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Educational games. Hear me out. The way we teach us basically how we did it 500 years ago. This is stupid, boring and not scalable. We dont have enough teachers

by iammjm 4y ago

Educational games. Hear me out. The way we teach us basically how we did it 500 years ago. This is stupid, boring and not scalable. We dont have enough teachers, attention span is short, education is costly. So we need something that scales, is fun and involves all types of media plus gamifies education. Think Skyrim or GTA meets MS Encarta

tnorthcutt 4y ago
You might find https://www.synthesis.com/ https://www.synthesis.com/ interesting. They develop games in-house that teach kids problem-solving, collaboration skills, dealing with unknowns/dynamic conditions, etc. etc.
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spikyman 4y ago
I'm not seeing a more fundamental issue in this thread; What are we trying to teach, and why? It's easy to subject people to studying math, history, etc. What if we wanted to teach appropriate social interaction? Moral analysis (NOT morals)? Critical thinking? Developing self knowledge? The problem is that we need interactions with live humans to explore these subjects. Gaming in the metaverse won't do the job.
- fizzpack 4y ago
  This seems key to me. We need to teach people how to learn autonomously. And provide them with quality tools to learn from.
acidburnNSA 4y ago
I've been exploring Encarta 96 on a Windows 95 VM I've been curating for active nostalgia and I gotta say it's pretty awesome. I feel like we are missing out on some magic from those days. Even the intro screen still gives me goosebumps
- darepublic 4y ago
  I remember Encarta 9x as well
phailhaus 4y ago
Interactive visualizations/simulations go a really far way towards helping students learn complex topics. Gamification is tough because you need a human to effectively react to a student's particular shortcomings and help them reframe problems.
CitrusFruits 4y ago
I TA'ed at a tech camp a while back, and there was a 12 year old from Mexico city that had astonishingly good English. I asked him how he was so good at it and he just answered "Skyrim". So yeah, kids soak up a lot of info through games.
- cloudymeatballs 4y ago
- Delk 4y ago
  I basically learnt most of my written English from games as a teenager. They didn't directly help as much with speaking, but hanging out in game chats or IRC for a ridiculous number of hours actually helped with that to an extent as well. Even though it's still written rather than spoken, it's still a more spontaneous form of communication. I took English as a foreign language in school since I was 8 or 9, so I learnt some of the basics there. But if I was faced with a spontaneous conversation, no matter how simple, I easily got tongue-tied. (I was also shy and socially awkward in general, which didn't help.) Spending those hours in chats is when I started getting more comfortable with spontaneous communication. I'm not necessarily a huge fan of gamification in general, which might be a generational thing, but learning as a side product of something you're interested in can be a huge boost. It doesn't have to be games, though. Lots of people probably learnt a lot of English from music or books they were engrossed with.
nicolas_ 4y ago
Emmanuel Freund (Shadow - gaming pc in the cloud - founder) in France is working on PowerZ (https://powerz.tech/ https://powerz.tech/) and has raised more than $10M.
whoisburbansky 4y ago
I credit a huge portion of my current career and general math and reading skills to having a couple CDs of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JumpStart https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JumpStart games early in my childhood. It's a pity I can't think of very many things that I would be comfortable pointing my own kids to and hope for the same effect.
mrtksn 4y ago
I don't believe at all in gamification in education. The kick that inspires new scientists and engineers comes from the gratification of learning or figuring out something as nothing feels better than figuring out how/why something is happening and how to push it to it's edge cases. Even chasing grades is a perverse incentive IMHO.
- jobs_throwaway 4y ago
  PHDs are never going to be learning through games but I think at lower levels of education there's a ton of room to inspire a desire to learn something more deeply through games.
  - xdavidliu 4y ago
    I agree that games intended to teach academic subjects are very hard to get right. Interestingly, when you take the arrow in the other direction, ordinary video games have sometimes been the arena of some very advanced "doing science", e.g.: "Speedrunning as a gateway to scientific endeavours" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8_1lQ2KH50 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8_1lQ2KH50 "The Complete History of the Super Mario 64 A Button Challenge" https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL94lfiY18_CgWGQzweD_aVjsFXiRi6kn5 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL94lfiY18_CgWGQzweD_a...
