But, yeah, I could see China using video games in re-education camps, sure.

Some examples of how it has helped me improve:

* Situational awareness and object tracking. Looking at the minimap frequently so I know the last location of each enemy and predicting where they will be moving based on the current state of the match. As a result, I've gotten much better at driving and I feel considerably safer since I can keep track of everything in my surroundings. The car's mirrors are basically your minimap while driving. This same algorithm applies to other real-life situations as well.

* Communication. I've learned how to communicate more effectively to push the team towards victory. It might feel satisfying to insult someone for playing poorly, but that's rarely a winning strategy. Bad players are usually ignorant and they lack a deep understanding of how to play the game. If you provide constructive criticism in a non-hostile or aggressive manner your allies will most often try to integrate that information. Of course, there's all sorts of people, and if someone is unwilling to listen then you just have to play around them as best as possible. Sometimes this means you have to take bad engagement and try to turn things around. This is just learning how to better interact with people.

* Self-awareness and self-responsibility. It's tempting to blame your allies when you make a mistake or a bad call. Sometimes it's definitely their fault, but recognize that you're not perfect and you also make mistakes. Own your failures, don't let your ego get in the way of your growth. Your allies will take your calls more seriously if they see that you're open and honest. Learn to take criticism. Sometimes it's justified and other times it's not, try to integrate the lessons when it's reasonable.

Ever since I started weight training daily I've also experienced improvements in my reaction time, which has had a direct and positive impact on my gaming skills. When I'm hyper-focused on a game, it feels like it's moving in slow-motion and I have way more time to think through each decision.

When I started playing this game I could barely keep track of fights with all of the enemies and spells flying around everywhere. My cursor would frequently get lost in the turmoil and I would just try to spam my abilities into the blob of lights and animations. Now I can largely keep track of each hero, their abilities, and the timings of everything.

> Computer graphics are now being extended into the area of play. There is a popular game, sometimes called Pong, which simulates on a television screen a perfectly elastic ball bouncing between two surfaces. Each player is given a dial that permits him to intercept the ball with a movable “racket.” Points are scored if the motion of the ball is not intercepted by the racket. The game is very interesting. There is a clear learning experience involved which depends exclusively on Newton’s second law for linear motion. As a result of Pong, the player can gain a deep intuitive understanding of the simplest Newtonian physics — a better understanding even than that provided by billiards, where the collisions are far from perfectly elastic and where the spinning of the pool balls interposes more complicated physics. This sort of information gathering is precisely what we call play. ___And the important function of play is thus revealed: it permits us to gain, without any particular future application in mind, a holistic understanding of the world, which is both a complement of and a preparation for later analytical activities.___ But computers permit play in environments otherwise totally inaccessible to the average student.

> A still more interesting example is provided by the game Space War, whose development and delights have been chronicled by Stuart Brand. In Space War, each side controls one or more “space vehicles” which can fire missiles at the other. The motions of both the spacecraft and the missiles are governed by certain rules — for example, an inverse square gravitational field set up by a nearby “planet.” To destroy the spaceship of your opponent you must develop an understanding of Newtonian gravitation that is simultaneously intuitive and concrete. Those of us who do not frequently engage in interplanetary space flight do not readily evolve a right-hemisphere comprehension of Newtonian gravitation. Space War can fill that gap.

> The two games, Pong and Space War, suggest a gradual elaboration of computer graphics so that we gain an experiential and intuitive understanding of the laws of physics. The laws of physics are almost always stated in analytical and algebraic — that is to say, left-hemisphere — terms; for example, Newton’s second law is written F = m a, and the inverse square law of gravitation as F = G M m/r2. These analytical representations are extremely useful, and it is certainly interesting that the universe is made in such a way that the motion of objects can be described by such relatively simple laws. But these laws are nothing more than abstractions from experience. Fundamentally they are mnemonic devices. They permit us to remember in a simple way a great range of cases that would individually be much more difficult to remember — at least in the sense of memory as understood by the left hemisphere. Computer graphics gives the prospective physical or biological scientist a wide range of experience with the cases his laws of nature summarize; but its most important function may be to permit those who are not scientists to grasp in an intuitive but nevertheless deep manner what the laws of nature are about.

> There are many non-graphical interactive computer programs which are extremely powerful teaching tools. The programs can be devised by first-rate teachers, and the student has, in a curious sense, a much more personal, one-to-one relationship with the teacher than in the usual classroom setting; he may also be as slow as he wishes without fear of embarrassment. Dartmouth College employs computer learning techniques in a very broad array of courses. For example, a student can gain a deep insight into the statistics of Mendelian genetics in an hour with the computer rather than spend a year crossing fruit flies in the laboratory. Another student can examine the statistical likelihood of becoming pregnant were she to use various birth control methods. (This program has built into it a one-in-ten-billion chance of a woman’s becoming pregnant when strictly celibate, to allow for contingencies beyond present medical knowledge.)

