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Video Games Assigned as Homework
joestump98 writes "I wish that my teacher had assigned video games as homework. Videogame makers are working on making educational games that are playable. The criteria for a good game, not surpising, kids say is an interesting storyline and unique characters."
Does this mean you could get away with playing Medal of Honour: Allied Assault or Return to Castle Wolfenstein and claiming it is for a History assignment? Or The Sims for Social Studies?
I've got a fever and the only prescription is more COBOL.
I had a history professor who gave the class the asignment of watching "Monty Pyhton and the life of brian", "and the holy grail", and "Bill and Ted's Exelent Adventure" on three seperate weekends. Coolest professor EVER. Back on track, sounds like a good idea, but i dont think that UT2003 could easily be turned into a math game... Maybe a history campaign for war3, but i dont think joan of arc had to fight zombies. AOE2, on the other hand, did help with my history class, both with its acurate sets of events and database of what REALY happened (I doubt that machine gun cars destroyed that much of the japenese fleet...)
When life gives you crap, Make Crapade.
Sluggy Freelance.
It boggles the mind. They're not even pretending to educate any more. It's right out in the open.
I'm sure we all recognize the kind of student this will attract: Those unbathed, ill-groomed term-room troglodytes we knew in college, who gave out the terminal room phone number as their own and slowly, lumpishly flunked out.
Some of them stayed on anyway, parasitizing an institution that was no longer willing to tolerate their presence.
Now I guess we won't be flunking them out any more, we'll be giving them A's in "Self-Justification of Incompetence", "Advanced Parasitism", and "Stinking Like a Corpse". I can see it now -- UC Irvine will attract every drug-addled adolescent imbecile in the United States to this "program". Academic standards, already lowerd beyond all human tolerance, will sink beyond all nadirs previously imagined.
They're trying to produce a generation of young Americans so dismally uneducated that they'll fall for any idiotic junk-science and pseudo-philosophy that comes down the pike. A nation of perfect suckers to do as their told, a nation of drones incapable of thinking critically. The "recycling" industry will take off like a rocket (I'll be investing tomorrow, believe me) because these sad excuses for "college graduates" will be incapable of finding out where the "recycling" trucks actually go with the trash that the suckers have carefully sorted through (like bag ladies in their own homes, or slaves assigned as punishment to the garbage heap). Where do those trucks go, you ask? The dump, same as the other trucks. It's just obedience-training. The liberals always do what they're told, because they haven't the imagination or strength of will to create their own freedom.
I'm sorry if I'm ranting here, but I'm watching my nation get flushed down the toilet at the taxpayer's expense, and it's a bit hard to take.
-- Reality checks don't bounce.
What better way to turn kids away from videogames than by tainting the existence of their favorite console with edge-oo-kayshonal "games"? ;)
People will pass up steak once a week, for crap every day.
Medieval: Total War
My sister will soon be a history teacher in rural Illinois. She is a gamer, and would gladly assign the right game as homework. There are equal access issues to consider, however. If the school doesn't have a nice big computer lab, you've just assigned homework that only the relatively rich kids can do.
The epitome of the 'educational game' and I have to be honest, I learnt nothing from it...Maybe pattern recognition...Play it long enough, and you can remember the questions. I can't remember any of the facts, and even if I did, it would be that sort of trivial pursuit type of knowledge, not the actually useful underlying concepts.
The only thing that could possibly be gained is to generate some sort of interest in geography in the player...and to encourage them to read some actual books about it. Failed for me, but that's about the only area I can see this being useful.
I start back at Uni tomorrow, one of the first semester projects is to write a game with DirectX, so I guess games will be homework for me too.
...this actually looks like a very useful tool. Originally, I was going to write it off as another feel-good kowtowing of the modern world to kids' micro-second attention span, but the article actually makes it sound truly useful, especially the parts where they find it helps Mom and Dad who don't speak English as well as they would like.
I'd even go so far as to say that it can replace a major chunk of "homework" for these kids. Even better, it seems to eat up time normally occupied by traditional video gameplay, which is basically useless (other than purely mindless entertainment). All-in-all, sounds like a good thing.