  - lukeschlather 4y ago
    Kerbal Space Program seems like a game which both can both inspire newcomers and could also actually be used by PHDs to bounce around ideas. At the least it seems like some actual astrophysics PHDs rely on it for inspiration.
- digdugdirk 4y ago
  Think of it instead as designing tools that make learning fun, and enables that gratifying feeling you described. Lego, for example, has probably created generations of people with incredibly high levels of visual-spatial intuition who've all been inspired to go on to become designers and engineers of all kinds. It doesn't have to occur within the walls of a school for something to be considered education.
mateo411 4y ago
Sounds like ad-tech masquerading as ed-tech. There are a lot of ed-tech companies around. I don't know how many take this strategy, but I'm sure there is a few.
commoddity 4y ago
I agree. Anyone every play the educational mode in Assassins Creed Origins? It basically took that game's massive, amazing and detailed map of ancient Egypt, removed all the combat and replaced it with what was essentially a huge virtual museum. You could go run around Egypt, go inside the temples & pyramids, explore the farms, cities and the Nile delta and listen to audio clips and view slideshows about actual Egyptian history. It was legitimately really amazing and educational. It essentially piggybacked off of the colossal amount of work that goes into creating a AAA open world game's map and repurposed it to create something educational. Would love to see more of that type of thing.
- reb 4y ago
  First time hearing about this! Not a big AC fan, but this is more than enough reason to snag it; is that a platform-specific mode?
  - throwaway5959 4y ago
    It’s on PC, Xbox and PS at least, not sure about others. Really cool experience because it also includes pictures of artifacts and audio commentary from scholars. They did the same for Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla aka Viking Simulator.
    - sofixa 4y ago
      It's also on Stadia, and also in the Odyssey (Ancient Greece) game.
- subpixel 4y ago
  I just watched this footage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySlKKe38Pnk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySlKKe38Pnk I can't help but think how awesome it would be to do that as a means of learning about WWI and WWII for example.
- chrisweekly 4y ago
  Related tangent - I'd love to see more games (whether or not explicitly "educational") that are more collaborative and less focused on violence. I remember playing GTA and enjoying its then-new (to me, at least) open-world dynamics and imagining a more peaceful version or mode where you'd play the role of an EMT or field surgeon, running around helping people and saving lives or something.
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Pandabob 4y ago
Off-topic but a little tangential: There's a designer named Zander Whitehurst[0] on TikTok/Youtube Shorts teaching Figma in 30 to 60 second videos and I'm in love with the format. I do wonder whether it's effective, but I've learned quite a bit of Figma from him. [0]: https://www.tiktok.com/@zander_whitehurst https://www.tiktok.com/@zander_whitehurst
WhiteOwlEd 4y ago
Working on it. As a first iteration, I am thinking video games meets data visualization. Details at https://www.whiteowleducation.com/courses/data-visualization-metaverse/ https://www.whiteowleducation.com/courses/data-visualization....
fuzzythinker 4y ago
Agree except for being "boring". I don't see educational games in anyway as boring. If you (reader, not iammjm) see it as boring, you are not the right person to build it.
nescioquid 4y ago
Simply changing a game's locale to the target language you are trying to acquire is such an amazing immersion experience with the language -- and this wasn't even intended as an educational tool! If playing Skyrim, you hear the target language constantly, utterances are subtitled so written and heard language can reinforce each other, and practically everything you look at is labeled in the target language. Best of all, you needn't feel so bad for spending all that time playing games!
- qsort 4y ago
  The only reason why I speak English is because I spent my teen years flaming strangers on Slashdot, you insensitive clod.
  - jamiek88 4y ago
    I always like reading about, and comments from, ESL people who learned basically Internet English. Subtly different to UK and USA English but comprehensible by all.
    - adeelk93 4y ago
      Subtly different how?
      - qsort 4y ago