The list of games with widespread educational impact of some sort is already much larger than most people think. As is usually the observation when edutainment of any sort is written about, the point is really that there are many important fields of education excluded from this revolution. Part of that is probably that the cross section of people that are interested in making a game and those who understand the topic well enough to start with is often not large. Persisting cultural relevance for your creation is very rare, which can be crushing. That a game like Snake Pass exists exposing more people to the uniqueness of snake movement is a near miracle.

Games aren't currently categorized by what a player can learn from them, just as movies rarely are. Sometimes even putting into words what you came away with after an experience is difficult, but you know your perspective on yourself or the world changed in some way. Check any of the movie or game storefronts and see if they have any comprehensive sections to let you filter by what people thought they learned from them. Valve is the most well positioned to implement something like this through Steam, because they rapidly iterate with experiments and have a strong variety of games available with an engaged audience willing to do the tasks necessary.

At the moment, you have to guess what you might learn based on the genre or first impressions. Even still, the ratings for a product aren't there to rate educational value and the time played doesn't tell you how long you have to spend in the game to get that learning experience. You can have a 1-2 star game teach you something priceless, while a 5 star game is a nearly vapid lifeless husk of manipulation. Stores like Steam almost need a completely separate perspective view with its own ratings, own tags and own reviews to make these aspects of games more discoverable. There are people that would be more than thrilled to populate that information in good faith.

I think there are hidden riches waiting to be described when people are encouraged to explain to others what it was that they learned rather than what bugs they encountered or whether the production quality was bad and changes like that could over time apply meaningful pressure to add more important educational moments into their games for measurable marketing value.

Being father's day, it wasn't that long ago that my dad was reminiscing about old TV shows where every episode tried to deliver some moral education. How hard is it to find those old episodes categorized by what it tried to teach? Seinfeld was also saturated with educational value through a bevy of unique situations. South Park is probably more educational than Big Bang Theory, because oddly enough I see BBT as more of a facade.

In short, it's not only the standard academic teachings that are underserved or have poor discoverability in all media and I do think continuing to neglect the explicit identification of this value as newer generations pass up old media of all types will have a cascading cost that will impact generations of families.

The side effect is that there will be some educational value that will be polarizing, like inauthentic diversity education that could become an avoid flag for many (for both good and bad reasons). That could be a good thing if it pressures political activism in media to be less overt in order to have more widespread subtle impact without preaching to people louder than the art itself is able to genuinely speak.

There are exciting times ahead and I'm optimistic of the many educational avenues that will be opening up as people wake up to how they learn over the course of their lifetime, be it calculus or empathy.

I simply don't believe this. My father said there is a hidden club in the military, and those not in the club don't know it exists. You join that club when you get shot at. It irreversibly changes your perspective.

I don't believe anyone can understand heroism without being in that club.

I'm not a member, though I have been threatened at gunpoint.

Creating while using stuff you are learning seems to have a strong "ownership" feel.

> #1-3 happened despite formal schooling

How did they learn to read? Plus I've never met a school that didn't encourage kids to read.

> Making it easier to create video games

Yes, video games are getting harder. And will continue to. GTA 5 cost half a billion and it's easy to see how it could be better. Until we have amazing AI it won't change and then nothing in this blog counts.

> Another insight is that making things easier has nonlinear effects.

This is where the blog gets it totally right and what Education really needs. Just nothing to do with computer games.

[1] Naomi Clark: Why Tom Nook symbolizes village debt in 18th century Japan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BgEnbXPZX4s

This is pretty much exactly what happens in Sudbury schools: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_school https://sudburyvalley.org/

Whoever are putting out the most cutting edge info on technology and innovation (think WhatsApp company blog, InfoQ, the latest and greatest academic books on the things you study), that's where the first mover advantage is for getting a leg up on everybody else in learning the skills you need to be in high demand.

If you wait for someone else to digest that info and then gamify it for you, you're already too late.

There’s this (seems like mostly unchallenged) assumption that more technology improves education.

What if more (or any) technology is actually counter-productive for most learning?

I’m thinking mostly here about k-12 students, and I’m not talking about actually learning technology (which would definitely demand access) —- but everything else?

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaBte1cBi5U

I feel game design technics can be applied to know-how and know-what learning, but for know-why learning, we need more advanced AI.

It was a surprisingly engageming and effective way to learn CSS Grid and I'm almost certainly going to buy the author's next course on https://mastery.games/

Virtually all of the educational software was lame, amounting to Glorified Flash Cards with animated characters and other decorations. Most if not all have been forgotten.

Fast forward to the past decade or so, my kids both grew up in the Internet era. Educational software is now Web based of course. But it's still not very far removed from Glorified Flash Cards. The main new feature is surveillance, ranging from making sure that you covered the entire exercise, catching cheaters, and tracking your online behavior. Note what one of the other posts says about stuff being sold that school districts are likely to buy.