My sole complaint here is this: the more we try to package learning as entertainment, the less we seem to emphasize that learning for its own sake is fun and interesting. And we also seem to be reinforcing the concept that it has to be FUN in order to be worth doing. Sadly, the world doesn't opperate this way, and I think we're doing a great disservice to kids if we get them thinking that learning has to be somehow immediately entertaining.
I realize this is for younger kids, where we don't have this problem so much, but I want to make sure that at some point, we start reinforcing the notion that learning for knowledge (and problem solving) are their own rewards, and don't have to be wrapped up in some entertainment package to be worth doing.
-Erik
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
"Kids say the key to good software is a compelling story and interesting characters.."
I thought the criteria for a good game was fun gameplay. Storyline and Character Development have their places in game making, but shouldn't be of primary concern unless the game is story-centric. A great storyline is not going to save a game if its not fun. A great game can still be fun with a craptastic or non-existent storyline (Tetris).
If you want great graphics, watch a movie or animation. If you want a great story, read a book. If you want to have fun, play a game. Chris Crawford (Atari and GDC founder), one of the original game developers, discussed this several times with me. I now keep that in mind every time I consider adding a new feature to one of my games. I've never heard of players refusing to play a fun game because the story sucks; so who cares if my game worlds and characters aren't comprable to Fiction writers?
Problem 1:
Load Quake3. Examine some of the textures along the walls. Point out whether or not maps in dm1 use:
- Texture Maps
- Detail Maps
- Bump Maps
- Specular Lighting.
In the case of all four present, determine the formula for determining a pixel color with light magnitudeProblem 2
Load Warcraft 3. Notice the design of some of the landscape. What would be the most effective use of storage for generating map material (e.g the landscape). Exclude objects such as trees since they are objects within the level. Explain why in your reasoning.
- BSP
- Height map.
- Triangluar Mesh.
- Quad Mesh
Some of the high hills in War3 look "boxy", meaning that there aren't enough polygons within the hill. We wish to implement a grid system that also stores a third point between grid points. This point in space will be the basis for creating Bezier curves.Write a program that takes a 100x100 array of height points, and a 100x100 grid of bezier height points, and write a program that creates a 200x200 array of height points. Remember to generate ALL height values.
Part 2: Try tesselating further into a 400x400 array.
Part 3: Render this into the API of your choice (OpenGL, Direct3d). Create a program that tesselates the grid runtime based on the distance to each key point on the grid. Derive your own reasonable equations to determine this.
Extra Credit: You'll notice some "popping" as new vertices are generated. This is because as new vertices are created between height points, the old ones are shifted over. Write a routine based on the previous problem that forms new vertices along the old position, and then morphs to the new position.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
I think games that are games first and educational second would do a better job at teaching. For instance, what if in order to level a cleric in Everquest you had to pass a real medical test (anatomy, biology, whatever). The Sims would also be well suited for this. Maybe harness some of all that wasted energy and put it into something useful.
Back in my day, we didn't need any of this "realism" Sims crap. We had games like Leisure Suit Larry to teach us social interaction skills.
Boy didn't it hurt when you tried out the ol' "Kiss" command on a random girl in the schoolyard (:
Ladies, form queue here -->
Cool. And my teacher(s) did assign games as school work. Oregon Trail was the main one. Got that one in US history class in like the 5th grade. (This was New Mexico, so take that for what it's worth. Not exacly the best trak record for edukashun in NM)
:)
The best thing about Oregon Trail from a teacher's viewpoint is it taught us basically without supervision, we learned to work as a team (had to double-up on the machines), taught us what it was like for them back then, and made me a deadly shot when we needed venison.
Were they as good as the games people have today to play? Yes, IMO, because it was new and exciting, and all the ideas weren't already out there and repeated 50 times.
Sent from your iPad.
I wrote my third year critical studies paper on the semiology of early arcade games (especially Missile Command and Space Invaders IIRC). My second year cinema studies paper was on the sound design on Tron.
:)
Benefits of being an arts graduate
Yes, and I know a doctor that learned his trade by playing Operation.
Be afraid.