        I'm pretty sure even a casual observer could tell I'm not a native speaker given a sufficiently large sample of my writings. GP is right, the correct thing to do is to just embrace that I'll never be as fluent, as natural in English as I am in Italian. Learning English at a relatively young age allowed me to talk to people literally across the ocean. This very conversation we're having right now would have been impossible otherwise. I'm not upset in the slightest. I count my blessings.
      - Hextinium 4y ago
        Internet English has different "regional variety" than real life, for example I have litterally never heard "grok" in real life but I read it here fairly often.
debunn 4y ago
I work for an EdTech company called Prodigy Game ( https://www.prodigygame.com https://www.prodigygame.com ) - we have Math and English adventure games that help students in grades 1 - 8 learn at school or at home. While I don't think this is a good substitute for teachers / is going to disrupt the entire education space, I think it is an excellent supplement to what is currently in place, and can really help kids want to learn outside of schools. I'd be happy to see more products grow in this space for sure!
happymellon 4y ago
Typing of the Dead did more for my touch typing than anything else. I remember loads of educational games from my youth.
bashmelek 4y ago
I would like to see a fun game to help me with differential equations. People still want to learn more advanced topics and I feel that not enough edtech exists for learning beyond the formative years, and even less for beyond high school. As an example, Khan Academy has received much praise, but I was less impressed to be honest.
ska 4y ago
It's not a crazy idea, but also not a panacea. So not crazy, people have been having for centuries (i.e. the game part predates "computer game" part). I don't want to say there can't be a real breakthrough that makes this a much bigger educational impact, but it's probably important to remember that as an area lot of smart people have tried this pretty hard (including your characterization of open-world + encarta) , and results are not that impressive, so far.
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groby_b 4y ago
Maybe. Maybe not. I think the questions of "who pays", "who profits", and "who controls the material" matters a lot. So does learning theory (I don't think games will be the only way to learn). It is definitely a field we should pay close attention to if we care about learning. For anybody interested in the space, I strongly recommend "What Videogames Have to Teach Us About Learning And Literacy" (James Paul Gee)
porcc 4y ago
When I read this I can't help but think of the meme that goes: Why don't we just like, put nicotine in salad so everyone can get addicted to salad?
copperx 4y ago
I was watching a Pixar movie and wondered, "what if these resources were spent in creating, say, scientifically accurate animations of biological processes for people who are learning chemistry, anatomy, genetics, etc." We all have seen small animations of processes, but some are inaccurate or simplified due to time and money constraints. I've dreamed about this since I was a kid.
- Darkskynet 4y ago
  On the topic of 'scientifically accurate animations of biological processes'. You may know of these videos, but I thought these might be worth sharing for others interested in this topic: Here is a TEDTalk by Drew Berry: Animations of unseeable biology. (uploaded in 2012) https://youtu.be/WFCvkkDSfIU https://youtu.be/WFCvkkDSfIU Here is also a more recent video by Veritasium on YT that also talks about these animations. (uploaded in 2017) https://youtu.be/X_tYrnv_o6A https://youtu.be/X_tYrnv_o6A
  - copperx 4y ago
    I did not. That's fantastic. Thank you.
WheelsAtLarge 4y ago
Agree, education via a game makes lots of sense. Math is one of those that is perfectly suited since repetition helps to learn it. There have been companies that specilized in educational games in the past yet they are no more. In the late nighties there were a few that were giants. If I remember well Software Toolsworks was one of them. It got acquired but now it's gone. I suspect the reason we don't see more of them is that education in the US is mostly free so it make's little sense for parents to spend money on something they already have. And teachers don't want to introduce something that threatens their lively hood and way of working. It's just a guess on my part.
- bdw5204 4y ago
  That's why you'd probably want to target the homeschool market if you had a startup making educational games. Homeschooling seems to be increasingly popular since the pandemic so that's a growing market and one that is probably not as dominated by very religious families as it used to be.
- buscoquadnary 4y ago