Okay, there were two "educational" software titles in the early 80s, worthy of note: Word processing and BASIC / Pascal. As I understand it, both BASIC and Pascal were created as teaching tools, but both are completely open ended and imply no specific curriculum. They also allow students to learn at their own pace if they want to, and resemble tools that people actually use in the "real world." They also fully expose you to the consequences of your mistakes.

What "educational" titles do we have today? My high school education predated the word processor. I believe that my kids learned to be good writers and thinkers because of the ability to do a lot of writing and have it read and critiqued easily. And I've never stopped learning from having a programming tool at my disposal, though it's Python instead of BASIC today. Once again, those tools contain no built-in agenda and provide total exposure to making and learning from mistakes.

My favorite educational game is Jupyter. It's not just for math and computation. It can be used for science too. Science has a peculiarity, that in order to really learn it, you have to experience how nature can prove you wrong. Building computerized experiments and measurements is one way to be exposed to this.

I believe that education is hard because it involves the brain, and we haven't figured out the brain. We'll be able to automate teaching when we can automate thinking. Meanwhile I think we can use software and automation to eliminate wasteful thinking, such as physical library searching and doing some kinds of mathematical manipulations by hand.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZkX544i8RA

GAME PAGE https://eastbayimmersivegames.itch.io/sheng-tian-episode-1

COMMUNITY FEEDBACK https://www.reddit.com/r/ChineseLanguage/comments/hb762z/10_...

Thanks for sharing. Thanks HN for putting this in the front page ;)

It is possible that software is the future of US K-12 education. I could see huge success for a piece of software inspired by DuoLingo's gamification and Khan Academy's bite-sized quick-"I get it"-gratification content design.

But if you understand the institution of US K-12 schooling -- test scores, funding formulas, etc. -- you quickly realize that this is a quite dystopic future. We will raise an entire generation whose only skill is consuming software that relentlessly optimizes for their test performance. Whole hoards of students who can ace a very particular test on Algebra but never really understand deductive reasoning or the concept of a variable/function. As bad as US schooling is today, and as mediocre as the teaching profession in the US might be, humans-teaching-humans at least provides some check on the system and enables real learning.

So, stepping back, the tech elite's attitude toward US education scares me. It's going to do to our schools what that particular set of neo-liberal MBA programs did to so many iconic American businesses.

Conflating education and the US K-12 schooling institution causes many smart and driven people to:

1. under-estimate the effectiveness of good teaching, and

2. fantastically over-estimate the role of self-directed learning in their own lives[^a].

These two errors result in critics of US education over-estimating the effectiveness of (and under-estimating the dystopian potential of) depersonalized/scalable solutions to education.

--

[^a]: I want to say a bit more about #2. My opinion on this topic changed when I read through a bunch of my old code from middle/high school. I noticed that my programming ability took three significant step-changes during that time. The first happened during the time when I was taking Algebra 1 in 8th grade, when I went from mostly simple CRUD programs to really understanding how dynamic programming worked. I went from building PHP/SQL websites to being able to use data structures other than lists/hash tables and design algorithms for things other than CRUD operations. The second happened during the time I was taking Geometry; that's when I started really understanding how to decompose problems and compose solutions. The final step-change happened during my first programming internship during Junior year. So, I was entirely "self-taught", but clearly something in my formal education was driving my programming ability in ways I didn't realize without explicit and rather time-consuming reflection. And that final step-change was basically intense 1:1 tutoring from a mentor.

I always wanted to play through a final fantasy in French.

Point being, it’s a tough nut to crack, but I’ve seen the potential!

Q2: Who's going to check the assignments? That'll be people, because there's no system in the world that can correctly do anything else but check multiple choice tests and/or provide sensible feedback. We've been trying that for 40 years now, and the results are not hopeful. But if you've got people checking the answers and giving you feedback, you're not reducing the costs by much.

And about that KSP remark: while physics is one of the few areas for which you can build decent simulations, that game won't teach you the basics of combustion, control systems or material science. It just lets you play around. That's fine, but it's no replacement for a PhD.

It's been a lot of fun watching videos of automatic wood/food/etc farms. These people are really learning how to think and design solution based on the world they're in. Some of these inventions are simply ingenious.

Plus, you can do actual code as well, I'm guessing after he's tired of grinding he'll decide he needs to learn how to get things done a bit more systematically.

There's also the economic aspect of it, thinking about how different resources are connected, how trading happens, etc.

Whether it works it hard to say though. Video games are a double edged sword, you can sit for years without learning how to code. You need some way of creating intellectual progress. Plus you need to actually put time into school to pick up credentials, and that competes with whatever else you spend time on.

To me, this isn't about producing educational video games, as much as adding video game elements to existing products and making something new and compelling to the consumers.

