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More Videogames, Fewer Books at Some Schools?
A News.com article highlights a plan that may please word-weary students: more games, fewer books in some educational settings. That's one plan put forth by some educators who feel that current learning plans don't fully engage today's classes. By offering real-world dilemmas in a virtual setting ('discover why fish are dying in a park'), teachers hope that games will turn kids onto the idea of learning, and eventually lead them back to books. The article covers several of the projects geared towards exploring this idea, as well as research on the subject. "A game designer, Salen is working with a group called New Visions for Public Schools to establish a school in New York City for grades 6 through 12 that would integrate video games into the entire curriculum. 'There's a lot of moral panic about addiction to games. There's a negative public perception, and we know we have to deal with that. But teachers have been using games for years and years.'"
This is a brilliant idea. Obviously there are many things to be concerned about... it's not necessarily a good thing to just get games so that the kids will be entertained, but to get them to learn something, to develop thinking skills, and to keep them interested in the subject being taught.
Obviously when talking about games, and school, many of us think of calculator games. For the most part, the use of graphing calculators to play games has just been a way for students to not be bored during class, or for the lonely students to not be bored between class. There are also many calculator games that serve educational purposes in some ways, and they can easily be implemented in the classroom, since the a lot, if not the majority of high school students already own a graphing calculator.
The purpose of going to school isn't necessarily to learn, but also to learn how to learn. And there are many puzzle games that help that cause - they develop the brain in ways that traditional school just can't do. Reading helps the memory, but playing puzzle games help the way the brain actually approaches certain problems and situations.
There is a certain level of interest that is absolutely necessary in order for a student to learn. The difference between the gifted students and the not so gifted students is generally their interest level.
Generally what I saw when I was in high school was that the teachers always fought against the use of graphing calculators (especially playing games on them), but if I ever become a teacher (which I probably won't, and this might be the reason for that), I will utilize the technology available to the greatest extent, and gaming will likely be a part of that.
And... a poll:
Do you think your education would have been better had the teachers utilized games in order to help the students understand?
Yes,
Maybe.
They DID! and that's why I turned out so great!
They DID! and that's why I turned out... the way I am...
No.
A New.com article highlights a plan that may please word-weary students: more games, fewer books in some educational settings.
Look, I learned everything I need to know about the Great Western Expansion by playing Oregon trail. Such as, it is very easy to die of dysentery.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Thats easy, its cos I keep rail gunning them.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
.. by introducing principles in games like ZZT, for instance. ZZT came with ZZT-OOP (ZZT Object Oriented Programming Language) so that you could create your own rooms with puzzles involving monsters that interact with the player and other monsters (or other objects). Each monster could be programmed with its own set of instructions (where it's told to start or react to specific events). ZZT is a great teaching and learning tool. I have 2 decades of programming experience (starting with BASIC on an 8-bit Amstrad), and the stuff I did as a child left the deepest impression (although it was, unfortunately, the BASIC language). So teach them when they're young.
I strenuously object to the hasty, ill-concieved rush to computerize education by turning everything into a video game. Pretty soon, everyone will think science only takes place inside a computer. Let me give an example.
One of my favorite childhood memories was going to the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. Up on the second floor, there was a permanent display of historic scientific apparatus, like a Wimshust Generator about 20 feet in diameter. I went back to visit it about 10 years ago, all those exhibits were gone, replaced with computer kiosks. Really BAD computer kiosks, uninspiring, ill-planned junk that had all the bells and whistles, but little educational content. I thought about the tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on developing and deploying those horrid, amateurish kiosks, and how they replaced a whole museum wing that represented the technological development of America, and I can only consider it the greatest educational tragedy I ever saw. I remember being inspired, as a little child, seeing those monuments to science, but that will never happen again. And it's a damn shame.
If this works these teachers might be out of a job. Hey if your class is learning using some software program why can't you handle 50 students instead of 25?
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
Well kids can't read but at least they know how to kill space mutants.
its very simple.. after teaching the theory, make the last part of a given unit contribute to real world application.
this kind of apprenticeship will require a little bit of checking, but could probably relieve labor costs a bit in the local community.
it will also help break down that wall separating academia from reality by integrating actual "practice" of that theory.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
"Fewer books" is not the right answer. Educational videogames can be a lot of fun--I'm reminded of Rocky's Boots (digital logic for kids) or Fraction Action (Okay, so graphics have improved over the years)--but "Fewer books" is almost always the wrong answer. There are so many incredible books out there--books that are written with beautiful language, books that can be enjoyed and explored.
(On a tangent, schools which assign BAD books to be read are pretty criminal--there's so much good stuff out there the last thing you need to do is assign a book that's going to turn someone off of reading before they've graduated grade school.)
I applaud the use of video games for education--and I have no problem with having video games to play, for children or adults. But how much would we gain by simply having a month each semester, or each year, when all the children at a school were told "No television and no video games." With more books assigned in that period--even if it's a question of asking each student to pick five or ten books out of a hundred choices. Television and video games are more immediately engaging, and maybe you need to starve someone of them for a little while to make them be more willing to try a book. If there's nothing else to do, even the most avid watcher of cartoons might eventually pick up a book and read for a while.
