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Education Via Video Games
An anonymous reader writes "According to Wired/AP, food stamp recipients will now receive video games instead of brochures and pamphlets, in an effort to educate them on how to get the most benefit. One wonders why someone that can't afford food would have spent money on a computer on which to play these games."
Sounds idealistic? Yes, it does. But lets also not forget that this UN body last year fed more than 100 million people.
Food Force will be free, either as a CD or as a download from the internet. The WFP is also looking at distributing it in schools as an educational tool
http://efil.blogspot.com/
Just give em a copy of the Oregon Trail and teach em how to hunt. This way, they don't need welfare, they're self sufficient, the deer and bear population is controlled, everybody wins. They will learn invaluble lessons, like: You can kill 1000 pounds of elk but only carry twenty back to they wagon. Saved my life many a time, helped me preserve those musket rounds.
You only need to buy a computer once.
Seriously, I could walk down the street to the Goodwill and drop $10 on an old monitor or a PC, but they wouldn't be pretty. For $100 I could buy a decent P-II system used. That's not too bad for something which I can use to help me get a job. Heck, it's less than some unemployed people I have known spent on beer in a month.
Believe it or not, computers don't all cost $4000, have an "Alienware" logo on them and come with artificially intelligent graphics cards from a company called "Skynet".
World Food Programme (WFP) seeks to capitalise on the popularity of video games to educate youngsters (target audience of children aged between eight and 13 years old) about hunger and the work of the aid agency, and not to those who cannot afford food.
a sp:
There could be better ways to do this, since educating using games seems to be a flawed idea.
From http://www.game-research.com/art_myths_of_gaming.
Not long after the birth of computer games the first hopes for the potential of learning through games were expressed. Wouldn't it be great if the enthusiasm exhibited when playing games could be used for good, sound learning? Since then, several commercial games showing various degrees of success have been labelled 'edutainment' - a combination of the two words education and entertainment.
However, neither the education nor the entertainment part has been very successful in these titles- combining the two has turned out to be a tough job. According to the proponents of learning through games the main potential lies in the ability of games to increase motivation through the interactive nature of games, putting the player in control of the learning and the game's options for adjusting the level of difficulty. However, it seems that most edutainment games have problems living up to these reasons for using games in the first place.
In her book Dataspill - Innføring og analyse (translation: Computer games - introduction and analysis) about games Eva Liestøl analyses five different games. She finds that the one game that does not let the player choose his own path through the game world is the edutainment title. She doesn't press the issue but if you look at other edutainment titles, you find the same pattern - educational titles seem to take over the control and narrow down the game universe to make it fit with the intentions of the producer. These intentions are often to convey some specific information about a topic. Closing the game universe and conveying specific information does not fit well with traditional game dynamics, where simple and general rules are the backbone. In stead, educators have to a larger extent turned to the adventure genre, where it is easier to focus on information, but they have found out that even here it is hard to convey the necessary depth of an educational topic.
Furthermore, very few studies have delivered hard evidence that games can be used for learning. Typically the research has been directed at putting learning into games and then assuming that this learning somehow came across to the player. But the ambition should be higher than this. It is not enough to have 'some kind of learning' in games. To truly say that games are great learning tools we must prove - or at least make probable - that games are better than other learning alternatives. And here we are still a long way from the goal - so the dream of games as great educational tools, remains a dream. (- Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen)
I'd change your list to read something like
If you have to live with 8 other people in a two bedroom house to make rent, you're poor.
If your children face the prospect of going to terrible schools, and you don't have any recourse (like even sending them to better schools in the district), you're poor.
If you'll lose your job if your car breaks down because you won't be able to afford to fix it, you're poor.
A crappy Goodwill TV is $15 *at Goodwill*, so you're not going to get much rent money for selling it. And the entertainment / keep kids off the street value a TV provides is so extreme, I don't even consider whether or not you have cable as a reliable indication of poverty anymore (again, at least where I live, in East Oakland)
Finally, if you're poor and trying to make sure your kids won't be poor, buying a PC is not some indication that you're no longer poverty stricken. Hang out at a Goodwill next time some crappy 486 goes on the floor. It's sold in SECONDS.
I'm about 10 degrees to the right of Atilla the Hun, and even to me your post smacks of total cluelessness about the situation that actual poor people are in.
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.