Well, no.. the post saying that he was found at his home in Maine is a discrepency. I have been watching the news channels and the news web pages, and internet sites about Stephen King, and have been unable to verify your post in any way shape or form. This should be bigger news, if it's true.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
this is serious evidence of the saturation of computers in society. It helps u bridge the gap between now and the science fiction novels.
I've always thought (well before i knew how to program) that good video games were true pieces of art, to be appreciated with much respect. For those that still don't play them: as much respect as a painting. I'm sure that because u're reading this here on slashdot, you've played a video game before, the odds that u have are far higher if u were a kid in the last 20 yers. But, notice, that there are lots of people that choose (for whatever reason) just not to have technology like this in their lives. This tends to cause a lot of tension between them and their children. I think its interesting how some people are just never going to interact with tech, no matter how much its at their fingertips.
-- -- --
Help my mini cause: My journal
Can't someone remove the link on the above post?
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Text adventures naturally teach typing - I think thats pretty much how I got fast at it.
And then there was always oregon trail - quite a fun game, I think. That taught a lot about...the Oregon Trail - the wildlife, what had to happen, etc.
I don't think that as many people would know how a rail-gun works without FPS (although I'm not sure most people know what they actually look like).
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
SSIA
_Europa Universalis 2_ would probably be better, if slower, for European history.
/really/ old empire-management games like "Hammurabi" (which was all about budgeting), "Lemonade Stand" and so forth might be better.
/well-written/ (that is, not "guess the verb" or "try everything because we left you no clues so you're just supposed to do things completely randomly") text adventures, in general, might be helpful for reading comprehension and problem solving.
But "Balance of Power", the
And
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Europa Universalis is definitely better by far, in this regard. It focusses totally on the strategic side, which is does better than Medieval. It has more of the history, more of the cunning planning, more of the diplomacy than does Medieval.
Of course, it doesn't have the epic battles of Medieval, with thousands of warriors ready to obey your commands (or not), which is what makes M:TW great.
Europa Universalis II and Medieval: Total War. Two fantastic games.
On a related note (moderation note: of recreational activities not usually tied with education, but, nonetheless, contributing to it), a fundamental rule for speaking well in English, that being to never end a sentance with a preposition, I learned from, and continually refer back to, Beavis and Butthead Do America.
...is neither.
I saw something on TV where they showcased this brainwave device. You put a 1 pound helmet on your head, and play games. Each game has a certain task you need to accomplish, and you can accomplish it faster simply by concentrating. The more you concentrate, for example, the faster a character on a bicycle will cross a finish line. They think this type of technology may help kids with ads/adhd (attention deficeit syndrome and attention deficeit hyperactive disorder). No more ritalin for me, just pure video games.
The criteria for a good game, not surpising, kids say is an interesting storyline and unique characters.
What BS.. one of the most popular games at the moment is Dance Dance Revolution which has no storyline, and the characters are overdone anime types who are there for no reason at all.
A lot of kids are getting fit from playing Dance Dance Revolution, and even a school in Los Angeles bought a DDR machine for Phys Ed class.
Okay, it's not educational, but it's in a school, and the kids love it.
Games do not necessarily need storylines (see almost any multiplayer game) to keep interest. They just need to be addictive. For example, Tetris, DDR, Tetrinet, SimCity.
Talking of which.. anyone remember Sierra's 'Castle of Doctor Brain'? Great educational game, and I even played it a few months ago to bring back the memories!
mogorific carpentry experiments
Queue RIAA...
"...while the rest of us just loaded up on ammo and went bear and squirrel hunting for 45 minutes."
shhh. Of course that's what I did. Never know when that old teacher might be watching.
Sent from your iPad.
The criteria for a good game, not surpising, kids say is an interesting storyline and unique characters.
What?!? I thought it was l33t gr4ph1X that you can turn off to get 120fps. And railgun jumping.
Kids these days.
Erik
Uh? Sierra? Thanks to Ultima V I learned my first two words of english: "Name" and "Job".
No sig
2) Doing a science fair project back in middle school on video games and hand-eye coordination. The project won first place and went to county, where it won second place.
I'm all for more gaming in the classroom, as games can teach basic skills like critical thinking and logic.