An example of this would be Duolingo (https://www.duolingo.com/), it's not a game, but it acts like one by introducing mechanics from games into it's identity such as the concept of leveling up, completing levels, earning points... They also do this on a visual level that feels mostly gratifying for it's users.

Of course educational games also have a place, but they're mostly disdained by children

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEmuEWjHr5c

This is close to how we teach STEM, but games tend to start breaking their own patterns (or the contextual clues for the patterns) in a smoother way. (E.g. portal where you’re gradually asked to think more and more (laterally) “with portals”)

So if we take a dichotomal view on education vs learning, we can say that games will encourage you to learn more effectively (in the context of the game, typically)

I suspect this can be helped with the concept of gameplay loops/cycles.

What games are good at is aiding the reinforcement cycle at the core of learning a skill.

(This cycle is also in any technical skill.)

Games are fun as long as they avoid this repetition and reiteration cycle feeling like a grind. Which is where Educational(tm) material quickly becomes stuck.

Grind is, in a sense, a qualifier of your experience. How the repetition feels to you. If you’re “grinding” with a purpose, and it’s paced so your progress feels steady towards a self-elected goal, then it does not feel like grinding.

If it’s dry-repetitions, then you feel the grind. And that’s the trap of educational (I think)

(The ideas here are still mostly half-cooked, but hopefully it can add to the discussion)

I know the head of the largest gaming magazine in Turkey, who quit his job years ago to consult Turkish game companies as well as the government to build such games. The government basically funded everything but the result is still below what they wished for.

Reforming education is hard. So is building video games. Now they had two problems. Reminds me regex. :)

The games that taught me real lessons were always those hardcore, for fun ones.

Back in the day (2005), we didn't have Turkish translations for DnD rulebooks. I pirated PDF scans and read all of them (very slowly) to be able to play as a DM for my friends. That is still the most challenging reading comprehension practice I've ever done for the English language.

I played the entire Monkey Island series with a dictionary open. Finished Starcraft BW multiple times just to be able grasp the story. Played Medieval Total War with many factions just to see what had been the differences among them during those times. Started researching the cold war after playing MGS3 since it was otherwise a really opaque thing to look at as a kid from Turkey. I owe my almost reflex-like analytical skills to those games where number crunching is the deciding factor for success, such as WoW with its auction house, Dota with its item combinations, Cities Skyline with balancing resources, and all those other tycoon games that I don't even remember.

Finally and most importantly, I'm a computer engineer today because Starcraft BW, Heroes 3 M&M and Warcraft 3 had world editors that can produce maps even for "multiplayer". Thank you Blizzard and 3DO, I owe you people big time <3.

So far my favorites are the Dragonbox games [1].

1: https://dragonbox.com/

And a question for you: while I do share that games are the way to learn things (our instinct for playing, shared with other animals, is precisely so we can learn), do you know any good investors in that sector? My experience is that three words to turn-off an investor is "a game", "educational" and "for the public good". :)

The question is very practical: I develop Quantum Game with Photons (https://quantumgame.io/) and looking for investors to make it a fully viable game and educational platform.

There are a lot of XYZ Mechanic Simulator games which I think have potential to be effective learning tools. They won't teach you muscle memory, but a good one can distill a lot of experience into a shorter timeframe than normal. A mechanic simulator can teach you engine diagnosis and repair quickly because you can fast-forward the slow, mundane parts. You can also pace the 'lessons' for better retention, building incrementally on concepts.

We've already seen this be successful in aviation and racing.

On that vein, I've been wishing for a Zachtronics-style game that teaches electronics, starting with LEDs and resistors and moving on to more complex circuits.

I don't think it is that hard to make a video game considering the many tools that exist to simplify video game creation. What is hard is making a video game that is also fun to play.

Some of the tools which let you write a video game without coding experience.

1. Scratch - https://scratch.mit.edu/

2. GameMaker - https://www.yoyogames.com/gamemaker

3. Dreams - http://dreams.mediamolecule.com/

Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23465862

The article rightly prizes tacit knowlege, but does not lay any argument for why games would give us tacit knowledge.

Tacit knowledge is primarily gained only by experience, and I don't see how games give us that in ways that the majority of folks would can say they had unambiguously helped us in the kinds of real world tasks we care about.

Some games are used to train soldiers, as far as I know.

I also read, that companies should hire MMORPG clan leaders, because they usually know how to lead ppl.

The new Spike set looks promising.

I don’t hold it against them though. Nobody was going to tell me how to teach physics.

Fun fact(?): Back when I was teacher my friend Eddie (math teacher) decided we could teach pretty sophisticated ideas to our community college students if we used this fancy program called “Mathematica.” We wrote a grant and got a good price from Wolfram and after that they introduced a pricing for community colleges. This was way back in the ‘90s- but I don’t remember the year.

