Slashdot Mirror
Learning By Playing
theodp writes "This week's NY Times Magazine — a special issue on education and technology — is tailor-made for the Slashdot crowd. For the cover story, Sarah Corbett explores the games-and-education movement, which she notes is alive and well at Quest to Learn, a NYC middle-school that aims to make school nothing less than 'a big, delicious video game.' Elsewhere in the issue, Paul Boutin writes about Microsoft's efforts to inspire The 8-Year-Old Programmer with its Kodu Project, and Nicholas Carlson reports on Columbia University's efforts to mix journalism and hard-core computer science with its unique dual-degree master's in journalism and CS. There's also an accompanying timeline that nicely illustrates how learning machines have progressed from the Horn-Book to the iPad."
Educational games tend to be pretty pathetic, but if you do any crafting in MMOs you'll find that some basic math skills are a big help. I'm sure that if you put higher forms of math, navigation, economics and social politics into an MMO, its players would quickly pick up on these concepts. As they are now, I don't think it's a very efficient way to learn. If you also added some tools and some tutorials for those things into the game, you might be able to make the learning process more efficient. Hell, they put protein folding into a game and made it fun, so I'm sure it could be done.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Why would you complicate things like that? And wouldn't the children without much ability to put themselves in another's shoes and ability to abstract be quite disadvantaged by a method of teaching like that? It's just the kind of "muddy" mixed-up way of teaching which I loathed in school - like mathbooks wich used such heavy layers of methaphor and allegory (to teach the kids to "use their skills in real life?") that getting a fix on the underlying system was 5x the normal work. This was fortunately absent from the physics books. When I got my college algebra textbook it was a godsend.
Emotions! In your brain!
I'm not so sure about Kudu and the ilk. The problem I have with it is that it isn't programming. The description of Kudu from the article (making a motorcycle racing game) sounds an awful lot like Racing Destruction Set or that Hypercard adventure game authoring tool I had for Macintosh that lead to some truly dreadful games. Also, I find the idea that you need some gimmicky, technicolor GUI for an 8-year-old to explore programming is a tad insulting to the 8-year-olds. I started learning Commodore-64 Basic when I was 6, and actually wrote a mildly sophisticated database program for my Little League Baseball team when I was 8 or 9. From the comments I've seen on Slashdot, my experience is certainly not unique. I think if I had started with Kudu I would have gotten bored and moved on. I'm an engineer now, largely I think from my childhood goofing about with computers.
I can't remember the name, but I saw a great book written by a Dad and his son about Python. I think that is a much better exploration into computers than Kudu.
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I have a three year old daughter and she was playing with an old educational toy when I realized that you could take it apart, see how it works and put it back together again. It wasn't designed for that but there were plenty of parts in it. You can't do that with most modern toys. They're just discrete pieces of silicon. Very little of interest or use is contained in them.
The problem with this type of "research" is that it's finding excuses to give kids sugar rather than discipline them so they eat real food.
Success is no longer defined by the amount of learning that is happening but by the lack of discipline problems that occur while the learning is occurring. Sugar shuts the kids up so that's success.
Schools need to stop encouraging the attitude that education begins and ends with a bell. If schools focused on reading, writing and math then students could find and learn about their own personalized interests outside of class.
Work Safe Porn
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shouldn't be teaching. Let's check the actual quote:
http://www.quotesdaddy.com/quote/290532/david-thornburg/any-teacher-that-can-be-replaced-by-a-computer-deserves
"Any teacher that can be replaced by a computer, deserves to be." - David Thornburg
Teachers who are as soulless as a computer shouldn't be teaching. Anyone who thinks a computer can do a teacher's job has never been a teacher.
Work Safe Porn
But what I see in the video does not look like a game that integrates learning; it looks like a series of bribes between homework sessions.
