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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.
Sure beats sitting around and programming in Apple Basic on an Apple 2...
I actually feel like spore would be a great intro for kids to get them understanding basic evolutionary principles. Playing that game for 30 minutes would be a good experience for any person.
I like playing games more than most, but this is another poor attempt to make learning "fun". I see this problem at all levels of public education and it is fundamentally flawed. Instead of pandering to the attitude that learning isn't fun, more effort should be made to instill a different attitude towards learning. "Tricking" students into thinking they aren't being taught is never going to inspire the next great scientist or artist. Achievement requires hard work and we should not pretend otherwise and we should certainly not teach that notion to students.
What they will get is the Ancient Egyptians made nuclear weapons. Sheep can be traded for Bricks, The success of evolution is based on the intelligence of the designer, with the attempt to zoom into the beaches in Brazil. Well I guess that is as good as american Education gets. You not really raising the bar. But the kids get the same education and have fun at it.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
This sounds like the type of "course" designed by lobby groups and their corporate masters not to actually educate children, or at least not as that term has been classically understood, but rather to indoctrinate the next generation of mindless consumers who don't ask questions and don't think too much. This is just one of many factors contributing to the continuing general decline of American public education. They might as well have them play America's Army or Modern Warfare, at least then we can begin their training early.
If you want to be unemployed playing games in a basement.
What's wrong with maths, english and science these days?
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has mandated that American medical schools must incorporate training using surgery simulation devices for all aspiring surgeons.
This is the legacy of No Child Left Behind... We've dumbed education down to the lowest common denominator. There are fewer and fewer gifted programs. Everyone's straight-jacketed into the same curriculum at the same pace, and should someone demonstrate superior intelligence they're practically punished for it because it might harm some other precious snowflake's self-esteem to know! Net result -- kids don't try as hard, so standards slip and slip and slip, to adjust to the new low point. Video games -- Seriously. You know, it used to be a treat to get a movie in class and it was read, read, read. It was all about reading. Nowadays it's all about learning via glowing rectangles.
Sad.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Will sex ed get taught with porn?
Elementary schools in the 70s used a different term than "gifted program"; but they did get to play lots of games too. They had "put the fries in the little box", and "sort the little metal disks". I'm sure that civilisation and quake are an improvement, but I can't imagine the sort of carnage we'll see in junk-food restaurants in 10 years...
Of course the impulsive child in me is all thumbs and fingers and even a few toes up for this. However, in the long haul I have to question how far you'll get on this kind of content. There is a lot of games that can certainly teach things, but they only have so much to teach and then they're just a game. I suppose, at the very least, it will be an interesting experiment, just not so sure I'd want to be the parent of the kids participating in said experiment.
Wonderful - a new generation of special snowflakes who will grow up expecting to be pandered to and for everything to be 'fun'. They'll have a rude awakening when they discover how fun mopping the floor at McTGIBurger at midnight is.
My kids play Spore. It looks like an entertaining game with no relation to reality whatsoever. If they use it to teach evolution (or anything about biology, really), I would pull my kid out the next day. It's pure fantasy - nothing wrong with that, but it doesn't belong in a science class.
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
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.
Down the shitter, of course.
...they can play "Try to find work in a struggling world economy competing against foreign jobseekers with real educations"
I'm not saying that all students will fall flat... the ones that are bright and feel that school is easy will not have a problem.
It's possible they will even excel.
It's the majority of lazy students that will suffer.
SketchUp, perhaps?
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.
The only thing Spore can teach someone is terrible game design.
And now we see what administrators (and parents) truly see the purpose of school to be:
Publicly funded daycare.
Uhm, gentlemen... Do you guys really think that this will somehow make homework fun?
"Your assignment due next Friday is to beat Xenogears [60+ hours easily], and write a 5 page report on the aspects of yadda yadda yadda."
If being forced to play the game doesn't kill the fun, the deadlines and summary reports certainly will.
Games are fun because they are an escape from reality. Turning them into work will kill them.
I don't know which is worse, that anyone can be dumb enough to actually make that happen, or that it would garner our praise. In our defence, Slashdot is full of people who think that education should be all about learning to think. That's utter bullshit, learning to think is only one aspect of education, and as a matter of fact it's more a by-product of "learning things". School is for learning basic knowledge and basic skills, like reading, counting, writing, or knowing about ancient Greece or being able to put Belgium or the Potomac River on a map. So, learning multiplication by reciting look-up tables isn't fun? Well tough luck, cause you need that in life, and that's not by making homoerotic monsters in Spore that you'll learn that. Just stop with the experimental education, good education doesn't need innovation, lots of kids 100 years ago received a better education than most of your offsprings ever will.
Disclaimer, I went to private school in France, I know what receiving a decent education is like. How do you think my English became this good, by learning critical thinking? More like by being forced to learn lists of irregular verbs.
You just got troll'd!
"Good morning class, today's topic is the evolution of European imperialism. Please load up King's Quest I, V, and VI."
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.
Not that monstrosity that they call mathematics (and which really has not much to do with it), that's right. :)
But real mathematics.. I think Paul Lockhart would strongly disagree.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
these kids sue the school for millions of $$ for being unhirable due to not knowing shit about the world. so yeah, good plan!
weinersmith
That is an awesome story. Thanks for sharing!
Reminds me of the Fallout game series (I haven't played the original games myself, but have read about the story numerous times).
