wii game called PooYoos (or something like that) recently that at least my daughter enjoyed but it wasn't highly educational. I haven't tried a lot of web based stuff but to me it makes sense it might be better because I've noticed iOS apps from small developers are better than any of these PC or console games for toddlers.
I have been pleased with iO
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I just downloaded the free version but I can't seem to play it because I'm not a student/didn't have a password. =(
Am I doing something wrong? If I could try it out I'd probably recommend it for my cousins.
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No, shit, really? Students that do well in school tend to do well in school. Did you ever stop to think that they do well in math because they do well in school, and not that they do well in everything else because your software magically made them learn everything else really well?
The problem I have with "educational" video games is that ideally they're just a wrapper for the core subje
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I'm sure that if you put higher forms of math, navigation, economics and social politics into an MMO, its players would quickly pick up on these concepts.
I used to play Vega Strike (and probably will again) and my most hoped-for feature in the far future is a functional economy. The number of cargo ships needs to be related to the amount of goods needed, and the price of goods needs to be based on the supply and demand... Because otherwise it's just a pretty backdrop and the complexity is all illusory. Why even bother to have a trading system in a persistent game if there's no consequences to any actions? Just because it's important to the storyline?
I don't
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A variety of sim games (Railroad Tycoon being my favorite) strike a very good balance of mostly game but there also being plenty to accidentally learn along the way. Railroad Tycoon will teach you a LOT of geography, for example, along with some basic economic concepts.
Eve is pretty much just an economics spread
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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),
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Wrong assumption, IMHO (Score:2)
You seem to assume that most people will actually do that math. In practice most will get some build off a site and run with that. Or get some tool which calculates it for them, rather than just help.
Or for crafting, people actually do stuff like pick some crafting guide from a site and mindlessly follow instructions like "gather 100 bars of X, 60 bars of Y and a stack of Z. Craft product A 20 times, then 25 times product B, go to the trainer and learn recipe C, craft that 15 times." At the end of the day m
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You seem to assume that most people will actually do that math. In practice most will get some build off a site and run with that. Or get some tool which calculates it for them, rather than just help.
Of course, they do. But the ones who do look into it and learn the ropes have an advantage in game. That's how education sneaks into these games.
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I suspect that the crafters in Eve online, at least the hard core ones, have spreadsheets and calculate to the isk how much they can spend and st
They do it anyway, actually (Score:2)
They do it anyway, actually. The point of those lists for example in WoW isn't to make the right number of components for a given number of final products, as most products don't really have any intermediate steps. The point is simply to grind your skill from 1 to whatever value, in the minimum time and with minimum expense.
QTL (Score:4, Interesting)
Kudu is insulting to 8-year-olds (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not so sure about Kudu and the ilk. The problem I have with it is that it isn't programming. The description of Kudu from the article (making a motorcycle racing game) sounds an awful lot like Racing Destruction Set or that Hypercard adventure game authoring tool I had for Macintosh that lead to some truly dreadful games. Also, I find the idea that you need some gimmicky, technicolor GUI for an 8-year-old to explore programming is a tad insulting to the 8-year-olds. I started learning Commodore-64 Basic when I was 6, and actually wrote a mildly sophisticated database program for my Little League Baseball team when I was 8 or 9. From the comments I've seen on Slashdot, my experience is certainly not unique. I think if I had started with Kudu I would have gotten bored and moved on. I'm an engineer now, largely I think from my childhood goofing about with computers.
I can't remember the name, but I saw a great book written by a Dad and his son about Python. I think that is a much better exploration into computers than Kudu.
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It reminds me more of something like The Incredible Machine with more interactive parts, presented as a programming educational tool.
There was another game that was much more similar to "real" programming called COLOBOTS, which I spent a bored weekend tinkering with once. My big complaint was the limited amount of code storage the little bastards had -- after some early futzing around I'd actually laid out a plan for a (hopefully) decent generic AI for the bots, that would allow them to self identify, coor
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>>Hypercard adventure game authoring tool I had for Macintosh that lead to some truly dreadful games.
As a kid, I never found it very hard just to program in hypercard. Why did they need to add an additional layer of abstraction on top of it? It was never hard to use.