  > And teachers don't want to introduce something that threatens their lively hood and way of working. It's just a guess on my part. This is wholy untrue, my mother has several decades in elementary education and they would love something like that. The problem is that teachers and schools often don't have the autonomy to acquire these things, a teacher can't buy 20 copies of a game for students as even at 10 bucks that's 200 dollars. So at the budget level required to make games available you then have to go up to the district level. (Stop me if this next part sounds familiar) the District administration is pretty far removed from the students that will be using the product and the teachers using it to teach. Because of this technology companies are incentivized to build their product to the wishes of the district administrators rather than for the students and teachers using the product. This process is helped by the trips, gifts, and "favors" the sales people can use while pitching to the district level decision makers. So the district goes with the product that checks off the most items on a big checklist, as well as if they are a bad administrator, gives them more control over the students and classrooms. Meanwhile the product that was actually purchased doesn't actually help the students, or facilitate learning because it turns out it is way easier to put together a "study" that shows "leading educators" (who were former district administrators) assure that it will increase X metric by Y%. Sorry, had to get this off my chest.
arminiusreturns 4y ago
I pitched such a thing to a department of education grant program and got rejected. I called it the Meta Educational Environment for Simulation and Gaming (MEESG) (long before FB thought about turning into Meta). The pitch was to create a core open source platform for which subject matter experts could create their own specialized training packages, tied in with a web interface for teachers/students to track progress, gamifying the educational process, which was the key to engaging the students (feedback on progress). Oh well, I still like the idea though. One of the biggest benefits was that certain trainings are either very expensive just due to materials, etc, or are very dangerous (high-voltage electrician stuff for example), and doing it virtually would have a much lower risk and cost less.
- gault8121 4y ago
  That's basically what I am doing with Quill.org (I'm the founder / executive director). Quill is a platform for learning tools and games - we support six web applications that plug into a common, open source platform where teachers can assign activities to students and monitor results. At the moment, our applications are all focused on literacy, and they are more "tool-like" than "game-like". However, we use AI to assess writing, and the AI creates a game-like experience of writing different responses and getting different pieces of feedback (somewhat like a MUD RPG). We're creating the applications in-house now, and the API is not public, but the hope is to open it up in the future to allow others to launch tools and game on our platform. Quill is now serving more than six million students across the United States, about 12% of all K-12 students.
rochak 4y ago
As an alternative, wouldn't it be better to invest into games that teach you something or sharpen your thinking? Playing fun games that elicited curiosity and boosted logical thinking had a lot to do with how I ended up doing what I do for a living (software engineering).
theonething 4y ago
Short attention span is in large part because of computers, phones, etc. So putting ed games on them doesn't seem to address the core problem. Our solution has been a no screen time policy. Education is strictly non-digital and a lot of real world, hands on learning and dialogue with real people. And our kid has loved books since infancy. Does it have to be so strict? I'm not sure, but I do know that our society is inundated with screens designed to addict us and if I give in a little, they just beg for more. We'll introduce screens eventually because it's inevitable, but delaying that as long as possible especially during the formative years has worked well for us so far.
- wussboy 4y ago
  I agree. Screens are the problem, not the solution.
ab-dm 4y ago
Time to remaster Logical journey of the zoombinis. Such an amazing game.
- atribecalledqst 4y ago
  It's actually been remastered a couple times. Wikipedia says there were remakes in 2001 and 2015. (Though of course, 2015 was seven years ago... old enough to remaster again?)
throwaway4837 4y ago
As a kid, the Encarta virtual 3D tours of historical places was extremely fun. I used to spend hours running around and exploring those.
buscoquadnary 4y ago
