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New York's Video-Game-Based Public School
An anonymous reader writes "In Manhattan this fall, a batch of lucky sixth-graders will start at Quest To Learn, the first public school in the US with a curriculum built around playing games. They'll play Spore and Civilization, board games such as Settlers of Catan, and learn 3D modeling in Maya and Google Earth as well. Each semester concludes with a two-week 'Boss Level.'"
Let me be the first to say that this sounds awesome, and I have a very strong urge to attempt to try and enter the sixth grade again! I can't tell you how much I would have loved to have had the opportunity to be so fully engaged in grade school.
Basically 90% of my public school education consisted of insufferable lectures with a worksheet at the end, and maybe if you're lucky a paper to discuss. Not until I got to the very end of high school did I get to engage in anything that wasn't essentially passive rote learning. Even the dual-enrollment/AP stuff I took relied soley on often dry discussion though, and had nothing on the proposed pedagogical model put forward by Q2L.
I'm sure that my public school education is somewhat representative of the majority experience. I'm sure there is a lot of collective envy with stuff like this:
A core goal of our pedagogy is to help students learn to reason about their world. Systemic reasoning, or the ability to see the world in terms of the many interrelated systems that make it up--from biological to political to technological and social--supports students in meeting this goal.Enduring understandings include:
1. Understanding of feedback dynamics (i.e., reinforcing and balancing feedback loops): understanding that small level changes can affect macro-level processes.
2. Understanding of system dynamics: understanding that multiple (i.e. dynamic) relationships within a system.
3. Understanding hidden dimensions of a system: understanding that modifications to system elements can lead to changes that are not easily recognizable within a system.
4. Understanding of the quality of relationships within a system: understanding when a system is working or not working at optimal levels.
5. Homological understanding: understanding that similar system dynamics can exist in other systems that may appear to be entirely different.
I would kill to be able to go back in time and have an education under people pushing such an enlightened philosophy.
I got a catholic block.
will the systems even have gpu / cpu power for this or will they be trying to do this with low systems with POS intel gma video? amd + ati on board video is a little better but not real good for trying to do any real gameing and civ 4 is a real cpu + gpu hog.
In the mid-90's I was in a program called Talented and Gifted - simply called "TAG" for short. Essentially, all the 'smart' kids (recommended by teachers, guidance counselors, and 'anomalous' test scores) were put into a room in middle school for one period (45 minutes) a day. Essentially, all we did was play games. There were occasions where we learned about other cultures and exchanged letters with students in Russia, but for the most part it was a period in middle school devoted specifically to games of all sorts.
However, the games were quite serious, at least as far as games go. I remember one in particular, where our whole class was informed we had 'woken up' in a bomb shelter, supposedly after a nuclear attack. We were given no general background of the setting of our dilemma, only the vague recollection that something *bad* had happened. None of us could quite remember exactly what happened, or how in particular we got there. We remembered our personal histories, but the information was on cards that were given to us by our TAG teacher, and we were not allowed to show them to other students - we had to 'express' what was on the card in interim periods between decisions. A little like a character sheet, if you ask me.
We were then given one direction by the "MC" of the game, the AI programmed into the bomb shelter - choose a leader. The whole game then revolved around a process of negotiation amongst the survivors with said leader , as said leader decided whether or not to enter into different communications with different camps in this post-apocalyptic world, something which the AI explicitly advised against. The climax of the game involved one decision: will you open the door to your shelter past the airlock (i.e, not safe, if the world was irradiated you would die) and check outside? Both the AI and the other camps advise against this through nearly the entire game. However, I remember our team deciding to open the door. We did, and found that not a singular nuclear missile had gone off, and that everyone was in hiding. In the end, what the game 'taught' was that neither the AI nor the other camps could be trusted, and the best conclusions were the ones we came to ourselves.
Obviously, you can't teach Mathematics through a video game. You can, however, clarify some of the more obscure portions of Mathematics through demonstration, and video games are an excellent way to demonstrate.
I think the good people of the Manhattan Public School Department will quickly find, however, that games meant for general consumption (i.e., non-educational purposes) are not fit for the task. For instance, I would not pick EA's "Dante's Inferno" to quickly teach kids in my history class the impact Dante Allegheri had on how people viewed religion, or its relationship to politics. I might opt for something more along the lines of this, which does gloss over some details, but hits the heart of the matter pretty neatly.
I fucking love Spore but... yeah, it's a very entertaining mimicry of science that shouldn't be confused with anything plausible.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
Some kids got a fantastic education 100 years ago. We only know about the ones who made it. Most were thrown on the scrapheap once they could read or write. Today, we have a vastly better educated populace than we have ever had, and there is plenty more potential there.
It's not the point. The point is that innovation is irrelevant to good education.
As for your experience, you went to school with a bunch of cosmopolitan, well off, middle-class kids. You should be holding yourself to a different standard than the average output of the French school system.
Too bad you have no idea what you're talking about. Private schools there are nothing like private schools in America, and actually there's not a lot of differences with public schools in terms of results (actually private schools are typically Catholic, whereas public schools cannot be, so where you go depends on how religious your parents are. Or how much they loathe Muslims. Although once again this has nothing in common with Catholic schools in North America, and there's not much difference in education style or curriculum with public schools). In France what really makes a difference is where you live. If it's in a ZEP then you'll get a shitty education. Otherwise everybody does about as good.
You just got troll'd!