The point is, nobody sold me software. I decided what my problem was and set about solving it. I suspect most teachers either (a) do that too or (b) want an accepted solution.

factoria is another good one that's really really fun and can also be really really educational if you think about the materials and resources and how you combine them. also if you really want to go crazy with it learning some math will help you fully optimize your factory but it's some pretty complicated math, at least for me.

Even young generations, with casual gamer parents, can hold positions like "videogames are banned at home until our son is 8".

Zachtronics does some very good abstract ones. Quite a few of his games are even outright gamifying assembly programming. Things like factorio are on the more 'applied' or concrete end of the spectrum.

I think I didn't so much learn new things so much as I got an applied perspective on things that I had already learned. It's one thing to read about value added in a textbook, it's another thing to actually experience it in person buying reagents and selling potions in WoW. You can read about the benefit of fuel transferring lifting stages (aka "asparagus staging") in an article it's another thing to reach that design in KSP, and understand why SpaceX tried to do it.

You're making the massive assumption that someone plays a game with the goal of learning something. Learning is something that happens subconsciously during game play and that's why games are so effective. I played KSP for a few months but I would never go out of my way to learn orbital mechanics or rocket design on my own. If you told me I need a 4-5 year degree then I wouldn't even start.

Heck, I wouldn't even start with a short technical book because I have no reason to read one. In KSP you are put into an environment where your learned knowledge is actively useful in completing game objectives. The reality is that people would just skip learning entirely.

I also take issue with the idea of hyper optimizing learning as a beginner. Most people don't know what the most effective method of learning is for a given topic is precisely because they are beginners. Even if someone wants to actively study a topic it can take quite a while to get into the mindset and find the necessary resources. You know what? Finding a good game is hard but finding a good book can be even harder! Usually the fastest way to find good books is to just read a lot of books and eventually you just happen to read a good one. Learning the same thing that the game taught you through books probably takes more time than you think simply because the book would have to be equivalent to the game.

The takeaway should be that playing a game and active studying are so far apart they might as well not even belong in the same comment.

This is a false generalization. You don't have to choose a big-name New York PR agency. There are thousands of other shops that are quite affordable. Some are just one or two people, and can be surprisingly effective if you pick the right one.

https://archive.org/details/msdos_Castle_of_Dr._Brain_1991

This is one of the reasons I don't particularly care for motivation studies, as I believe it's only a temporary method to generate traction. Once learning becomes difficult, it requires a higher order of motivation I call "discipline" to maintain.

But back to MOOCs, there is work on MOOC forum analysis[1]. In short, forum activity and the people you associate with in an educational forum can have a significant impact on your grade. Note this study was post-hoc analysis, but students that primarily discussed non-course relevant topics were more likely to fail the course.

There is also the fact that MOOC students come from a variety of life experiences. Students of different countries have different cultures and as a result, will behave differently [2]. France, for example, only wanted to view the course in [2], not engage.

I think the beauty of a MOOC is the accessibility and automated feedback feature that from their design. Beyond that they suffer from a lot of human conditions that can't really be controlled without removing or reducing those features. Plus, as I mention, there isn't a lot of cog psych research on "discipline" yet to identify the qualities that encourage its development besides Duckworth's "grit" (if I'm wrong I'd love to be pointed towards them).

[1] http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1446/GEDM_2015_Submission_2.pdf

[2] https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED592695.pdf

One reservation I've had about Khan Academy, is a "gather college textbooks and distill them" story doesn't work well when textbooks so poorly describe domains. When MIT did a VR intro to cell biology, they reached out to people with direct research expertise. And found them very intrinsically motivated to contribute. But it's still no small effort.

Creating excellent stories, especially interdisciplinary ones, requires far more intensive domain expertise than is usually appreciated. And seems more at the scale of (neglected) societal infrastructure, than something that can be MVPed in passing.

But perhaps excellence in stories is more than is needed. At least to develop and prove the delivery mechanism. But coming from science ed, I think of misconceptions as toxins that can severely diminish outcomes.

So as I read the Boston Harbor story slide, I thought... The big heavy canvas fluttered away?!? Is there a hurricane? Was anyone killed? Did they launch a boat to recover it? Why was the label sun-weathered if it was under a canvas? Did they really use printed labels on sea cargo? I'd have naively thought branding the wood more likely. And so on.

An issue with science education graphics, is they often mix aspects done with great care for correctness, with aspects that are artistic license with little connection to reality. And students lack the background to identify which aspects are which. Creating rich ecosystems of misconceptions that compromise understanding.

But students' understanding of history is and will remain so poor, that perhaps there's little there to damage. Content might be pure upside, regardless of shortcuts taken to keep creation costs plausible. At least until we do better.

Re Gates Foundation... perhaps a useful model is that they think of patents and established companies as keys to impact at scale... and thus do things which can seem less than ethical if one doesn't share that perspective.