Recently I got the game "The Logical Journey of the Zoombinis" for my kids to play on steam since I got young kids and I remember loving that game when I was younger. The game is amazing, the way it combines fun, learning, and engaging kids without ever feeling like it's a lesson. Seriously my 5 year old now has a basic understanding of set theory because of it. It feels like educational games peaked in the late 90's and early 2000's and everything since then has been a regression that spends too much time trying to explain things to students rather than letting them discover and explore for themselves.
- fasthands9 4y ago
  I loved this as a kid! And also played it for a couple days as an adult recently ha. Even though I don't play much games anymore. Some of the logic puzzles were actually still very tricky. Was very impressed.
thenerdhead 4y ago
Why does education have to be entertaining? Interactive, sure. But not entertaining due to attention spans dwindling.
- Aeolun 4y ago
  More like attention spans for boring stuff were always short for humans. Making it more entertaining means people don’t have such a hard time remaining focused.
- barrysteve 4y ago
  Short attention spans can be absorbed into poetry/philosophy and expanded by chasing the meaning of the tiny sentences. With skill you can put a lot of information into a shorter song. Chain those short sentences together and you can educate and entertain across a rythym. Just saying it's possible.
i_like_apis 4y ago
If there’s anyone from Meta who works on Oculus here: I want to build an educational VR app for Quest, but where would it go in the store? There’s no educational section in the store. So can I get any sales for an educational app?
boredtofears 4y ago
Games already do this all the time. Hades is essentially a fantastic retelling of many Greek mythologies.
tuatoru 4y ago
Lots of sibling comments have talked about games to learn logic, maths, etc. To me, the less explored area is games (or computer assistance) that explicitly teach how to know and master your own emotions and how to get on with other people. Edit: also games to teach basic household finance, critical thinking, and practical probability. (Academic probability teaching totally slides by unacademic people.) Life skills, in short.
askvictor 4y ago
Agree in principle, though taking the human (i.e. teacher) out of the loop is a very dangerous proposition (consider the current wave of book-banning in Texas). At one level, even the idea of studying computer games as literary texts is quite tricky, as they tend to be expensive, require expensive hardware, require teachers to have played them (would you expect a teacher to teach a book/film without having read/watched it?), and everyone's experience of it diverges. At the other end, the idea of a massive game (like the "Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" from "The Diamond Age" where you learn everything as you explore the game world sounds very appealing, but is a massive undertaking even for a game company (you're talking about codify most of the curriculum), so would need massive state funding. Parents tend to want things done at school as they had to do them at school (even if those were crap), so you'd struggle to find schools actually willing to take this on board (and that's before the resistance you'd get from teachers).
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chernevik 4y ago
Strongly disagree. Teaching and learning have been solved problems for a long time, for those that want them solved. "attention span is short" -- b/c we have stopped rewarding its development. The answer is insisting people develop longer attention windows, not trying to stuff real learning into atrophied attention windows.
aaron695 4y ago
zem 4y ago
any good open source ones people are involved in?
jschveibinz 4y ago
“Legends of Learning” is looking for educational game developers for those who are interested: https://www.legendsoflearning.com/interested-game-developer/ https://www.legendsoflearning.com/interested-game-developer/
master_yoda_1 4y ago
Totally agree, learning geometry or linear algebra through AR/VR would be so easy and intuitive
dubcee349 4y ago
I think graphic text books is also a super interesting field that is starting to be more heavily explored. I did play many MS DOS learning games as a kid and i think they were helpful. (math blaster would be one that i remember the most)
tmaly 4y ago
I don't think everything could be a game, but we could definitely teach with newer technologies. Think of how Scratch programming can be used to teach problem solving or even math concepts. I think accessibility will depend on what we can run in the browser. And what we can run in the browser will depend a lot on where JavaScript goes.
havercosine 4y ago
Shameless plug. I'm building this, a fun but curricular platform for games focused on mathematics grades 8 onwards. Please check https://pledu.co/trigo-shooter https://pledu.co/trigo-shooter (no login needed). The game levels are designed to gradually expose you to one concept at a time. Currently live with 3 games on Trigonometry, Vectors, co-ordinate geometry. I am all ears for feedback!