That's interesting that you say that. That is the exact thing we are trying to avoid. :) I remember when I first heard about this company and I looked at the website and the videos and I thought some of the same things you have said. Then I started to play the game and more importantly I watched children play the game and then I saw the value in the game. Many of the youtube videos on the site are there to give a quick overview of the game and show the different levels. If you go to the teacher page and look up the setup video you will see how the game tries to be more than a bribe. We try to integrate playing and learning into the same thing. So, please try the free version, which has all the education of the upgraded version just not as many environments, and if you have any suggestions please send us an email. We love all the suggestions we can get.
Also, I haven't seen StarFall so I will have to take a look at that. Thanks for the suggestion.
Why must one side frame games as "The work of the devil, corrupting our youth!!!1" and the other as "The university of life, teaching useful skills!!!1"? Can't we all just be reasonable people and say "Games are games, they are only supposed to be fun. If some people are able to learn from them, that's good for them (I know I have done, but not everyone can, so don't abolish schools just yet). If some people are homicidal maniacs, it's because they are homicidal maniacs, it's not because of the games they play."? We don't need to pass games off as good or evil.
Sheesh guys!! Don't we already know that young of animals learn by playing? Look at kittens, cheetah's cubs or children of most animals when they play.
No, I have not read TFS or TFA.
Can anyone tell me a reason why real educational content is not already seamlessly folded into games? Kids can't pass a test but they know the names of all 150 Pokemon, or the good items in WoW and how to use them effectively together, or the location of every last secret location in GTA4. Why not name the Pokemon #1=Hydrogen, #2=Helium, #26 Iron, and so on? We'd have an entire generation who memorized every element and their atomic numbers, without even trying. Just think of how much we all learned about ancient societies and leaders just by playing Civilization? How many people learned what a phalanx or trireme was? How many of you knew, before playing the game, who Rameses II was? Heck, how many of you even knew Frederick the Great?
I've always thought this should be done as a standard tactic. But no, we have yet another nonsensical story for kids to learn about a magic turtle and his journeys where he met dozens of made-up people and their fake experiences. How about telling a piece of history, with cartoon characters substituted for the historical figures? Kids will realize one day that Fooky the Bear was actually Cromwell, or Woodrow Wilson, or whomever, and Fooky's story was actually the French Revolution or the Enlightenment. Mark my words, one of these days someone is going to "discover" this concept and get the Nobel Peace Prize.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
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I might not be the only one, but I grew up playing games in English and I believe most of my learning experience in this language was based on the challenges those games brought on me. I mean, I was 10 or so when I finished Crystalis and Zelda on the NES and I remember finding myself thinking/playing in English when my school friends were learning "my name is...". I think there are fields (like idioms) which can greatly benefit from games, like history, geography. But in the case of mathematics, which requires a great deal of practice not so much.
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You seem to assume that most people will actually do that math. In practice most will get some build off a site and run with that. Or get some tool which calculates it for them, rather than just help.
Or for crafting, people actually do stuff like pick some crafting guide from a site and mindlessly follow instructions like "gather 100 bars of X, 60 bars of Y and a stack of Z. Craft product A 20 times, then 25 times product B, go to the trainer and learn recipe C, craft that 15 times." At the end of the day most will just be a few thousand gold short because they just bought those quantities instead, and still have no idea why, say, they skipped products D and E in the middle which needed more bars. The maths involved won't even get a nod, much less some thinking.
Heck, I still see people who don't even learn the basic geography of the place because they were chasing the little cube marker of QuestHelper and never even noticed major landmarks.
Basically, in the immortal words of Dorothy Parker, "You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think." ;)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The problem with injecting math, social politics, etc, into games like MMOs is that the problems to be solved are "constructed"—that is, the lesson to be learned has to be presented as a specific obstacle to be overcome. The criteria to get the reward behind that obstacle has to be defined; essentially, there's right and wrong answers and the reward is not generally connected to the problem in an organic way.
I'll use a simple example for illustrative purposes...remember Math Blaster? If you've ever played it, you get a math problem across the top of the screen and different answers to it fall down. You sit at the bottom in a little Space Invaders-like spaceship blasting away. Shoot the right answer, get points.