Also when I was kind I wasn’t really able to build a good city. I understood years later this is because the game expects cities to be built in the US fashion: big residencial/commercial/industrial zones separated from each other, linked by roads, lot of roads. And square based layouts. That was totally different from where I lived so I’ve always found the cities layout that works in the game where very artificial. So there wasn’t too much to learn about city planning.

Also lincity/linticy-ng are great too, even more for a climate changing world.

Speaking of choice and marketing, wonder why McDonald’s in the US still lacks a veggie burger. Is it based on a business decision?

Yes. Though it can probably teach you enough that you have enough scaffolding already in your brain that you can get through a textbook without getting lost?

Doing some pre-planning of your factory's eventual layout will have you advancing through the tech tree much, much faster (and without rebuilding critical sections all the time!)

You have a fundamental misunderstanding about what a PR company does. You're thinking about an advertising agency. They're not the same thing.

Yeah, every parent these days seems to have the attitude "god forbid we teach more than one algorithm for addition, but it's unacceptable that you don't have CS in middle school!" And even get outright angry if you try to point out that teaching more than one algorithm that meets the specifications of addition over naturals is CS. But have the kids "build" some kit robot and you're a damn hero.

The most frustrating thing about education is trying to explain to voters why their child has to learn something (at a young age) that the parent doesn't understand.

You see this a lot in parental complaints about Common Core math.

Over-involved stay-at-home moms who still can't add double digit numbers without using their fingers will complain that they don't understand their first grader's math homework. The point of the math homework is to teach mental math strategies for adding numbers together.

Also, parents of fifth grade kids who are frustrated that they can't help their kids understand conditional probabilities, and express that frustration by telling us to "stop teaching their kids about gambling".

It's impossible as a school board member to say "look, it's embarrassing that 10 year old German kids are better than you at math. Sorry we failed you. We're trying to do better by your kid."

That's the problem. I think if you define "educational" as the curriculum taught in school, this is not possible. There's no way around working a ton of math problems to get better at math. You maybe can make it a bit more engaging if you pack it in a video game, but it will never be fun for most people.

Therefore, I think, the educational role of video games must be to spark interest. For example, KSP sparks interest in aerospace engineering, and I bet there's a significant number of people who went on to study rocketry because they played KSP.

Sparking interest is an important function. In fact, I think it becomes increasingly important as a lot of material and courses are now available for little money ubiquitously. Great education starts with a spark of interest.

Let me explain in more detail:

Back in the days, an important part of going to school was having access to knowledge. Now, thanks to the internet and millions of amazing humans, knowledge is accessible all over the place, virtually for no money. Today, the motivation to learn something is therefore more important. To get motivated, first you need to know that something exists, and second you need to know if you like it or not. Before motivation comes sparking interest. And here, video games have an extremely important role to play - and unlike "educational" video games that are math exercises disguised as video games, video games that can try to achieve the spark can be genuinely fun to play.

About 'German Grammar': check out Heaven's Vault https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaven%27s_Vault

But honestly, humans don't learn languages by understand their grammars with the logic part of their brain. Games would be ideal to produce comprehensible input, and test players on their comprehension via actions, instead of making them reply with words.

There's some evidence that trying to produce language to early in your learning just ingrains bad habits. So instead you can just follow increasingly complex instructions to show that you understand. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input_hypothesis

WWII is a pretty common setting for games. Making the German protagonists communicating only in German would be a first step to incentive learning the language.

I'm actually still working on something similar but, basically, no longer trying to run a business selling educational games (more, profits from commercial development contracts with actual budgets funding the cooler projects).

(note: I am not OP)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCafé

> Software will eventually be able to read an essay and provide feedback on how well the argument was made, as well as the nuts and bolts of how sentences are put together... Imagine for example the task is to convince an AI to buy you a pony. You have to write a persuasive essay as to why you should have a pony. The AI can...

No, it can't.

Giving good feedback on essays in high school English or History courses is AI-complete.

"Some type of feedback" is already possible (you can go buy essay graders today -- go try one), but if we go that route we'll mostly just be teaching people how to optimize for a (very broken) grading algorithm.

"'The AI' will then <do thing that we spend years teaching people how to do well>" is exactly how you end up with horribly shitty ML code destroying people's lives.

TBH we're not even there with high school math yet, which is a lot easier than high school essays.

I have a CS PhD, publish in AI conferences, and have taught high school. I am fundamentally absolutely certain that high-quality grading of high school English/History essays is not possible. I'm also certain that we could build "something" that "grades essays" and will have catastrophic negative outcomes for a generation of students if adopted. Students will learn how to write for one really dumb algorithm, and then there will be years of cleanup at universities and workplaces afterward teaching them how to actually write for humans.

> but to be clear, _almost all_ motivation in education is extrinsic now. Nobody is doing their math homework because its fun. They do it so they won't "fail".

My classroom experience suggests that a) this isn't true, and b) there are lots of different types of extrinsic motivation; grades are actually not the most important motivator for most students. People are really complex, and everyone has different motivators.

