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I'm a game developer who just finished a few months of home schooling 2 kids, and I agree that games are the future of Education, but not for the same reason as

I'm a game developer who just finished a few months of home schooling 2 kids, and I agree that games are the future of Education, but not for the same reason as the author. 1. I think we'll eventually have software manage the progress of our children as they learn. It will present new ideas when they are ready for them, and test that old ideas stay fresh in memory. Software can do a better job than a teacher can, because the lessons can be tailored to the student. (rather than the whole class at once) 2. The software can do a better job at encouraging a student to "want" to do the tasks. Teachers can use praise, rewards, and sometimes punishments, but software can open up a whole world of other things. What happens next in a story? Leveling up characters or objects you care about? Competition? Mystery Boxes? It was never fun to grind through killing 100 Goblins, but you did it so that you could get the magic sword at the end. The hard part is not software development. The hard part is finding things that students want to work towards, then give them so much of it that they want to do it all day long for 13 years.

throwawaygh 6y ago
1. See "competency-based education/learning". I have some experience doing this. First, it's really hard to do in American schools because of the grade progression system enshrined in funding formulas through rigid scheduling of standardized tests by age (instead of by competency level). Second, software can keep track but definitely can't make the assessment. And keeping track isn't really valuable; teachers can do that today with a really simple Excel spreadsheet. So I don't really see a big role for software here. 2. There's a lot of research on extrinsic motivation in K-12 education. I'm skeptical, to say the least.
- jay_kyburz 6y ago
  Ok, so many things to comment on here. Firstly, there are a lot of other countries than America. Secondly, re grade progression system, the issue is not what broken system you have now, we should strive to improve the education of our children. There are clearly a million was that software can make assessment better. 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. Software never gets tired after reading 30 other essays. Never grumpy, never phones it in. Teachers are human. We study intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation in the games industry as well, 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". But I agree that just bolting some lame point system on top of exiting work is mostly a waist of time. The work and rewards need to be tightly coupled and the hard part is to blur the line between intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. 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 respond to your essay with their own arguments. You can then respond to their augments and pushing the discussion forward. You could do it every day in 10th grade. How good would you be at persuasive writing?
  - throwawaygh 6y ago
    Yes to everything about the US system having some serious problems and being fairly unique relative to the rest of the world. > 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.
    - jay_kyburz 6y ago
      >high-quality grading of high school English/History essays is not possible. I didn't mean to imply we could do it now, but somebody will eventually spends hundred of millions of dollars on this and we'll get there. Machine Learning is not what I mean when I say AI. We need AI's that actually understand text in the same way we do. All jobs will go to machines eventually.
manofstick 6y ago
> It was never fun to grind through killing 100 Goblins, but you did it so that you could get the magic sword at the end. I think you're taking exactly the wrong lesson from that. It wasn't fun to grind through the goblins, but it wasn't challenging either. You did it because you could turn your brain off. I opine that if it did require thinking then the world would now be overrun with goblins...
- jay_kyburz 6y ago
  A lot of my kids math and reading is not hard either. He just needs to do a lot of it, over and over. He is 8 so he is learning a lot of times tables and spelling.
- redbar0n 6y ago
  I think he took the right lesson in that case. I at least did it for the rewards. I for one don't do tedious and mind-numbing tasks, that involve serious involvement over time, just to turn my brain off. I might do the dishes, but that is very time constrained, and not something I repeatedly come back to doing unless I have to. On the contrary, games usually inspire work by precisely _being challenging_. That's what normally keeps people coming back to play them for their own sake (the autotelicity of games).
disqard 6y ago
Check out the PLATO system [0]. It was built in the '60s and was a connected, online learning environment which would tailor its content delivery based on the student's learning rate. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_(computer_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_(computer_system)
- TigeriusKirk 6y ago
  We used PLATO in some class I was in at Ga Tech in the mid 80s, I think maybe chemistry. I remember thinking it was pretty neat, but that it was simplified and I wasn't learning that much from it.

throwawaygh 6y ago

1. See "competency-based education/learning". I have some experience doing this. First, it's really hard to do in American schools because of the grade progression system enshrined in funding formulas through rigid scheduling of standardized tests by age (instead of by competency level). Second, software can keep track but definitely can't make the assessment. And keeping track isn't really valuable; teachers can do that today with a really simple Excel spreadsheet. So I don't really see a big role for software here. 2. There's a lot of research on extrinsic motivation in K-12 education. I'm skeptical, to say the least.

jay_kyburz 6y ago
Ok, so many things to comment on here. Firstly, there are a lot of other countries than America. Secondly, re grade progression system, the issue is not what broken system you have now, we should strive to improve the education of our children. There are clearly a million was that software can make assessment better. 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. Software never gets tired after reading 30 other essays. Never grumpy, never phones it in. Teachers are human. We study intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation in the games industry as well, 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". But I agree that just bolting some lame point system on top of exiting work is mostly a waist of time. The work and rewards need to be tightly coupled and the hard part is to blur the line between intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. 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 respond to your essay with their own arguments. You can then respond to their augments and pushing the discussion forward. You could do it every day in 10th grade. How good would you be at persuasive writing?
- throwawaygh 6y ago
  Yes to everything about the US system having some serious problems and being fairly unique relative to the rest of the world. > 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.
  - jay_kyburz 6y ago
    >high-quality grading of high school English/History essays is not possible. I didn't mean to imply we could do it now, but somebody will eventually spends hundred of millions of dollars on this and we'll get there. Machine Learning is not what I mean when I say AI. We need AI's that actually understand text in the same way we do. All jobs will go to machines eventually.

manofstick 6y ago

> It was never fun to grind through killing 100 Goblins, but you did it so that you could get the magic sword at the end. I think you're taking exactly the wrong lesson from that. It wasn't fun to grind through the goblins, but it wasn't challenging either. You did it because you could turn your brain off. I opine that if it did require thinking then the world would now be overrun with goblins...

jay_kyburz 6y ago
A lot of my kids math and reading is not hard either. He just needs to do a lot of it, over and over. He is 8 so he is learning a lot of times tables and spelling.
redbar0n 6y ago
I think he took the right lesson in that case. I at least did it for the rewards. I for one don't do tedious and mind-numbing tasks, that involve serious involvement over time, just to turn my brain off. I might do the dishes, but that is very time constrained, and not something I repeatedly come back to doing unless I have to. On the contrary, games usually inspire work by precisely _being challenging_. That's what normally keeps people coming back to play them for their own sake (the autotelicity of games).

disqard 6y ago

Check out the PLATO system [0]. It was built in the '60s and was a connected, online learning environment which would tailor its content delivery based on the student's learning rate. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_(computer_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_(computer_system)

TigeriusKirk 6y ago
We used PLATO in some class I was in at Ga Tech in the mid 80s, I think maybe chemistry. I remember thinking it was pretty neat, but that it was simplified and I wasn't learning that much from it.