National Endowment for the Arts Report: Reading At Risk
That's the first study that came to mind. Granted, it's not necessarily reflective of the quality of someone's education that they choose to spend their time doing something other than reading--but when reading as a whole declines, there's a whole wonderful part of culture that becomes diminished, in a way, by the shrinking community. Not to mention that the potential readers lose out. Other mediums have good stories too, and ones well worth listening to, and things to learn and to enjoy--but reading is at least as important, and in many ways more so in that it stimulates the imagination.
Also, ask a teacher from inner-city schools thirty years ago for their horror stories... and then ask one from inner-city school teachers today.
This seems like a never ending cycle of catering to attention deficient children. Western culture is so much more media driven, than ever before, that attention spans are dwindling. There is a reason we didn't need jazz up science 100 years ago to get people interested. That is because science is interesting. If we start catering to an inability of focusing and building desires by yourself, we are more hurting the children then helping. They will get to a point where they expect everyone and everything to cater to them, especially if they show a lack of interest about something. It just seems like a bad idea. It almost seems like dropping computers altogether, and getting back to basics in a way that forces them to focus would be of utmost benefit. The only downside is the lack of information sharing that the internet brings, simulation capabilities that computers offer, and disability services that computers give.
je suis parce que j'aime
Like, who Johann Gutenberg was, and why he really needed that letter 'G' because nobody wanted Utenberg Bibles. And how to collect enough mushrooms to travel through time while riding a surfboard.
Karma police, arrest this man. He talks in math. He buzzes like a fridge. He's like a detuned radio.
--"offering real-world dilemmas in a virtual setting ('discover why fish are dying in a park'), teachers hope that games will turn kids onto the idea of learning"
Well when I was in school they at least taught us some Latin, German, maths and skewed history
so I suppose I can stand up and join in on "Don't know much about history, don't know much about the
french I took, but I do know how to open a book"
but what are those kids going to sing?
"Don't know anything about history, never opened as much as one book
but I do know the fish are dying in the park!"
Hmmmmhmmmmm Mother Gaia knows they're dying in the park, hmmmhmm they're
dying in the park.
Each generation they turn out is a lot dumber than the one preceding it.
A New.com article
/me cries.
Have you read my journal today?
...maybe because they don't want to traumatize the poor first-graders who don't have an extensive enough background in Organic Chemistry to properly identify a poison and its andidotes before the fish turn belly-up?
Reading and writing are *so* passe, but if you look at Information Age jobs, these skills are absolutely critical. Beyond jobs, literate citizens are key to a functional democracy. The diminishing of information literacy in America proceeds apace, and our cultural and political life suffers as a result. We expect less and less of ourselves, and we pass that on to the next generation.
Games are great. I grew up playing them, and I still play them. But games aren't a replacement for the tried and true combination of reading, writing, and hard work. Wrapping learning in a sugary coating may make it taste better, but that won't make it nutritional.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
That's the problem with most schools. Not enough reality. Maybe they should try taking the kids to a real lake one day to teach them why the fish are dying, they might learn something important.
Video games do not engender abstract thinking. Video games stimulate the visual center of mind in order to get the attention of kids easily, but IMHO, I don't think that necessarily translates into learning. There's no substitute for a lot of reading and a lot of hard work. There are no shortcuts.
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
Romance Novels->Lost isn't real worrisome to me, and that article appears to talk about romance novels as 'literary reading'. The decline of poetry might be a bummer, but it has been accompanied with the rise of 'rock' music, which is pretty much the same thing as at least low brow poetry. The decline of 'simple minded fun' reading is real without question; the decline of reading for culture seems a little harder to verify.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Four of five of your poll's choices put these teaching games on the map (Yes/Maybe/They DID I+II)
so I suppose you might like to freshen yourself (your bias is showing).
Calling a virtual-model a game only serves to denigrate the whole concept. :p Really, interacting with a model sounds a lot less cool than "playing a game" but it is a much more accurate description. Controlling a simulation in this sense sounds, if done properly, like it could be a very engaging form of learning versus rote memorization of books. Complimenting traditional studies this might actually be able to accomplish it's goal: engaging developing-minds in ways linear text doesn't.
Shh.
If this is successful, could it lead to video games courses in universities? I'd love a diploma in Donkey Kong.
To do something right, you often have to roll up your sleeves and get busy.
I think many educators do not understand that engagement in a game does not mean a child will be learning anything from it. Here's the difference:
The information you gain when playing a game is very fragmented, because you only absorb enough that you need to get you closer to winning. As the parent poster noted, you don't know what dysentery is, you only know that it's bad and it kills your characters.
Teach these kids how to learn, not how to play a game. (Perfect example: MadTV Hooked on Phonics Parody)
I'm currently in highschool and I can tell you games (although we haven't done any in a long while :) are a horrible way to learn. A good teacher can do wonders even with the least motivated of kids.
Yeah. Would you choose a neurosurgeon who pokes around people's brains in his spare time? I wouldn't.
Games are written. Just as books are written. And the writer has his/her own biases.
If you read a book, you can read two books. You can read a dozen books. You can find the biases.
If you play one "educational" video game, you've pretty much played them all. There aren't very many. So you'll be stuck with whatever bias the person who wrote it had.
That's not education. That's programming.
The problem with games as instructional tools is that most instructional objectives don't translate well into the world of gaming.
Sure, you want to teach resource management, the locations of states, or where in the world one can find Waldo, you can turn these things into games.