Better assessments won't magically lead to better education if the system continues to ignore the results of those assessments. The US education system doesn't need better assessments, it needs to start actually using the assessment results that it already has.

Learning the first language as a baby takes many years - and even after these years, you are still only on a "baby talk level". That is why I don't consider these "natural" approaches for learning a language to be a good idea - they are far too slow to be economical.

Someone taught me a cool bit of willful ignorance long ago: After choosing a profession one should try to solve all problems from that domain however poorly it fits. That way one learns relevant stuff rather than lose oneself in a second or 3rd profession. Of course it turns things into impossible challenges but if you get better at what you do the time is always worth it. A gardener should solve all his problems with gardening.

You "win" the elections by teaching (deliberately not doing everything else)

> The most frustrating thing about education is trying to explain to voters why their child has to learn something (at a young age) that the parent doesn't understand.

You mean the most challenging thing is to teach the voter why one has to learn something at a young age.

It has teaching in it twice! I would love to share my thoughts but you have near infinitely more experience doing this. (you have been warned haha!)

The challenge would be to get people to sit themselves down in front of your blackboard. Use youtube if necessary.

Then you simply brag endlessly about what you do, why you do it, what the students though hard work, your effort and good parenting have accomplished and how that will benefit them later on. Use examples!

We have a garden 6 by 12 meter with a shed in it 3 by 3 meters. The tiles are 30 by 30 cm. 72 square meter minus 9 is 63 square meters! How many tiles do we need?

10 by 10 is 100 tiles, the tiles are 30 cm long so 10 of them is 3 meters! 3 times 3 is 9 square meter! One tile is therefore?

Then you point at mum (the camera) and say correct! 9 meter is 900 cm divided by 100 is 9 square cm per tile!

We needed 63 meters which is 6300 cm therefore we need 6300 divided by 9 is 700 tiles!

Thanks to my sophisticated arithmetic I'm able to calculate such things and order my tiles without giving it a second thought.

Your kids can learn this too (point at the audience or camera again) and take on ever greater challenges in life.

~the end~

I would stand on my desk saying that but you have to give it your own style of course.

I was unable to find anything specific beyond "apps we determine to be outdated" here https://developer.apple.com/support/app-store-improvements/

The solution is to work on curriculum and textbook some more.

As a kid, I picked up a familiarity with history and geography that was miles ahead of my peers due to games like Total War and Close Combat, which aren’t sold as educational at all.

I think people innately want to learn whatever they need to know to accomplish their goals, and it’s way easier to give people goals and tools than it is to teach them about tools in the abstract.

Even Maxis itself actually failed, they went bankrupt and EA bought them and ditched their educational games (what remained of Maxis started to just pump out The Sims series one after the other).

But unless you are aiming at a really, really wide market, and is either lucky or get exposure help, you won't go far.

I noticed for example "Kingdom Come: Deliverance" has a LOT of information about medieval era in the Holy Roman Empire, still they aimed to be a "AAA" game, and the information is tucked inside the in-game manual.

And The Sims simplified, but made me (and probably others) aware of quantified personal needs; you need x amount of sleep per night or you'll accrue 'sleep debt' and distress, you need social contact to fill that meter, etc.

Minecraft has an educational mode / version btw, there was one game our son was playing that basically made him go out into the sea and identify various types of sea life. I mean it's all Minecraftified (?) and abstracted, but they do pick up a lot of things from it.

I'd still like him to read more books though, given that his language skills are pretty bad.

Let parents have vouchers to attend my school and I will.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_(philosophy_of_...

Let's put aside for a moment the optics of a school teacher having their class play Poker (even though obviously they wouldn't be using money). I can imagine a lesson plan going something like:

1. Have kids play some individual games with each other.

2. Stop the games, and go over some of the actual math concepts behind Poker. At this point, the kids are engaged and will want to learn better strategies.

3. Run through a game as a group, with the teacher asking the class what they should do each turn. Ask students to explain why they think one move is better than another, get brief discussions going where applicable, and write probabilities on the board.

4. Let the students play another round of individual games to apply what they've learned.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3057889

Video games are good at getting through to those who don't respond well to adults stepping in and contextualizing things all the time.

Sure, I'll go with that. So we've got some percentage of 3% who see the school system as a failure. That's a tiny percentage. This is why data is important. I'll even agree that the real percentage of parents or graduates who think the school system is a failure is much higher. But how much higher?

> You’re really digging in here, and seem to be taking personally

Not at all. I'm interested in learning and I don't trust anecdote. I trust data. So I was hoping you have data but it seems like you won't ever have data because you're convinced that anecdote is enough. For some of us, it's not enough. We like data because we've seen anecdote paint a false reality far too many times.