Why does this game suck? Because the problem-solving element of solving the math problems is not connected to game play; in fact, game play exists only as an artifice to get you to solve the math problems. One doesn't advance in the game because the result of the equation was useful (other than adding to your score, of course).
Contrast this with an organically presented problem, where your character is standing in a train station, confronted with having to make a decision about how to get somewhere in the game world by a certain time. The player has to run around and get the info from the train schedules, maybe it makes sense to wait for the bullet train that skips stops, maybe it makes sense to wait for a cab to come even if it costs a little extra money. In this way, game play is actually advanced by working out the problem.
Of course, this kind of game play has drawbacks. You can't usually present a binary right/wrong answer—problems that arise organically usually have solutions that present in degrees. One consequence of this is that most of the time you can't force every player to deal with the problem at all, some will find a way to avoid it entirely. The other issue is that it's hard to differentiate between solving a problem based on understanding and solving a problem by finding the answer. You could, for example, find a way for a complex calculus problem to arise naturally in your game, but you have to make sure the player's success is based on deep understanding of the solution, not the player's ability to pull up Wolfram|Alpha and get an answer.
but have you considered the following argument: shut up.
toward the medium of games as an educational tool. I'm in the field, and many people who are taken seriously talk about games used properly as a tool by educators and caregivers. This is a relatively new medium that needs to be researched and experimented with so we can establish how it is most effective for different subjects and in different situations.
Here are some of the challenges in this field as I see it:
- Most educational games are made in silos. Games made by publishers are mostly reused engines or game designs with an educational goal slapped on (many edu games for young kids on Nintendo DS are like this). Games made by researchers and educators are generally some sort of mix of whatever subject they're interested in and whatever game that is big at the time. The truly effective and fun educational games are often made when good game designers, researchers and educators collaborate from the beginning of a project.
- Due to the fact that people are working in silos, researchers working the edu game field are often working to figure out game design issues that the non-edu game field covered long ago.
- My work is in the preschool - grade school edu game field and I work with top publishers and content owners. Most of the people I work with, especially decision makers and content people, do not and have not ever played games. I think this will even out over time as younger people who are more likely to play games come into the field, but it will take decades.
- Games are just a tool. We need the pedagogy established to help teachers understand how to use the medium. Until we have this available to all educators, game use will be all over the place.
- We need an established body of good examples in different subject areas and for different ages for future game makers to refer to when making edu games. This will take decades to create in my opinion.
To reiterate my main point, games are just a tool like books, video, hands on activities, etc. They are only as good as the educator or caregiver who is working with the student makes them.
Some healthy skepticism is in order. Too often games or game design is just used as a form of entertainment to spice up seemingly dull topics such as math and science. It does not have to be this way. We find that when providing students with the right support they can do amazing things. For instance, we have all these middle school students build sophisticated games including AI base on diffusion equations. That is certainly not sugar. Moreover, we can now begin to measure transfer of game design skills to making science simulations. Pretty exciting stuff. You can see some girls using AgentSheets to build BP oil spill simulations. They started by making 1980 style arcade games. http://www.news8austin.com/content/headlines/272429/congressman-visits-girlstart-summer-camp
Agree! In fact thinking back on my own experience I knew who Adolf Hitler and the Nazis were waaaay before they ever briefly, briefly covered World War II in my formal education...All thanks to Wolfenstein baby.
The kids know all the names and attributes of game characters because they spend the equivalent of WEEKS in school learning them.
Schools just cannot devote the next 2 months for JUST memorizing the periodic table of the elements.
And the kids learn the stories on TV and the movies because the stories are all simplified and standardized. History isn't that clean. Humans do not follow the same pattern as our society's myths do.
Which is the great part about learning REAL history. You see the people as more than 1 dimensional entities. In the movies, this guy is bad because he is the bad guy. This guy is good because he fights the bad guy and feeds baby puppies.