What a poor proposition in general. Sure, players do "learn" while playing, in terms of improving their game-playing skills. They also remember details reinforced through multiple plays. However, video games present an environment too distracting for educational purposes. The already overstimulated kids would be receiving multiple aural and visual inputs from the game, applying some cognitive decision-making, then producing outputs on the game controller. Since this would ostensibly be done in a game-playing environment, there would probably be other distractions as well. Human Factors research shows that cognitive performance decreases rapidly with the number of inputs, the number of input modalities (aural/visual/etc...), and the complexity of the outputs. In short, you can not expect to really learn while playing a video game.
I agree with a previous poster that video games should only be assigned as homework for courses in Computer Graphics.
The quality of education in this country has become abyssmal. People 10 years younger than I have to reach for a calculator to multiply two two-digit numbers or to compute a 20% tip (double the bill, move the decimal one tick to the left). The average incoming freshman at my uni had a high school GPA of 3.7 or higher, but the research papers written by them--even as sophomores and juniors--would have earned me a "C" back in 6th grade. Have any of you "older" (30-40 y.o.) readers seen a contemporary textbook? They resemble USA Today with slick, meaningless graphics, horribly slanted and inaccurate "facts", and so little depth. Kids today are already being crippled by their shoddy education. Don't cripple them by expecting them to learn from video games.
"I think all foreigners should stop interfering in the internal affairs of Iraq"
-- Paul Wolfowitz, 7/21/2003
"And, if you have any questions at all after you leave here, just ask your kids," said consultant Adelma Stanford. "They know these things inside out!"
Tech Support = Kids.
Assignment monitor = Kids.
No forging notes from parents to teachers, it will be the other way around;
"Dear Mr(s)Horshack,
Due to budget cutbacks, we are unable to provide Horshack with his latest "chapter" in social studies.
We would appreciate it if you could purchase "Frag'em to Hell" so he may continue this valuable portion of his education.
Thank You,
signed, Horshack's Teacher"
I agree with this wholeheartedly. Unless the kids have to bring in their high score from a certain "Math Mission" in order to demonstrate that they understand the material, the teacher is left without an indication that the student is having difficulty until the student does poorly on a test. Homework is supposed to help the teacher identify problem areas before they seriously affect the student's progress. My neighbour's son has Reader Rabbit on his computer and if there were some real penalty to getting wrong answers, I'd think it was a great way to teach Math and English. But getting wrong answers only reduces your score. So the little boy picks up as many wrong answers as he wants. He doesn't really care what his score is. He just wants to get to the end of the level. Hopefully the software this school is using puts a little more pressure on the student to improve, or else the game is not demanding that the students learn. It is using learning as an incidental occurence to the fun the students are having.
Virtue finds and chooses the mean.
Aristotle, Ethica Nichomachea
So does this mean that the inner city kids have to play GTA3 for "homework"? Possibly for their preparation for the real world classes?
Economics 101:
Now notice, that when you crack a brotha' in the head with a bat, he drops his money. Now, other people will rush up to see what's up to see what's goin' down, and then you can clock all of those suckas, too.
Law 101:
When you have to steal a cop car, keep in mind that the doors are all locked. So, try to open the passenger side. When the punk ass bitch gets out to try to git ya', he unlocks all of his doors! So then slide in the passenger side, and take off while that fool is still runnin' around to the other side of the car!
Sociology 101:
Be careful when you're in a gang controlled 'hood. Taking one connected guy's car id gonna make all of his brotha's try to gat yo ass.
Foreign language:
After you piss off the Italians, NEVER go back into their neighborhood. They be gunnin' for ya with sawed-offs that can take out ANY vehice.
Driver's Ed:
Do your best to get a tank. Nobody casn stop yo ass in a tank. Those motherfucka's be solid!
I look after the IT for a school, and spend most lunchtimes in the library helping the kids with their homework and the computers. The Headteacher isn't mean't to be best pleased with the fact that the kids are always using the computers to play one or two of the fairly mind-numbing puzzle games on there instead of doing "research".