However, try teaching the periodic table, the works of Shakespeare, calculus, or Dukheim's study of Suicide in a game format.
Sure, you can easily create a game that incorporates something to do with the topic, but is it a game that really teaches what they need to know in an efficient format? No.
It's slightly off-topic, but my question is: Why are all students expected to buy graphing calculators starting in like 7th grade? I'm a teacher at a school where it's MANDATORY for all middle school students to purchase a graphing calculator. The most complex thing these students do with these arcane hunks of plastic is play some sort of tetris game and painstakingly spell out obscene messages to each other. It's been going on for like 15-20 years now and I don't get it. Maybe twice a year someone does the extra credit problems and graphs a couple of parabolas. They're utterly useless for almost everything that school students do. I did quite well on the AP Calc test without ever touching one. Why should every parent toss $100 in the toilet (or send it to Texas, which is worse) on a baffling, never-used brick of never-touched buttons?
Note: I'm not a technophobe. I'm fully in favor of every student having a laptop now or in the near future. But I've been really perplexed by the whole graphing calculator thing for years now. It just seems like a huge waste of money for a tool no one uses. Why not force all students to buy defibrillators and bone saws for health class while we're at it?
Games are a media, like books and film and images, and each media has its strengths. Books are good for teaching because (Besides touching on literacy skills), they can be read over again, at the reader's own pace; films are good for teaching because they compress information relatively densely, and are much better at giving a sense of scale or displaying events than a book (What's better? Telling people about the size of the universe, or showing them Powers of Ten?).
Games are good for helping students understand complex systems by interacting with them. Being able to play with a historically accurate strategic wargame is more interesting, and provides a deeper insight, than just reading what happened during a war. Being able to watch small simulated lifeforms reproduce on a screen is a stunning display of natural selection. There are some subjects which are better explained through a particular media.
I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: "O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous." And God granted it.
How about, petition Microsoft, Yahoo, and AOL to include spelling and grammar checking in their IM programs? Then, chatters will slowly fix errors in their spelling and grammar, becoming excellent writers and excellent readers through exposure to proper spelling and grammar?
It's been a long time.
Then we might actually want to go to school everyday!
Kids today have it easy. Bring back corporal punishment I say. There's too much damned spoon-feeding nowadays. The odd eraser thrown at a random student was a great way to keep us awake. The smacks on the wrist with a ruler let the lefties know their place in society. And of course you learned a lot more when the material was yelled at you than from a damned video game...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I never found school engaging when I was in it. When I was given my NES, I played SMB for many days. It wasn't until I got my hands on Dragon Warrior however that I realized the importance of games. They were teaching me to read (Albeit in the old english style) and because of that I was finally able to catch up with my class, and even surpassed them at points. I wouldn't have reccomended it 10 years ago due to bad translations and such, but now I certainly would.
I am 27, and I have heard alarming news about the decline in the literacy, attention span, civic mindedness, etc, of America students since I was in elementary school.
:)
Don't worry. That argument is so old it was used in ancient Greece by Socrates, et al. The older generation always thinks that society is slipping into a moral/educational/civic decline. Perhaps it has to do with us old farts just simply not understanding the newer generation
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Ok, so a caveat: I was a researcher of educational gaming... but I quit the field when I realized how poorly gaming could translate into the kind of learning that kids need to succeed in the world. Some questions to consider:
How do you transfer game learning to test contexts? After all, standardized tests matter to governments. If you teach in one context, it is very hard to utilize the skills in a different context. Moving from screen to paper is, for instance, tough.
A game requires simplification. What happens to history when it's all burnt into a 15 minute game? While simulations can be helpful for testing dangerous or invisible things (such as genetic combinations, hazmat training or airplane simulation), they're generally poor at proving background.
Some educational games are built on a research base. For instance, there is a math game that will build upon a learner's growing base of rote-memorized solutions (automaticity; measured in Sec. to answer) by scaffoling new and old together. These games are few and far between. MOST games are simply multiple choice, or weird adaptations of Doom-for-math-learning.
End point:
Does what we can teach through gaming actually matter in real life? What does, and what doesn't? Therefore: what should we continue to teach with books and discussion, and where can gaming be used positively?
Anyhow, that's some general food for thought... without raising issues of gender bias, stereotype threat, etc etc.
Yeah. Would you choose a neurosurgeon who pokes around people's brains in his spare time? I wouldn't.
Kids learn better by engaging them. Kids are engaged by video games. Thus, kids will learn better from video games,
I know I look forward to learning about Greek Mythology from God of War II.
Seriously though. I'm all for engaging kids. The better job you do, the more likely they are to engage themselves and learn on their own. You know one thing that doesn't engage students? Spending all your time teaching to a standardized test. Why go outside and show kids plants, plant a little garden, let them learn from that. Instead, we can just show them a picture in a book and force them to memorize what geotropism.
Let's not forget that as you dumb down the curriculum and spend more time going over and over the same stuff so that all the kids can memorize it for the test, the kids who are smart (and already got it) and even those who are just normal (and got it 6 times ago, unlike the kid in the back who eats paste) are getting bored and tuning out. You may get them back, or they may learn that "school is boring".