I've been playing around with Google App Inventor. It seems like a suitable tool to teach kids the fundamentals of modern programming (get/set methods, callbacks, etc.) with a pretty easy UI on top of it. I just don't think it's powerful e
Was it this one? (Score:2)
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Any teacher that can be replaced by a machine (Score:2)
shouldn't be teaching. Let's check the actual quote:
http://www.quotesdaddy.com/quote/290532/david-thornburg/any-teacher-that-can-be-replaced-by-a-computer-deserves [quotesdaddy.com]
"Any teacher that can be replaced by a computer, deserves to be." - David Thornburg
Teachers who are as soulless as a computer shouldn't be teaching. Anyone who thinks a computer can do a teacher's job has never been a teacher.
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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.
Stupid politics are stupid (Score:3, Insightful)
Why must one side frame games as "The work of the devil, corrupting our youth!!!1" and the other as "The university of life, teaching useful skills!!!1"? Can't we all just be reasonable people and say "Games are games, they are only supposed to be fun. If some people are able to learn from them, that's good for them (I know I have done, but not everyone can, so don't abolish schools just yet). If some people are homicidal maniacs, it's because they are homicidal maniacs, it's not because of the games they play."? We don't need to pass games off as good or evil.
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Actually - games being 'fun' is a completely subjective application of something that has no place in their definition...
Games are no more about fun than puzzles, art or competitions. The only reason people think that is the case, is because they confuse play as a verb, (which describes what we do in a game), with play as a noun.
Games, art, puzzles and competitions have no relationship with the words work or play when used as a noun. Such words need to be subjectively applied, and therefore can be applied
watch animals (Score:2)
Sheesh guys!! Don't we already know that young of animals learn by playing? Look at kittens, cheetah's cubs or children of most animals when they play.
No, I have not read TFS or TFA.
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Why not have educational content folded into games (Score:2)
Can anyone tell me a reason why real educational content is not already seamlessly folded into games? Kids can't pass a test but they know the names of all 150 Pokemon, or the good items in WoW and how to use them effectively together, or the location of every last secret location in GTA4. Why not name the Pokemon #1=Hydrogen, #2=Helium, #26 Iron, and so on? We'd have an entire generation who memorized every element and their atomic numbers, without even trying. Just think of how much we all learned abo
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Because history sucks. (Score:2)
The kids know all the names and attributes of game characters because they spend the equivalent of WEEKS in school learning them.
Schools just cannot devote the next 2 months for JUST memorizing the periodic table of the elements.
And the kids learn the stories on TV and the movies because the stories are all simplified and standardized. History isn't that clean. Humans do not follow the same pattern as our society's myths do.
Which is the great part about learning REAL history. You see the people as more than
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I say throw some advanced math into games. For example, imagine that you're playing a game and you enter a room. Suddenly, you realize that the room is filled with toxic gas, and you suddenly take 50 damage. One second later, 52 damage. One second after that, 54 damage. You have 10000 health. You need to figure out how long you have to get out of the room. So you think "ok, the DPS (hey look, that's a derivative!) is 50 + 2t. I want the total damage to be less than 10000. So you take the antiderivative (50t
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 requi
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Going through the math subjects he learned, I noticed that the process pretty mu
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I have probably learned at least as much history from video games as I did in primary and secondary school, and I've definitely learned more geography.
Geography? Shadow President taught me the location of just about every country. It also included the CIA fact files for all of them, giving huge amounts of info about their economies, demographics, etc.
History? Medieval: Total War taught me at least as much
Disappointed in the attitude.... (Score:2, Insightful)
toward the medium of games as an educational tool. I'm in the field, and many people who are taken seriously talk about games used properly as a tool by educators and caregivers. This is a relatively new medium that needs to be researched and experimented with so we can establish how it is most effective for different subjects and in different situations.
Here are some of the challenges in this field as I see it:
- Most educational games are made in silos. Games made by publishers are mostly reused engines or
Education or Entertainment: Transfer to Science? (Score:2, Interesting)
Game plan (Score:2)
duhhh (Score:1)
Text based games... (Score:1)
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 :^)