- python273 4y ago
  The controls are quite inconvenient. A common type of controls for top-down games is WASD movement relative to camera + mouse to rotate and shoot. If you spam shooting button, it starts showing the same "not enough power" warning many times. For shooting it would be better to simultaneously play the animation and spawn the bullet, not waiting for the animation. The tutorial windows can be replaced with text on screen to not block movement (controls, level objective; power warning replaced with animation maybe)
vasili111 4y ago
I would add to that educational animations. For example, in biology/medicine good animation are trully helpful to understand better and form more memorable associations. Animations cannot replace textbooks but can complement them and make learning much more easy.
moomoo11 4y ago
Will I need to buy 800 edupoints so I can unlock the organic chemistry module? Or some micro transaction like that?
kaba0 4y ago
Attention span is not a well-defined term, and according to most researcher there is not even any reason to believe there is only a singular value — the “kid who can’t sit on his ass” can play a video game/learn something from youtube for hours just fine, it all depends on the activity at hand. So the “decreasing attention span” is a myth.
barrysteve 4y ago
I agree with the idea mostly. Games are limited in the sense that they teach frozen symbols and mechanics. Great for learning a large number of mechanics, engineering concepts and 'settled science'. Getting your hands on broad concepts, blank paper and a relationship with a master/teacher/prof will always be necessary to teach higher concepts. I will also note that youtube, khan acamedy, and comment sections have done a lot of education, intentionally or otherwise and do a decent job at conveying the master's perspective on the topic being discussed. Video is education that can be done at a low cost vocally and visually, rather than developing it into a game, one of the most expensive and difficult art forms.
simonebrunozzi 4y ago
Strongly agree. I would be happy to see the emergence of a few startups doing this.
jamesfisher 4y ago
We've been writing a data science course [1] which feels like a game. Although it's more like Monkey Island meets MS Encarta, or a choose-your-own-adventure. It's a written story, where you frequently make choices through multiple-choice buttons. [1]: https://tigyog.app/d/C-I1weB9CpTH/r/everyday-data-science https://tigyog.app/d/C-I1weB9CpTH/r/everyday-data-science
heurisko 4y ago
The reality of "technology in the classroom" for me was just a bunch of classmates goofing around and getting distracted with computers, whilst they could be reading a book combined with interacting with each other.
snird 4y ago
I work on a gamification product. We have schools as customers, they made a game that engaged the students and in an a/b testing showed much better results over time. They pay 0.1% of what other, non-education customers pay. Because that's all they could spare and allow. Needless to say, the servers alone cost more than what they pay. Not to talk about the massive amount of support they consume. So if you wonder why it's not widespread - that's why.
- techdragon 4y ago
  Ding ding ding… we have a winner. Scrolled all the way down waiting for someone else to mention the hard truth that they have even less money for educational software that they have for teacher’s supplies, which is so bad you’ll find teachers having to pay for supplies for their class. It’s nice to suggest the idea, but it’s not currently a sustainable business for deeper educational material due to support costs and the low ability of the customer to pay in the first place.
mschoeffler 4y ago
You're thinking on the right path, but I'd suggest going wider than videogames. I built a math program in Newark that worked stunningly well because it took the level assessment/lessons/testing from Khan and gamified it. Not gamification in the electronic badge/"you did it!!!"/points sense, but contests between kids, with teams rooting each other on and parents helping run the show. Education needs genuine praise and involvement to inspire children to put in the necessary effort. But videogaming the experience is a solution in search of a problem. We need less isolation and more coaching.
tresqotheq 4y ago
>attention span is short, Fix that first. Because without that, education only serve to create decoys/rubber stamps/plants.
monissiddiqui 4y ago
Here is a very relevant podcast episode on what you are talking about. I enjoyed listening to this one a lot and am a fan of the podcast in general. https://deepfuture.tech/podcast/video-games-optimized-learning-environments-with-david-edery/ https://deepfuture.tech/podcast/video-games-optimized-learni...