I like the idea behind "No child left behind." I think holding teachers accountable, as radical as that may be, is a good thing. It's just too bad that everyone decided to implement it by teaching to the test all the time. I remember when I was in elementary and middle school. They would teach us stuff, we'd learn, things were good. There was usually at least something interesting. Until that time of year. Yes, time for the CAT (California Achievement Tests) or whatever other yearly test we used. For the month before the test they did nothing but teach to the test, which was boring to no end since it was always below the stuff we were currently learning.
More hands on lessons. That's what schools need. Hands on stuff, experiments, field trips.
How many people here think they would even remember what the Oregon Trail was if it wasn't for the game? How many people here remember all the historical stuff from the game, and how many just remember seeing how fast you could get your friends killed or trying to get a tombstone so you could write something on it.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
I just have to wonder when are these children who have been thought by playing computer games to study with a book? When are they going to learn how one should do his/her reading and writing exercises? I mean in elementary school you learn to concentrate on a book and on how to write essays, and when you go to high school you will start really using what you have learned previously. To go more to a point, how can kids thought by computer games and etc.. in later life, in collage or university concentrate on to hard-to-read-hard-to-understand books that they just have to read and understand to achieve anything in their studies?!
I myself am very much into using computers and software to help and automate task, but when we talk about basic education, I have to say that I'm inclined to go back to basics: books, pens and lots of repetition to get the education in the bottom layers of brain.
And before somebody says that it's boring and no fun when you have no audio visual and interactive material then I have to say that childrens work is to go to school and learn. Yes the kids may complain, but if and when they do, they should be told about the realities of life: "Daddys and mommies work brings the bacon home and it takes all day with no play, so if you don't want to go to school, the other alternative is real work" or just tell them that "If you don't work hard at school, if you don't learn, you will not know anything and you will not get anything done, and when you are adult you will be poor and living in bad neigbourhood and the best place you can get work is local Wal-mart or McDonalds bathroom cleaner, you want that?". Of course if this doesn't work, you can always threaten them: good grades = you get something you want, bad grades = nothing to wait for.
Survey research tool for commercial and scientific use
The program runs 5 1-hour sessions per week over 3 nights, and recruits upwards of 30 tutors and 60-100 kids (I'm not sure of numbers, some kids are repeats/siblings, some tutors take 2-3 kids or work multiple nights). Our program director is always desperate for more room and more tutors because half the school district comes in for tutoring. That's not a good sign.
Last year when I was working with two boys, 3rd and 4th grade, I was appalled by how low their reading level was. I can't compare them to myself at that age because I was a voracious reader, but even remembering the other kids in my class, I think the boys I was tutoring were at least a grade level behind. And all they wanted to read was Captain Underpants. > For the uninitiated, those books are full of (purposeful) spelling and grammar errors... fun to read, but not the best for teaching reading.
In my school system, it is mandated by the government to have 110 hours of instruction per course per year. This makes the fix quite obvious - provide 110 hours of instructional material per course per year. As expected, following what's written down is the one of the best methods.
Some people once played with a "toy" where you have to put shapes into holes - learning that only the square shape fits in the square hole, the circle into the circle and the triangle into the triangle. Time spent attempting to put a shape in the wrong hole isn't that much different than giving incorrect training to students (e.g. addition drills when the student mastered long division.)
On the main topic of games, I have "played" them at school. I would label these softwares as substandard due to their rigidity, railroading, or other factors, and it would take a significant update in software technology level to change my opinion. For example, one math software package had easily guessable answers for a multiple choice - a correct answer, and two wrong answers generated by changing exactly one aspect of the correct one (but differed between the two.)
I seem pessamistic when it comes to these efforts in encouraging education, as if it were beating the ground five feet away from the bush. However, instruction is the only way to get education to work, and it isn't done by a fire and forget method.
Who cares about video games, get FIRST Robotics at a school and any student who participates should stand out in any physics/engineering class and understand why it's all useful. I've been in FIRST for 4 years and I'm breezing through my AP physics class. Just having a general idea of the concepts being taught lets me do better then those who are considered the brightest students in the school.
As long as they don't try to remove reading from the curriculum, I think this is a great idea. Kids need to be required to read, and as they move up in grade levels, to read faster while retaining the same amount of content.
+++ATH0
I am interested in adapting your lesson plan to fit my curriculum. I am working on a few test questions on which to grade students. Please comment:
1) Why did the fish die?
a) Because the teacher poisoned them.
2) Write at least two sentences explaining thoughts about your answer to the first question.
Paul Grosfield - the quicker picker upper.
I don't about you, but I work hard for a living. I can come home and turn on Fox News and get the important issues of the day summarised for me. That's what the information age is all about.
That's where you're wrong. I don't work hard for a living. I'm independently wealthy. That's why I think Americans should pay attention to what's going on around them. I'm just a rich, arrogant snob who reads (and not just when it is forced upon me). I don't believe everything I see on TV, either. One of these days I just know I'll get strung up by an angry mob.
Now, could someone please pass the Grey Poupon?
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
When I was a kid I was totally hooked on video games, I'm talking about 40 hours a week of Madden 2000 and Final Fantasy. We used some games in the curriculum at my grade school, however we tended to blow the games off- they were forcing us to learn, we didn't care, they weren't fun. I preferred textbook learning to video game learning by far, but then again I am looking to go to graduate school now, so I don't know how representative I am of the broader population.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The only supplies you need are quinine and guns. Broken leg? Dope them up, and let endorphins heal them. Ditto for everything else. And morale is impressive too.