Once I've actually got their network sorted out, I plan on writing a 2D platform game where they earn time in the game by solving Math problems, and where the problems that require more thought are rewarded with more time (so, for example, solving a few simple multiplication/division sums might get them thirty seconds, whereas solving a trig problem might get them five minutes). The whole thing will be completely voluntary, the prospect of shooting bunnies will hopefully be enough to spare them on a little, and they'll be spending their time doing something a little more worthwhile than clicking on pretty pictures (which seems to be the theme of a lot of so called "educational" proprietary software out there right now).
The only problem is that unless they find someone else to do the library shifts every lunchtime then I'll have probably moved on to another job before I've had chance to sort their IT out and write the game. But then my attempts to get this through to management will probably only surface when they're asking why I left...
--
Andrew
I don't mean to flame the educational system, but mod me down for it cause i believe what i write.
The entire educational system is in the crapper as far as i'm concerned. The larger problem is that we have teachers that don't give a darn about teaching and students who would rather be doing something else. Albiet that the latter has almost always been true, i mean, when did a kid *want* to go to school? I know many who do and the only reason is that from birth their parents have told them that to get somewhere in this world, they must go to school. Teachers, on the other hand, get paid less and less. That is the crux of the problem. I don't know many teachers who wouldn't bail for another job. The third issue is the idea in the American psychology that the school should teach everything from math to table manners to ethics (in other words: the school should be parenting). The fourth issue is our governments desire to fund murderous foreign goverments (read: Israel and a hundred others) with billions of dollars that could be going to our schools. All of this thrown together and we end up with teachers experimenting with tomorrows youth by playing video games. Did the generations of the 18 and 19 hundreds that got the ball rolling to have the technology we have today rely on a playstation? No, they relied on a pencil and a stack of paper. That is the only way to learn basic skills. That is way it should be. No video games in this household.
I quite often get video games for homework. We try to explore the narrative possibilities of video games. So for that we analyse games. Quite boring often when you are forced to play a game and get stuck in you're homework because you're not able to kill that one big mutant whose in your way. Well anyway videogames are another medium to tell something to another. FYI The study I'm occupied with is this one:
http://dvtg.hku.nl
I personally learnt much as a child by playing Carmen Sandiego games. How many seven-year-olds do you know that know where Sofia is (I'm in Australia, so nobody here has any reason to know or care)? It's probably useless knowledge, but at least I learnt a s#!tload.
OLPC Australia
School are perpetually complaining about a lack of funds for computers. In a way the PS1 is a really cheap computer that the schools can afford to buy in quantity and loan to kids. What does a PS1 go for these day $50? Need a monitor but most families have a TV. If a school buys enough of them I'm sure the price would go down. Media... CD based. School buys a general license on a piece of software/buys a package to author their own and prints a hundred copies using an off the shelf CD burner. Add one of those chips to allow any CD to be used and you have a really cheap computer solution for students. Granted the input (gamepad) is a bit limiting, but I imagine a keyboard already exists or could be built if there was sufficient demand. Alternatively, could one just come up with some sort of converter for a PS2 input? Probably not.
Pretty clever really. Thinking back, I wrote all my high school essays on an Atari with 512k and a decent word processor, I think the whole thing may have booted/run software off a 3.5" floppy and an internal ROM. Didn't have a spell checker or anything but considering I was writing for highschool I think spell checkers may have been a bad idea at the time.
As far as the 'edutainment' gripe is concerned, how about having a seemingly meaningless code output at the end - similar to the old NES games continuation codes. Student writes it down and gives it to teacher, teacher uses conversion program to find out that the student has missed 65% of the questions, mostly the hard ones.
What would be really, really cool is if there could be a way of hacking together a cheap solution for the output problem. Student has CD with Linux port - exists for PS1 if I recall - some mini gui and a small office solution. Student writes essay. Are they SOL if they want to say print/email the text to teacher? Is there an obvious output solution I'm unaware of? I can think of that wouldn't at least triple the cost of the system.
Do you know the meaning of the word study? You seem to be using it in the improper way when referring to young kids, or even high school kids. When a parent tells a child to "go study history", it means to read the history book, or play the flashcards, now the videogames. It DOES NOT mean go out and become a freakin' historian!