Where is Sim City 4 Deluxe? After 7 years of playing this game, with new buildings I can download all the time like the Burj Dubai, the Freedom Tower, Taipei 101, and canals with malls, new parks, utility buildings and anything you can think of this is the perfect game for anyone who is interested in city planning.
"We multitask like you breath, I couldn't think as slow as you if I tried"
How about all traditional board games and card games that have been passed down by our ancestors for centuries, like Go and chess. Most traditional games are great trainings for thinking logically, which are fundamental for other areas in one's future learning, such as math and engineering. I think it's more practical to train the kids' sense of logic than their ability to grasp and obey the rules/laws given in a computer game setting at a young age. Frankly, the level of difficulty in today's computer games arn't very high at all. All it will take is about a week of practice and you'll be able to get pretty good at it. Also, not to mention that almost all the games in each of their respective genres are very similar in both interface and game play. I can't imagine how much resource the school is able to provide to fill up the curriculum throughout the year, or even longer.
If they were going to do this, I would suggest using Blender instead. Its open source and every bit as good as Maya 3D studio etc (From what I have read) Granted I have not used Maya myself, but look at what the pro's can do with blender http://www.blender.org/features-gallery/gallery/art-gallery/
To my mind this is the greatest intersection between fun and learning.
Tell the kids: "Try to simulate anything. What would you do?"
Suppose they say "Let's make Jurassic Park!"
Get some stock graphics they can move around for a day and then start putting in the conditions. "You wanna play T Rex? He eats a lot. If you stay in your territory you've razed he'll starve."
"The little animals can hide under stuff".
"The weather is changing. Now this is why warm blooded animals have the advantage. Your T Rex is slow!!"
It takes say only 1 night for the Teacher to put in a condition, and then the kids have to find the new equilibrium.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
This struck me as a really innovative idea. I admit that I haven't played any of the games in the article (except the Oregon Trail back in the first grade), but from the comments, it sounds like Civilization got quite a few people interested in history and world civilizations. Does anyone remember playing Number Munchers? That was a far more entertaining way to learn multiplication, factoring, and inequalities than a bunch of worksheets. That's the game I remember the most, but that wasn't the only game we played during class. There were others that became a part of our curriculum for weeks, about which and from which I don't remember a damn thing. Even Oregon Trail didn't seem all that instructional to me. I didn't have any better sense of the hardships of western explorers after having played it. All I really took away from the Oregon Trail was: it's easy (and fun!) to shoot wild animals, but it's hard to get all those animals into your wagon. And they spoil so quickly!
Selecting the appropriate game for each subject and age group seems to me like the most difficult part of this curriculum. For example, how much Mesopotamian culture are these kids really going to soak up while they develop their graphic novelization of "Gilgamesh?" I'll bet that the future engineers will become masters of the multimedia application they're supposed to use, and when you ask them to tell you about Gilgamesh, they'll say, "Check out how realistically I rendered his fall from the tower! And look at this bitchin' eagle I made that broke his fall!," (I've never read Gilgamesh; here is the brief description from which I constructed my example) followed by a lengthy explanation of how they got the whole thing to work despite numerous setbacks and frustrations with the multimedia program, and how, when they write their multimedia program, it will have fewer bugs, more features, and just generally be way better.
Sorry, just trying to score some Funny points.
One of the earlier comments talked about a role-playing game in which the children had to work their way through a post-apocalyptic scenario: pick a leader, decide whether to open the bomb shelter door. That seems like an excellent game. Hopefully such innovative "real-life" games won't be permanently shelved in favor of electronic or board games during any move towards a more game-centric style of teaching.
Back to selecting age-appropriate, subject-specific games. I don't know much about such games, but per my experience with Number Munchers, it seems like such games could be a real boon (it also seems weird, as an adult, to be talking about Number Munchers as an excellent, age-appropriate mathematics game, instead of talking about how cool the game is and how far into the game I can get relative to my peers, as I did when I was in grade school). For example, Alice seems like an excellent teaching tool by which to introduce more kids to programming. And maybe Civiilization, or a game like it, can help drive home history material. At least initially, though, selecting the right game seems like the most difficult part of this approach (harder still: how do you determine whether it WAS the right game? How do you gauge effectiveness?). I do, however, applaud the attempt to try something novel, and despite having read and having had my initial enthusiasm tempered by the critics of this approach who have posted already, I admit that I am optimistic about the outcome.
If they're going to use any version of Civilization in the classroom, I would much rather they use the original version from Avalon Hill (well, Hartland Trefoil, really) and designed by Sid Sackson over that game by Sid Meiers. The former is much more reliant on efficiency and diplomacy, while the latter rewards combat and warfare over all else.
-nd
I hope this will help them tighten up the graphics on level 3, because it's scary that we are so far behind on tighting up the graphics on level 3.
These kids will be "lucky" if this only sets back their educational growth by the length of the program, rather than messing up their whole expectation of education and fun. I fear someone has taken the idea of self directed learning, and instead of allowing students to choose their own path through the required facts and methods, with provision of some optional material, the idea of "fun" has crept in, and unfortunately this leads the students to conclude that when it ceases to be fun they can stop doing it.
Self directed learning can greatly speed education, particularly for smart students who read well, some of my offspring have benefited from it. But it isn't made fun so much as made interesting, which is quite another characteristic.