Guns are for the food. Turns out no one thought to program gout in, so there's no problem with venison for every meal.
I see your informative link, and raise you a pithy comment.
Take them on monthly field trips to the places where uneducated people wind up. Slums. Trailer parks. Skid rows. Jails. The Post Office. Episodes of "Dirty Jobs".
...remind me to move more investments overseas.
discover why fish are dying in a park
I think it's probably because they don't get enough water while swinging on the swing-set and riding on the merry-go-round. Frisby also wears them down.
Table-ized A.I.
> Does what we can teach through gaming actually matter in real life? What does, and what doesn't? Therefore: what should we continue to teach with books and discussion, and where can gaming be used positively?
There are only a handful of games I believe I learned anything from:
1) Number Munchers -- You have to solve simple math problems quickly during the game (e.g. "eat all multiples of 5"). I got plenty of practice figuring out multiples and such while playing that game as a kid.
2) Binary Blitz -- You have to convert numbers from 1-255 to binary within a time limit (I suddenly wonder if never asking me to convert 0 to binary should be considered a bug?). It helped me with my assembly language class because our teacher liked giving out binary (and hex) math problems. And I don't mean a few, I mean whole pages of them like they used to give out in 1st grade when you were learning addition. Did I mention that all the tests had time limits? It's very helpful to see 254 and be able to convert it to 1111 1110b when you have to do crap like that on the final.
3) Katakana & Hiragana. I don't know if it qualifies as a "game" per se, but it makes practicing them a lot easier.
Most anything else, I learned incidentally. For example, I had no memory of being able to talk to anyone in Oregon Trail like another poster mentioned. And I've forgotten pretty much anything I learned from Carmen Sandiego. I guess I might have learned a few odd historical names from other games (e.g. Liu Bei has shown up in quite a few), but I've probably learned more from watching anime than I ever did by playing games for that sort of thing *shrug*
If the game can teach people the difference between "everyday" and "every day", I'm all for it!
For posterity:
"everyday" = ordinary, commonplace.
"every day" = daily, once per day.
-- I prefer the term "karma escort."
Hmmm, dead fish in the pond, Eiffle tower stolen, Pyramids missing.
Only one person in the entire world would have the audacity to pull off this crime.
> It seems to me that too many young people today want everything to be fun and easy. ... back when I was young, we wanted everything to be boring and difficult!
My son will come busting into the house, exstatic, overjoyed about his new found knowledge of our asian human brothers, shouting about his opium cargo and how he just got 6 new canons. "7 Ships are attacking Taipan! You orders: fight!"
A small percentage of that time actually taught me useful skills. Included among them were. . .
Patterns of competitive social behavior among friends. (When you are doing really well in a game, other people will sometimes try to derail you by projecting "Fail" at you in a variety of ways. You learn how to recognize this and how to counter it, and what kinds of behaviors friends can take on. These lessons, however, can be learned in any environment. Kids will make up games with sticks and rocks in order to learn this stuff. Computers just happened to be the dominant medium at the time.)
Resource management and energy investment strategies Playing the ancient 14kb pre-cursor to MOO2, "Conquest" was a very instructive game. I was able to use the basic patterns I learned in such games later on in the business world to good effect. The computer was able to teach such lessons quickly.
The limits of artificial intelligence V.S. the power of human creativity All games are stupid. They cannot adapt and so all scenarios must fall within pre-conceived realities. Not being able to pick up objects in an adventure game and use them as they could be used in the real world beyond what the programmer allowed for, was highly irritating. But I don't think this lesson is worth much. If there were no computers in the first place, it wouldn't even be an issue.
Technology. I built my own AppleII, all in order to play video games. I learned about computer programming in order to make my own games. As a result, I am comfortable in a world run by computers. I can build and fix and tinker, usually with good effect, where others are left confused in the power of technology they cannot understand.
Hacking systems Some of the very best lessons I learned from the old computer games came from cracking them, pirating them, making friend networks where we would trek around the city with blank 5.25" floppies in our back packs. From this, I discovered an all-powerful pattern which could be mapped on to nearly all areas of existence; that the limiting systems which surround us every day, systems both technological and social, can without exception be altered to fit one's vision of how reality ought to run. You do not have to conform! These skills have served me very well in life, and I learned these lessons by following my love of video games.
I differentiate between computer games and the console games. Console games seem to offer far fewer opportunities at learning anything beyond the simple lessons I outlined above, about competition and simple resource management, etc. For the most part, the people I see playing such games often look like brain-dead zombie people sitting on couches twiddling thumbs ad nauseum. I certainly blew lots of hours with Atari-style joysticks in hand, but it was always done in front of a keyboard, though I have little recollection about anything which happened during those particular hours. Console game systems seem to me more like opiates; yet another layer of limitation and control placed upon humanity. Interestingly, I've never found such game systems to be terribly interesting. Computers have always seemed far more engaging to me.
-FL
We are gutting education to the extent that it won't be verifiable anymore. If you reduce education to a videogame, you can't very well test on it, and you won't have quantifiable data to point to to show that little Johnny is an idiot. They'll dazzle you with buzzwords about emotional intelligence and self-esteem while fighting standardized testing. I don't blame the teachers all that much--they are subject to the demands of parents, and parents have long brought their power as consumers and taxpayers to bear on the school systems. The parents don't want to fault their own little angels because to do so would call their own parenting into question. It isn't even about the kids.