Ok, class...tonight you have to go home and really kill that big demon in Resident Evil.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
What has Square (And almost every other producer of Not-Roleplaying Games) done all these years
They published Tobal and Ehrgeiz, two 3D fighting games with 60fps graphics (impressive on PS1) and the freedom of motion of a wrestling game (up moves away from screen, down moves toward screen).
Shooting someone in Quake 3 is really no different than shooting someone in Wolfenstein 3-D
Wolf3d, with sideways movement buttons overlayed with its turning buttons, didn't stress moving sideways to avoid fire. Wolf3d, with its single-plane level design, didn't stress taking strategic positions. Wolf3d, with its hundreds of drones and then a tank game design, didn't stress AI. Heck, Wolf3d didn't even have a deathmatch, and Quake III is ALL deathmatch.
Combine it all. Give me a world where I can command a fleet from my chair, or go out with a rifle and frag enemies of the Imperium.
The America's Army series does this. There's an RTS version and an FPS version.
Will I retire or break 10K?
after playing Kingdom Hearts yesterday
Unfortunately, I won't be able to enjoy Kingdom Hearts because 1. the PS2 is still too expensive, and 2. I'm boycotting the instigators of the Bono Act.
Will I retire or break 10K?
My sole complaint here is this: the more we try to package learning as entertainment, the less we seem to emphasize that learning for its own sake is fun and interesting. And we also seem to be reinforcing the concept that it has to be FUN in order to be worth doing. Sadly, the world doesn't opperate this way, and I think we're doing a great disservice to kids if we get them thinking that learning has to be somehow immediately entertaining.
I don't really agree that it's a disservice to kids to connect learning to immediate entertainment. On the contrary, I think this is a useful thing to reinforce, as it makes learning a pleasurable activity.
I don't think that kids should expect that Lightspan will necessarily do a game for everything they should learn. However, via concepts such as Mind Maps, immediate entertainment (and the association of it with "all learning") becomes a Good Thing.
I'm kinda surprised that no one has mentioned that yet ...
Just a little plug for FreeCiv
Karma? Karma? I don't need no stinkin' karma.
Its a lovely retort to the huge misconception that all things geeky somehow make you more intelligent (Since they don't make you physcially stronger they must have some value, right?).
Education in North America is at a dismal low. Why is it that every educational contest seems to produce a home-schooled student as the winner? This tells us that a lay-person who actually cares (mom or dad) is capable of producing far better students than our dismal system.
Oddly enough, I learned a lot about WWI history by playing Red Baron. It was a really cool game, and threw in some real history to boot.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
What about Shogun TW? Same company, but original... this one's just a _Lords of the Realm II_ clone.
:)
I already knew about morale, military maneuvers, etc. before playing Shogun, but that was the first game I ever played which really tried to emulate them. Flank attacks out of forests, double envelopments, charging cavalry down a hill, even just psyching out the enemy's conscripts, all worked just like in the history books... That game did a great job.
I know you're not a gamer, but try to hunt down a copy of Shogun. You'll probably like it more than Medieval.
FWIW, I wanted a Shogun sequel in the same time period, but in Europe. Imagine a Gustavus Adolphus campaign like those in Shogun, or the Thirty Years' War fought with a Shogun-like engine, only in Germany...
my nit pick is, "Interesting and original characters and story."
Since when did DDR have a story?
Since when was Marvel Vs Capcom2's characters original?( granted, given that MvC2 is a huge money maker at arcades and home alike, it must be doing something right... )
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
From the article:
"The kids love it. They're interested in it, and if you can get students where they think they're learning and they're playing, it has hit the magic mark," said Joy Davis, assistant principal at Summerour Middle School in Norcross, Georgia.
Freudian slip? Government conspiracy?
You decide.
Your brain is not a computer.
Even though I agree with you on principle, those two examples are pretty useless. Assembling and dissassembling an assault rifle isn't a cerebral process. It is supposed to be committed to muscle memory so that you can do it in the darkness, quickly, and without thinking. Working a clutch and gear shift, same thing.
Bah! Kids these days have it so easy!
Back in the stone ages when I was a kid, the only way we were assigned video games was as a programming assignment for our Assembler class! And not just any old ASM, but it would hours of dealing with that segmented 80n86 crap just to eek out an MS-DOS version of pong!
