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."

Comments

Hidden Math in MMOs

[Greyfox]

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.

Re:Hidden Math in MMOs

[Anonymous Coward]

Educational games tend to be pretty pathetic

I happen to work for an educational video game company, www.bigbrainz.com and we feel that most companies rush out products to cover a ton of subjects. This approach isn't necessarily bad, but we've tried to focus on one thing, the times tables, and we do it well. The graphics in Timez Attack are amazing compared to other educational games and children really seem to love it. We also notice that when a child does well in one subject, in our case math, they tend to do better in other subjects. We hope to continue on to other subjects but we are really focusing on quality. We hope that other companies join us in our pursuit in high quality education video games and not simply games that are really flash cards on computer.

QTL

[Securityemo]

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.

Kudu is insulting to 8-year-olds

[crgrace]

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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Taking Things Apart

[KalvinB]

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.

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