Frankly, we shouldn't even have computers in the classrooms until high school. It should be all books, chalkboards (cheaper than dry-erase boards/markers) and that's it. Kids need to read. For that matter, adults need to read. But will it change? I doubt it. Parents view teachers as their own contracted employees. Even when I was in high school back in the 80s it was changing--one of my best, most challenging teachers was fired becasue parents complained.
ummm...walk into any McDonalds or Reject Shop, buy something for $2 even, hand over a $10 note and watch how the staff cannot actually work out the change without the till informing them! I'm not talking about the staff quickly confirming their calculation with the till, what I am talking about is the inevitable look of confusion on their face as they look at the till several times while fishing out the $8 change!
The OpenCroquet project is working on to provide the easy ability for a Virtual 3D Educational Metaverse http://www.opencroquet.org/ About: The Croquet Consortium is a 501c3 not-for-profit corporation dedicated to developing and promoting the widespread adoption of open source, Croquet technologies for research, education and industry.
There was once a system that worked, they changed it, it no longer worked. So you then reverse the change to undo the damage and kill of the people who suggested the change and anyone who in future suggests doing similar changes right?
Offcourse not, that would be sensible, instead you chase the dream, you ask the same people who made the bad changes to come up with yet more changes.
Games in the classroom. Real world problems. Right.
The biggest problem in education right now is the believe that all kids are equal. They are not. Some kids are smart, some are stupid. Some kids like to study, some do not. Some kids are favor the soft subjects, some the hard sciences. Trying to create a one size fits all system is NOT going to work.
In the netherlands there used to be a simple system, you had the LTS/MTS/HTS wich stand for Lower/Middle/Higher Technical School and LEAO/MAVO/HAVO/University were the A stand for administrative. Basically the plumber and the engineer go to the technical schools, the shop assistent and manager go to the administrative school.
ADD and all that crap? Simple go to the T school and 24 hours of shop class a week will take care of it enough that the remaining hours can be spend on theory. Within each school there is still a system of grades so that the brightest students get more theory. A top LTS student was of higher caliber then a top MAVO student. Both got roughly the same level of theory BUT the LTS student did that on top of the practical lessons.
But in the idea that all kids should be molded in to the same standard shape these two system were merged, it had wonderfull results. Drop out rates sored, scores dropped and companies complain that school leavers have no skills. Wonderfull!
EVERYONE in the teaching proffesion itself has warned that this would happen, and now when it is examined why the change happened you get a nasty story off backroom deals and the idea that just a handfull of people decided to experiment with an entire generation of kids.
It don't work, BUT to admit that now would mean that you would have to go against the whole system, any party that suggests going to back to the old system would be forced to say that they got it badly wrong and offcourse that just isn't done.
So we muddle through applying bandaid after bandaid and hope for a miracle.
Might childeren learn from a computer game. Well, early learning is a game so the idea has some appeal BUT real life is NOT a game. So sooner or later kids are going to have to learn an important lesson, that they are now at work and no, there is no recess, no school holidays, that getting suspended means being fired and that basically playtime is over and get your ass to work and nobody gives a shit about your ADD or emotional needs.
I don't think many employers think that this learning experience should come on the workfloor.
One recent example I come across of how badly schools prepare kids for real life is this. A class is 50 minutes yet the schedule is based on a full hour, leaving 10 minutes time between classes, wich are needed to move between classrooms. Sensible, to a point. Shopclass for instance is several hours in the same classroom so the 10 minutes are then for some reason used as a break. This is very nice, and in previous decades was all right, since on the workfloor this is also the custom, every hour there used to be a coffee break. However the laws on the working times have changed with the goverment not laying down the law as hard anymore with the idea that workers and employers could figure it out themselves. Yeah right. If they could there woudn't have been a need for the laws in the first place.
Nowadays typical hours in simple jobs are 2.5 hours of work followed by a break. If you stand on your stripes and demand it. Kids used to a 10 minute break every hour and the light workload of a school shopclass are in for a rude suprise.
Learning in a video game why the fish in the park are dying? Yeah, there is a real
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Now see, in 15th century printing press and the paper were the big thing - new technological stuff that made it possible for knowledge to be more easily transferred. This has resulted in the world we know today.
Today, we have graphics, sound, internet, computer. These are the big thing now.
We need to use them just as people used printing press back then - as the primary source of spreading information, and education.
There is a forced inclination to think that 'people should read books'. We have to give that up. The book concept is being conferred much more importance than the value it provides as a medium. It can easily be said that the importance conferred comes more from traditional conditioning of 'books are good' (correct at any date pre-1997) than the actual value books carry in disseminating information and education today.
Visual aids are ALWAYS better. This is why we had illustrations on any printed material during the course of history whenever it was possible. Today we have virtualization, games, sound, graphics, anything you can imagine to make the utopic futuristik education themes in sci-fi movies come true.
And we should do as such, for faster, better and less stress-inducing teaching of children.
Read radical news here
More like if parents actually had time for the kid. Now I know that an anecdote isn't exactly data, but let me tell you how it worked for me.