And it was uphill both ways with holes in our shoes!
healyourchurchwebsite.com - WWJB?
The only "educational" game that I've ever played really, i mean truly, enjoyed, is civilization (I, 2, and III). Why? Because it was not designed to be educational! It was designed to put the player in a fun, challenging, situatation that happened to be educational. The other games mentioned on the site like Carmen Sandiego and Oregon Trail managed to keep my attention for a few hours sure, but I played civilization for days!
I'd be really interested to see an article posted that interviews every single one of the students in that class regarding their opinion of the games. Then see if you still get the impression that these games are still as wondeful as this article says. I mean, all the evidence they present here is an interview with 1 student/family and a bunch of people who are either making or deploying the game.
I don't even want calculaters in the class room until grade 8, much less video games. My kids go to school to LEARN, not to be entertained. I don't want them to be misreable of course, but learning without video eye candy should be stimulating and interesting all on its own. Any teacher that is considering video games as an education aid should stop and reavaluate how they are teaching.
I did try out a couple of "education" games with my kids at home. The kids thought they were ok games, but they didn't stick at them long enough to improve any math or reading skills. I had much better success with flash-cards and reading together. The kids like the one on one time, and the much more flexible and intuitive 'DAD' interface. That's right - I can much more quickly answer the kids questions and adjust to the pace they are learning at than any video game. I can handle changing subjects if something we reads brings up a question about atronomy or history.
So put away the games and spend some time reading with your kids, helping with the home work, doing flash cards (my daughter actually has a favorite question that I have to keep re-insterting into the deck over and over until its last question).
Don't become a parent unless you want to spend a lot of time being a parent. The TV is not a baby-siter, the computer is not a teacher.
Anarchists never rule
"Even better, it seems to eat up time normally occupied by traditional video gameplay, which is basically useless (other than purely mindless entertainment). All-in-all, sounds like a good thing."
Maybe you haven't sat down and observed people who've played a lot of video games vs. people who haven't.
When you're gaming, you're right in the action! You have to keep everything in your mind, solve puzzles, memorize things quickly, watch for key frames to strike on, and more! It brings many skills into play, not the least of which is learning and memorization. You can always spot habitual gamers because they only have to go somewhere once to have memorized the route (this is especially noticable in people who play FPSes competitively enough that a path to a weapon from any point on the map is the difference between winning or losing). They're also quick to pick up on things, like how to operate a particular program (if they're good gamers), because they will explore the interface the way they'd explore a dungeon. Games also introduce new skills in an easy form that people can absorb at their own rate (like the car maintenance sense and knowledge of how upgrades/repairs work in general in Sega GT, or the communication and socialization habits in Animal Crossing).
Gamers of the sort I mention tend to be more alert, have quicker response times, and have an active imagination. Exactly the kind of people I'd like the world to have more of.
(Note: that paragraph is part of an article about the costs of entertainment, comparing music, DVDs, and video games for the gaming section of my website).
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
The other end of the spectrum.
I know you were joking, but I want my Karma, so I'm going to reiterate your post in a serious tone.
Let's set aside for a moment the question of whether these games teach what they're intended to teach and take it as a given that they do. I still have an issue whis this: what the hell is wrong with the time-tested pencil-and-paper homework assignments? The students will tell you that they're boring. Students will find homework boring for one or both of two reasons: either it's too easy or the student isn't interested in learning what's being taught. In the former case, changing the format of the presentation isn't going to help anything. The latter case can be broken down into two subcases: either the material really is trivial, or it's valuable but the student is too indolent to bother learning it. In the former subcase, changing the presentation format still doesn't help. In the latter case, changing the presentation _may_ get the student to learn the material, but this has one nasty side effect: it teaches them absolutely wretched study habits. It tells them that it's okay not to give a damn about learning and that if we want them to learn something that they're entitled to a dumbed down presentation laced with eye candy that costs millions of dollars to put together. And as soon as they don't get that, they'll rebel.
...l33t5p34k as a second language now?
3y3 0wn3rz j00 0r3g0n tr41l!! ph34r my m4d v3n1son hunting sk1llz!