I say throw some advanced math into games. For example, imagine that you're playing a game and you enter a room. Suddenly, you realize that the room is filled with toxic gas, and you suddenly take 50 damage. One second later, 52 damage. One second after that, 54 damage. You have 10000 health. You need to figure out how long you have to get out of the room. So you think "ok, the DPS (hey look, that's a derivative!) is 50 + 2t. I want the total damage to be less than 10000. So you take the antiderivative (50t + t^2), set the result to 10000 (t^2 + 50t - 10000 = 0) and solve the quadratic equation! t = (-50 + sqrt(2500 + 40000)) divided by 2, the root is about 210, so t = 160 / 2 or 80. I have 80 seconds to live!".
Ok, now I actually want to play a game like this.
What does a 7 year old playing BZFlag learn then? (Apart from loosing badly and crying about it).
Take Nobody's Word For It.
Apparently there is an admission of problems in the journalism profession, but how about this solution?
From the article on computers and journalism:
But what’s in it for the engineers, who might have more lucrative things to do than save journalism? Grueskin argues that “one of the things engineers want to do is find practical, intractable problems society is facing and help come up with ways to solve those problems.” The unhealthy state of journalism, he says, is definitely one of those intractable problems.
It's not O(N!), is it?
The whole point of play is to learn. Take a cat, make a fluff ball run away from it like run, hide and stuff then it has a blast. Get that same dustball and make it come at the cat (like a dog might like) and the cat isn't down to play. Why? it's in training.
I learned most of my early programming skills and honed my math skills in playing a text based persistent browser-based game, Earth: 2025 (which has since closed and been cloned at Earth: Empires); most of the most fancy excel stuff I learned a decade ago was for calculating attacks and whatnot. I think text based games are a good way to learn as they have to have some good, engaging, content, and can't rely on faced-paced graphics or such things; it tends the genre towards using your brain more.
No technology involved at all, but students are forced to learn the material in unusual ways- rather than lecture and ask them to regurgitate on a test, I've got students who will have to defend intellectual positions against attacks from other students. (And they will attack- they get bonus points for meeting their objectives, and the games are designed with winners and losers)
The short game (around the decision to de-planetize Pluto) worked pretty well and they're set to start Tuesday on the long form game about the decision to award Darwin a medal from the Royal Society. Crossing my fingers on this one- there's some stuff that's tough to understand, and I've got 16 first-years teaching it all to each other (with a little coaching outside the class :^)
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
They do it anyway, actually. The point of those lists for example in WoW isn't to make the right number of components for a given number of final products, as most products don't really have any intermediate steps. The point is simply to grind your skill from 1 to whatever value, in the minimum time and with minimum expense.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Was the book called Hello World?
I've been disappointed with the availability and quality of toddler friendly games available for PC/Mac and the game consoles I have. I did find a downloadable Wii game called PooYoos (or something like that) recently that at least my daughter enjoyed but it wasn't highly educational. I haven't tried a lot of web based stuff but to me it makes sense it might be better because I've noticed iOS apps from small developers are better than any of these PC or console games for toddlers.
I have been pleased with iOS apps for toddlers though as many are very affordable ($1 - $5), they look good, they are educational, and most important my daughter enjoys playing them and can do so without my help. (Not that I don't interact but she can do it and isn't just watching me.) She has picked up a lot of information through these games such as object recognition, spelling, and so on that seems advanced for a two year old. All without drilling which could take the fun out of learning. Also she has gotten very apt at technology itself.
We watch a lot of Dora, Kai-Lan, Signing Time, etc too which I think is good for her too. I like the exposure to different languages she gets and the other topics they cover ranging from shapes and numbers to how to handle emotions is a good place for us to start our interaction on the topics.
Of course we do a lot with blocks, toy trains, dolls, books, coloring, etc too. All the basics of childhood. Before actually having kids I'd read a lot about how bad it was to let children watch tv or play video games and at first I was avoiding them but as I gained experience I decided that these studies were misrepresented or wrong because I can clearly see the opposite result. I think leaving your kids in front of the tv all day is a bad idea but giving them good educational resources of all types and using them with your child will produce good results. As always it's about being involved and balancing it all.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
i dont know exatly but i dont accept
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