I learned to read and write long before I got to school, because my grandma took the time to teach me that, and to make it interesting. I can't remember much from that age (she started with it when I was 2-3 years old), but from what I'm told it involved pictures of animals whose name started with that letter, and stuff like that. Kids are pretty much pre-programmed to hang around and learn from a parent or, in this case, substitute parent, so playing some game with letters with grandma and getting lots of attention, hey, it must have been fun times.
I already had basic understanding skills in English and French by the age of 7. No, I couldn't have written Les Miserables, but it was a start, you know? Grandma is again responsible for French, using some Pif comics as material. Kids like to be told stories, you know? _Illustrated_ stories with a cat and a dog doing mean things to each other? You tell me if that doesn't sound like fun. Plus, again, hey, I was getting lots of attention from grandma. Mom and her English language tapes are responsible for English, but again, some time doing it together was involved. (It worked too. I think I'm doing decently in English, wouldn't you say?)
Incidentally, in school, I have grandma to thank for another piece of wisdom, which strangely enough the school didn't teach me. School told me to just keep reading something again and again until it's memorized. Except at some point you feel like your head is numb, and keeping at it any longer isn't getting you any further. It just gets you more frustrated. I can see how lots of kids just concluded that learning is boring, and gave up. Grandma gave me this little piece of advice: so take a 10 second break. Nowadays I know that that's just enough to flush the brain's shortest term buffer. Why couldn't school teach me that? She also helped check my homework and stuff.
At some point, you know, a kid gets to ask stuff like "why is the sky blue?" My parents, bless their nerdy souls, gave me some physics books. You'd be surprised how I could accept the real explanation just as well as other kids accept the fairy tale versions. The whole family, all the way to the great grandma, also were always available to talk about it, which is always a plus. In retrospect, it might have been a tad boring to listen to a kid ranting and raving about a transformer, but someone or another always had time for that. I should be thankful.
Dad also helped provide some maths knowledge needed there, such as teaching me to do a derivative, and how to get there by way of really small delta X... in elementary school. It helped with, for example, understanding mechanics early.
Computers... ok, now for that one I didn't need any special encouragement. It was experimenting with something and seeing some results, which is fun. Still, in retrospect, it wasn't as much spontaneous interest in programming, as Dad showing me how some small BASIC programs are entered and run. I was pretty quick to get interested from there. At some point, basic was kinda slow, so Dad gave me the CPU instruction set manuals and a very quick introduction to Assembly. And to translating it all to hex by hand, because the old ZX-81 had 1k memory total, and an assembler just didn't fit in there. It would be another half a decade until I understood _why_ assembly is faster than BASIC, or how does the computer understand either of them, but it got me happily coding away anyway.
By contrast, the things I was the _least_ interested in was the stuff that just came pretty much by royal decree, so to speak. (Not meaning actually from a king, but from any authority figure, parents included.)
So exactly what are you going to solve by just turning off the TV? "Young man, go to your room and don't come out until you've done your homework." Damn, if that had been all the parent input and attention I got, I'd probably be w
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
"Clusters anyone?"
Oooh. The new demigod. No. Clusters are tools. Science takes place in the brain and the real, empirical world. Computers are used to process data, that's not science, that's -- data processing. Compute models are used to check ideas. Again, not science, just -- fact checking.
You can tell that some people think that science is done in a computer by how they hold on to their computer based results. All the while looking at contradictory facts in the real world.
Well, literacy falling from the ninety plus percentages to the fifties or sixties is pretty good evidence they (currently) can't handle books.
I don't, however, think electronic stimulation is the answer. What is? Go back the method that produced the above ninety percentages of literacy .
But, no. Why? That would show that the 'educators' who thought up the last forty years worth of bullshit educational ideas were being paid to masticate children's minds, not teach them.
Can't have that.
More games, less books? In other words, just another excuse for teachers to NOT teach. I have a 13 year old in school right now who is experiencing this fabulous trend. He already brings enough homework home to fill an entire school day's worth of learning and he has at least once report or project due within every 2 weeks. And now, instead of teachers standing up in front of classrooms and teaching (which they dont seem to be doing as is) they get to sit the kids in front of the computer and twiddle their thumbs all day even more. I wonder why teachers even need degrees anymore. It is NOT helpful. It is not even regulated. Kids are seated in front of a computer and left to "play" so-called learning games. The instant the teacher isnt looking though, they are on inappropriate websites watching flash video's and the like. And to top it off, my son and his friends find the "games" boring. In a world where the teachers have foregone actual teaching already, this is only adding fuel to the fire. The school's only focus anymore is to get better standardized test scores so the school will get a better rating on a national average. And after looking at these games myself, I found they resemble the swiss cheese lesson plans almost mirror. What I mean by "swiss cheese" is that they leave large chunks of important learning out and ONLY teach children what is on the standardized tests. So, when these children are actually playing these "learning" games, they are only being force fed the same boring information they are teaching themselves at home with 6 hours of homework and projects and reports. In a way, I suppose the idea is good.. but it is not going to be used the way this article is intending it. At least not by my local board of education.