> something which seems plainly obvious to many successful people: school failed to prepare them for their professional lives,

I'll make the opposite claim: it's not obvious to most successful people. It's also not obvious to the companies hiring people. Yes new employees need some training. But they do not need years of retraining to compensate for an "abject failure" of a school system that trained them for twelve years. Most employees start adding value pretty quickly. I've run my own companies. I was happy with how quickly employees started adding value.

So this is another example of why anecdote fails to help us understand a situation. My anecdote is different from your anecdote is different from someone else's anecdote.

> in many cases school was a physiologically damaging, stifling experience.

School or being around other kids? Kids are brutal. Work is also too often a physiologically damaging, stifling experience. But usually not as brutal as children can be to each other. What might prepare you for success in that kind of work environment?

> This isn’t an argument based upon data, it’s an argument based upon a constellation of anecdotal data.

Perhaps there is a constellation out there, but I don't see it and you're not willing to show it other than saying "trust me, it's obvious a lot of people feel this way".

What 's obvious to me is that Americans have one of highest standards of living in the world and the largest and most important economy in the world, along with a very high median wage. So what's hard to believe is that this has been the case for so long when 90% of the children who will go on to contribute to that economy as adults were educated in a system that is an "abject failure" when it comes to preparing them for their professional lives. That the twelve years of public education they went through needs to be thrown out, and companies have to start from the beginning in teaching all of the basic skills the schools failed to teach them.

I would also extend this to all developed countries. They all offer a high standard of living, even to lower middle class people. Most often healthcare is considered a human right. How does all this progress manage to happen when the first twelve years of education are an "abject failure"?

With all of that said, I don't want to silence or dismiss you or anyone who had a horrible time at school. For sure I had some less than ideal experiences myself. There is a lot that can be improved. But if we are going to improve, it has to start with moving from anecdote to data. We need to understand causation and what can be fixed and what is outside the responsibility of the school system and should be the responsibility of parents and society at large.

We are not going to get there thanks to articles that promise video games are a silver bullet. If many developers truly do see education as an "abject failure", then they are going to have to do what I have done: teach, write educational software, and in short get deeply involved in the industry you are trying to improve. By which point you will have a far more nuanced understanding of what does and does not work and you'll firmly be out of "it's all an abject failure" territory.

Source please? I have been working in Brazil for the past few years and the education level here is nowhere near 1970s Europe. Not even close. The public primary school system is so bad that any family who can afford it - even poor people - pay for private school. Sometimes only a $100 a month for the cheapest private schools. They are not very good, but they are better than the public schools and so there are an estimated 40,000 private schools in Brazil. About 40% of the primary and secondary schools. So about 60% of Brazilians get a very substandard primary and secondary school education.

At least 26% of the population earns below $56 USD a month and as a result the government gives them $13 a month but only if their children are vaccinated and stay in school. That should give you an idea of the level of poverty and the tax base upon which the public schools in those areas have to operate on.

Conversely, the free government run universities are excellent and hard to get into. Ironically, the vast majority of students accepted are from elite and expensive private primary and secondary schools. So the free public universities are mostly a service for wealthy or at least upper middle class kids.

Your claim that almost all of Latin America is more highly educated now than 1970s Europe is highly suspect unless you can provide something to back that up.

I made no such claim. I said that education was a consequence of economic growth, not vice versa. That is all. If you do a regression of changes in education over time versus changes in economic growth there is no trend. Changes in education do not cause changes in economic growth.

That Brazil is not competing with 1970s France is irrelevant to my claim. Education is a consequence rather than a cause of growth.

Even their conclusion "the evidence favors..." is far less strong than your insistence that growth is definitely the causation. This is exactly why I always ask for sources.

From a more recent study that includes some meta-analysis:

> The relationship between cognitive skills and economic growth has now been demonstrated in a range of studies. As reviewed in Hanushek and Woessmann (2008), these studies employ measures of cognitive skills that draw upon the international testing of PISA and of TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) (along with earlier versions of these). The uniform result is that the international achievement measures provide an accurate measure of the skills of the labour force in different countries and that these skills are closely tied to economic outcomes. [1]

> Second, to tackle the most obvious reverse-causality issues, Hanushek and Woessmann (2009) separate the timing of the analysis by estimating the effect of scores on tests conducted until the early 1980s on economic growth in 1980-2000. In this analysis, available for a smaller sample of countries only, test scores pre-date the growth period. The estimate shows a significant positive effect that is about twice as large as the coefficient used in the simulations here. In addition, reverse causality from growth to test scores is also unlikely because additional resource in the school system (which might become affordable with increased growth) do not relate systematically to improved test scores (e.g. Hanushek, 2002). [1]

Before you get too excited that the study focuses on test scores, rather than education, I recommend you read the study.

By now it's clear to me that you're operating on confirmation bias for a personal theory you favor rather than having evaluated all of the available and most recent studies. You're working only to prove yourself right and not putting effort into proving yourself wrong. So I'm going to stop here.

[1] http://www.oecd.org/pisa/44417824.pdf