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.'"

Comments

Awesome

[explosivejared]

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.

Re:Awesome

[Itninja]

I agree it sounds awesome. But you realized that had you had this education in your youth, your above post would have probably been more like: "W00T! This is teh awesome! All those n00bs who talk smack about it are totally FAGS!!!!"

I kid of course, but your concise use of grammar, punctuation, etc indicates that your traditional education was not a total waste as you seem to paint it.

Re:Awesome

[Shin-LaC]

Really. I had an easy time at school and got excellent grades with very little effort, but that just made me lazy and unused to working hard on things I'm not particularly interested in. At the same time, I'm grateful for all knowledge the school system did manage to cram into my mind. Looking back, I only with it had made me work even harder: I'd have more knowledge, better skills, and I'd be used to working harder to boot.

In other words, I might have loved to go to video game school as a child, but as an adult I would hate to have gone to it.

Re:Awesome

[blahplusplus]

"I kid of course, but your concise use of grammar, punctuation, etc indicates that your traditional education was not a total waste as you seem to paint it."

I disagree, traditional education basically sucks the life out of kids. When we are kids there are a lot of cool things we want to do but we don't know how to go about doing them. I would have loved to have learned to program by someone leading us through the construction of small simple games and telling us why the hard boring stuff (like math) is important, kids want to accomlish their dreams and once they realize it takes hard stuff they will 1) Discipline themselves to do it (because they want to accomplish that cool goal) or 2) They will find an area more to their liking.

There are those who have the persistance to work hard and there are those kids who don't, we do a disservice to the kids with big goals and dreams and not nurtering them.

What I wouldn't give for someone like John carmack to write a book about learning to write small 2D games, etc, with feedback from those who had to learn the hardway (i.e. have insight on how to teacn and structure a lesson in terms of capturing kids interest).

Kids want to learn stuff we just suck the joy out of learning because we don't give them cool things to work on that teach teh lesson that -- cool things require lots of hard boring stuff to accomplish but the end result is awesome.

Now if we can ramp up this boring stuff by taking cool complex stuff and giving them access to chunks of stuff they can handle (i.e. take animation of cool things that blowup like say a car in burnout, and allow them to tweak matehmatical values to see the results they get)

They can start seeing a direct feedback relationship between what they are learning and doing cool stuff.

Re:Awesome

[Capsaicin]

Building the monument - the Pyramid, The Cathedral of Notre Dame, The Golden Gate Bridge, The Great Wall of China - is fun. But do you really understand its significance?

If you don't -go and find out!

My 6 and 8 year old have recently started playing CivIV. While it would be overstating the case to say that their interest in learning has been entirely sparked by the exclusively by the game (the 6 year old was already obsessed with all things Ancient Egypt), these kind of wonders especially have resulted in greater attention being paid to the kind of History documentaries I like to expose them to. Last week they watched a show called "Great Wonders of the Islamic World" with the kind of attention that was previously reserved for StarWars, TMNT, and David Attenborough Nature docos. The 6 year old is extending his obsession to Aztecs (they have pyramids too!) as a result of this game.

This has demonstrated very clearly to me that at least some games (well at least Civilization), have a valuable role to play in fostering involvement with younger children. This is not to say that education should consist solely of electronic game-playing.

Misguided at best

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

So...

[jellomizer]

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.

Re:So...

[PotatoFarmer]

...Sheep can be traded for Bricks...

Q: What did the one Scotsman say to the other Scotsman while they were playing Settlers of Catan?

A: I've got Wood for Sheep!

Thank you, thank you. I'll be here all week. Try the ve^H^Hlamb!

Re:Spore for education

[am 2k]

Uh, you do realize that Spore is as creationist as you can get? It's intelligent design (well, mostly semi-intelligent), because you're doing the designing yourself.

Spore?

[Shimmer]

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.

Re:what crap...

[BJ_Covert_Action]

I'm sorry but I fail to see how the topic mentioned in the article (yes I read it, no I am not new here) has to do with schools succumbing to the 'make everybody equal mindset.' Granted, the program is an attempt to educate kids through the use of video games. But just because video games are very popular amongst kids doesn't mean there is some connection between this program and trying to make every single kid equal. I would assert, however, that implementing a program like this. which gives kids more freedom in how to learn (different choices in video games, different approaches to problem solving, etc.). would probably help those kids with superior intelligence and problem solving skills shine more.

Forgive me if I am treading on your lawn but frankly, the school system as it stands now is a broken piece of shit (which you seem to agree with). Currently we stuff kids into a room, unload an unending string of partially garbled speech at them (through teachers that can hardly make sense of their own thoughts), and expect them to absorb it all like a sponge. Then we ask them to barf the crap they just heard back onto papers in an automaton fashion so that they can be rewarded with a pat on the head in the form of good grades. It's ridiculous, stifling, and completely fails to teach children how to learn (it succeeds very well in teaching them to accept what they are told though).

The program described in the article, while it may end up failing or may end up succeeding (I don't know which), is at least an attempt to break free of that massively screwed system. It puts the children in a technologically immersed learning environment (that alone should pay off in an ever-increasingly technologically linked world) and gives them the opportunity to approach education in a way that makes sense to them (with guidance from their teachers). This not only gives them a chance to try new things in a safe environment (last I checked kids don't get hurt from video games), but it also gives them a chance to approach problems and knowledge by a means that works for them. That freedom and that freedom alone makes this program worth observing and not just dismissing out of hand.

Furthermore, it appears that the games and programs kids will use to do their schoolwork vary from fun games to practical computer programs such as Adobe flash. As the article and summary both point out, these will give them a tech saviness that is lacking in kids these days. It gives them a chance to approach what are normally boring things for young kids (ancient Babylonian poetry) through a fun and creative medium (develop your own graphic novel) which could give them an intimate knowledge of something that most kids would just sleep through in normal school.

Don't get me wrong, I am as embittered as anyone that my own education was a patterned succession of memorizing crap right up until college, but that doesn't mean that I am going to slam any alternative education model that comes along just because I feel like it. Frankly, this idea is one worth pursuing if for no other reason to see if it works or not. If it doesn't, hopefully a better program will come along that will. Until then however, I have to say that I think this program deserves a little more inspection than, "What Crap."

Re:what crap...

[Chris Burke]

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

No, it's much worse than that. We always had essentially the same curriculum for everyone if your school couldn't afford "gifted" courses, and most schools couldn't for more than maybe a couple subjects -- e.g one elementary school I went to had "advanced" math, but not science, history, english or anything else, so if your "gift" involved something other than math, tough luck!

The problem with No Child Left Behind is that the curriculum now revolves entirely, 100%, around passing the stupid tests. Teachers don't teach anymore, they train and coach in how to pass tests. They don't teach things the test doesn't cover. They don't teach the principles, they teach the technique needed to pass the test. Because they can't afford to do anything else or they'll risk losing money and then whatever few interesting programs they have left will be gone.

It'd be one thing if it was an actual education based on the lowest common denominator. But it's not even that good. Ever cram for an exam where you didn't care at all about the subject, you only cared about passing the exam, because if you didn't pass the exam your GPA would drop and you'd lose your financial aid? Was that the best learning experience? Now imagine your professor had exactly the same motivation. That's what No Child Left Behind has done to our education.

Then after school....

[Domini]

...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.

Re:Experience

[mckinnsb]

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.

Spore?

[Kenoli]

The only thing Spore can teach someone is terrible game design.

Facepalm

[4D6963]

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.