I despised reading throughout school. I got to the point where I thought reading itself was an outdated form of expression altogether, something surpassed by movies and TV. I figured games would eventually destroy movies/TV likewise, a kind of Highlander evolution of story-telling. It wasn't until I left school that I finally got turned on to some good authors and developed an appreciation for reading. The books in school are terribly boring. There is nothing worse than forcing someone to read (an especially more active form of input than this so-called ADHD generation is used to) something which holds no interest for them. I've loved games since my youth, but there were two books I read in school that I really loved (The Martian Chronicles and 1984), so it was possible to hold my interest if the book actually engaged me. If educators are so desperate to engage kids that they're willing to try a concept as hopeless as "educational games," instead why not let them read whatever the hell they want? Whatever mature or downright vulgar themes their twisted little teen-angst ridden minds think they crave. If I could have read Chuck Palahnuik or Gore Vidal as a kid I would have been well on my way to enjoying reading. Why not talk to those few kids that actually are reading and compile a list of books from them? Educators will only succeed in making games as boring as their book selection. Why not just let the students select the books themselves?
I'm tired of being told today's children are a "sight and sound" generation. What about the Japanese who have even more gadgets than us? Ever played a Japanese game? They're full of text (weird squiggly text!). Hell even their arcade fighting games have a whole dramatic buildup of text firing back and forth before the brawl. How do those kids do all that reading with all the bleeping and flashing in their culture? It's a mystery.
I'm a new parent and while I love to read and think that books offer something that no other media can offer, which I'll explain later... I also think that engaging kids is very important and that different people learn in different ways.
Games can be great learning aids. Teachers always try to introduce learning games to their classes but I suspect that after age 8 the kids are not impressed as they've played real games and well Teachers and their sponsors just aren't as good at Game creation as say EA or Rockstar or Blizzard. They obviously need help creating games that will get the kids attention and keep it long enough for them to learn a lesson or two.
What would be really nice is to introduce a topic with a game... but leave out some of the juicy details (claim that 'we can't show you that part because it's too violent and/or racy/scandalous, BUT we can give you a book all about it and you can read it for yourself"). At the end of the game have a quiz about things that happened, maybe have little vignette videos between the action that they have to pay attention to, not only to grade well on the quiz but also to do well on the next level. Kids love that kind of challenge where there is immediate feedback from having learned something.
Back to books for a few minutes. A poster below mentioned that no one has time for books but hours to devote to TV. I suspect the reason kids aren't in to books is that they never see anyone just sitting around reading. My Father always had a book near him. He'd watch the News, some B-Ball or Football for a while at night, then let us take over the TV and sit back in his lazyboy and read some SciFi. Then my older brother read the books and eventually I did as well. We'd make trips to the book store to pick out books together. It was family tradition as far as I was concerned.
Now what books can offer that no other media can: your own completely unique vision of the story. With TV, radio, movies, even most games... the characters are decided for you, what they look like, what they sound like, their expressions when they do something (which reflects their motivations for doing it). The storyline is linear... one thing happens after another, rarely you'll get a show or movie where they have multiple storylines that intersect, and the importance of events is decided for you and made quite obvious because they have only so much time for you to get it.
Books are great... 20 stories happening all at once, across time and space... you can skip sections, go back later... follow a character for awhile and ignore the rest until you realize they were important, then go back and find out why. It's all you and your own imagination, whereas TV, Video games, etc. it's the directors vision. There's a reason so many books get turned into Movies but never the other way around.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
...more than ever before? You don't need games, you need good teachers, and good teachers need more of a budget. Kids don't need computers, they need reality. They need to interact with the real world. Take them on field trips if you want them to learn about fish dieing in a pond. Go to an actual pond. Wow, what concept. They can learn about computers in computer class.
Read my short stories - You won't regret it.
https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos /us.html
Lists US literacy at 99% of all people over the age of 15.
Which seems a bit high to me, and of course there are many different ways to judge literacy. Many of those people's literacy is not as functional as it should be, I certainly personally know plenty of people who can't read critically as fully as they should be able to. But that isn't the same as saying most Americans are too illiterate to handle books or written material at all.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
I taught high school chemistry for 4 years and was fortunate to have 1 computer per lab group. This was at a time when computers were thought to be the new panacea for our education problems. My findings? Students sure were motivated to get on those computers and play solitaire or change the DOS prompt ("U Suck C:\>") but as soon as they had to create formulas in a spreadsheet all the fun went out the door.
Do I believe games can be entertaining and didactive? You bet. But I bet if the concepts the game is designed to teach get difficult enough then the game won't be too entertaining anymore. Guess what? Oftentimes learning takes work and the payoff is not immediate.
Now you're going to reply to everything I say! BRILLIANT!
Why don't you go get yourself banned at Ars again? I could use the lulz.
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why it is that you are the only person I (or anyone else I know) have ever had this kind of "conversation" with.
Could it be that you are a singularly sociopathic individual who simply cannot abide any insult to his ego, no matter how slight and how much the person's opinion shouldn't matter to you one whit?
Why do you have so much trouble with this, Alec? Don't you realize that I don't affect your life in ANY significant way whatsoever? Why did you even have to take the bait in the beginning?
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because some mod was bored and needed to spend his points somewhere. Did you notice how I was later modded up for showing you what a tool you are? Seems you missed that somehow.
I don't deny that I started with you. I saw Russinovich's name and thought, "you know, I bet he'll be reading this, JUST BECAUSE it's Mark Russinovich. I bet he won't be able to resist reading it, and I KNOW he won't be able to resist saying something back if I troll him."
And what do you know? I was right! You pathetic, pathetic loser.
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There is no factual evidence in that link, Alec, of anything but your own inferiority complex.
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