In exactly the same way that you claim a videogame is, by definition a "degenerate imitation" - so is a textbook.
I'm not claiming that there are any videogames that are textbooks. I am claiming that there should be, could be and one day, most probably one day soon, will be.
I find it hard to believe that no-one in this thread has referenced Henry Jenkins and his games to teach project.
Interesting storyline and unique characters?
What we need are UNIQUE STORYLINES and INTERESTING CHARACTERS, not the other way around.
Most characters are either a serious cliche knockoff (Max Payne) or are unique but completely uninteresting and lack personality.
Most storylines are cliche "save the world" rehashing to the extreme. They do need to be interesting, but the first step to making it interesting is to actually try to make it unique in the first place.
And most gamers care more about SOLID and NOT ANNOYING gameplay and control. Counter-Strike's graphics are seriously outdated, it has templated characters, and no storyline, and it has no storyline, but it's popular because of it's rock-solid gameplay.
Rant over.
# Erik
...and America matriculated in the school of the blind...
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Score 3? For what? Being wrong, at length? - smirkleton
A mite offtopic, but food for thought anyway: [cantrip.org]
... is whot bwings os tugevza tsuzay.
about a decade ago, I played sid meier's civilization and colonization a lot... they did not bring me straight A's all by themselves, but while learning, I had the "hey, I heard of that"-effect, and also had a rough idea what combustion, feudalism and unions are, and what happened in America between 1492 and 1776. That was quite helpful, and a lot of fun, because you learned stuff on the move, instead of getting it shoved in.
Karma
I remember my grade school class rooms use to have a full stock of Sierra adventure games. They were perfect because they were educational without education being there actual focus.
It's a shame they stopped making games like the King's Quest/Space Quest series (I mean before they dummed it down and went with the icon interface).
...in an English course at Georgia Tech. The theme of the course was literature and media depicting and relating to war; we of course read things like Crane's The Red Badge of Courage and watched Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket but we also had to play Falcon 4.0 and the Close Combat trilogy.
It was an interesting course, not only in the subject matter but also that it drove home that where literature is classically just the written word, it's important to look at other forms of media when you're trying to get a view of how things are portrayed.
I have friends who were studying Urban Planning who were assigned homework in SimCity -- back in 1993!
IDRTA (I didn't read the article), but for comparative interface studies getting video game assignments can be a good thing. Other posters' bad-mouthing other things like language programs and such are almost right - the computer could be an excellent way to teach/learn many things including languages.
Most things just haven't been done right, though.
Is the point here to educate kids or to sell videogames? Setting aside those rare good games (eg SimCity, The Incredible Machine), most games with pretentions to 'educationalness' are just flash cards dressed up with animation and other distracting excitement. Though I do remember I owned MathBlaster Mystery when young, and it was a pretty good game, not in the cheesy animation way (it ran on our old DOS machine) but it had some pretty good logic-puzzle-ly games which also exercised math skills, one of them was like Mastermind meets multiplication (instead of a row of colored peg, you had to guess some two-digit muliplication problem).
Needed? No. However, creating problems which are similar to ones that the students are interested in can be effective in causing the students to actually REMEMBER the material. Most people don't learn about transformations, beizer curves and texturing techniques for the fun of it (though I'll admit some do), they learn about them because it could apply to what they want to accomplish later. If this is directly demonstrated (direct analogy to modern games that they wish to emulate) they then have a reason to remember it aside from the "we're going to be tested on this" factor.
Now granted, there doesn't have to be serious amounts of actual gameplay, but it would help build enthusiasm for the topic material.
See: "When are we ever going to use this stuff?"
A program should be light and agile, its subroutines connected like a
strings of pearls. The spirit and intent of the program should be retained
throughout. There should be neither too little nor too much, neither needless
loops nor useless variables, neither lack of structure nor overwhelming
rigidity.
A program should follow the 'Law of Least Astonishment'. What is this
law? It is simply that the program should always respond to the user in the
way that astonishes him least.
A program, no matter how complex, should act as a single unit. The
program should be directed by the logic within rather than by outward
appearances.
If the program fails in these requirements, it will be in a state of
disorder and confusion. The only way to correct this is to rewrite the
program.
-- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"
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