by iammjm 4y ago

tnorthcutt 4y ago

You might find https://www.synthesis.com/ https://www.synthesis.com/ interesting. They develop games in-house that teach kids problem-solving, collaboration skills, dealing with unknowns/dynamic conditions, etc. etc.

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spikyman 4y ago

I'm not seeing a more fundamental issue in this thread; What are we trying to teach, and why? It's easy to subject people to studying math, history, etc. What if we wanted to teach appropriate social interaction? Moral analysis (NOT morals)? Critical thinking? Developing self knowledge? The problem is that we need interactions with live humans to explore these subjects. Gaming in the metaverse won't do the job.

fizzpack 4y ago
This seems key to me. We need to teach people how to learn autonomously. And provide them with quality tools to learn from.

acidburnNSA 4y ago

I've been exploring Encarta 96 on a Windows 95 VM I've been curating for active nostalgia and I gotta say it's pretty awesome. I feel like we are missing out on some magic from those days. Even the intro screen still gives me goosebumps

darepublic 4y ago
I remember Encarta 9x as well

phailhaus 4y ago

Interactive visualizations/simulations go a really far way towards helping students learn complex topics. Gamification is tough because you need a human to effectively react to a student's particular shortcomings and help them reframe problems.

CitrusFruits 4y ago

I TA'ed at a tech camp a while back, and there was a 12 year old from Mexico city that had astonishingly good English. I asked him how he was so good at it and he just answered "Skyrim". So yeah, kids soak up a lot of info through games.

cloudymeatballs 4y ago
Delk 4y ago
I basically learnt most of my written English from games as a teenager. They didn't directly help as much with speaking, but hanging out in game chats or IRC for a ridiculous number of hours actually helped with that to an extent as well. Even though it's still written rather than spoken, it's still a more spontaneous form of communication. I took English as a foreign language in school since I was 8 or 9, so I learnt some of the basics there. But if I was faced with a spontaneous conversation, no matter how simple, I easily got tongue-tied. (I was also shy and socially awkward in general, which didn't help.) Spending those hours in chats is when I started getting more comfortable with spontaneous communication. I'm not necessarily a huge fan of gamification in general, which might be a generational thing, but learning as a side product of something you're interested in can be a huge boost. It doesn't have to be games, though. Lots of people probably learnt a lot of English from music or books they were engrossed with.

nicolas_ 4y ago

Emmanuel Freund (Shadow - gaming pc in the cloud - founder) in France is working on PowerZ (https://powerz.tech/ https://powerz.tech/) and has raised more than $10M.

whoisburbansky 4y ago

I credit a huge portion of my current career and general math and reading skills to having a couple CDs of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JumpStart https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JumpStart games early in my childhood. It's a pity I can't think of very many things that I would be comfortable pointing my own kids to and hope for the same effect.

mrtksn 4y ago

I don't believe at all in gamification in education. The kick that inspires new scientists and engineers comes from the gratification of learning or figuring out something as nothing feels better than figuring out how/why something is happening and how to push it to it's edge cases. Even chasing grades is a perverse incentive IMHO.

jobs_throwaway 4y ago
PHDs are never going to be learning through games but I think at lower levels of education there's a ton of room to inspire a desire to learn something more deeply through games.
- xdavidliu 4y ago
  I agree that games intended to teach academic subjects are very hard to get right. Interestingly, when you take the arrow in the other direction, ordinary video games have sometimes been the arena of some very advanced "doing science", e.g.: "Speedrunning as a gateway to scientific endeavours" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8_1lQ2KH50 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8_1lQ2KH50 "The Complete History of the Super Mario 64 A Button Challenge" https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL94lfiY18_CgWGQzweD_aVjsFXiRi6kn5 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL94lfiY18_CgWGQzweD_a...
- lukeschlather 4y ago
  Kerbal Space Program seems like a game which both can both inspire newcomers and could also actually be used by PHDs to bounce around ideas. At the least it seems like some actual astrophysics PHDs rely on it for inspiration.
digdugdirk 4y ago
Think of it instead as designing tools that make learning fun, and enables that gratifying feeling you described. Lego, for example, has probably created generations of people with incredibly high levels of visual-spatial intuition who've all been inspired to go on to become designers and engineers of all kinds. It doesn't have to occur within the walls of a school for something to be considered education.

mateo411 4y ago

Sounds like ad-tech masquerading as ed-tech. There are a lot of ed-tech companies around. I don't know how many take this strategy, but I'm sure there is a few.

commoddity 4y ago

I agree. Anyone every play the educational mode in Assassins Creed Origins? It basically took that game's massive, amazing and detailed map of ancient Egypt, removed all the combat and replaced it with what was essentially a huge virtual museum. You could go run around Egypt, go inside the temples & pyramids, explore the farms, cities and the Nile delta and listen to audio clips and view slideshows about actual Egyptian history. It was legitimately really amazing and educational. It essentially piggybacked off of the colossal amount of work that goes into creating a AAA open world game's map and repurposed it to create something educational. Would love to see more of that type of thing.

reb 4y ago
First time hearing about this! Not a big AC fan, but this is more than enough reason to snag it; is that a platform-specific mode?
- throwaway5959 4y ago
  It’s on PC, Xbox and PS at least, not sure about others. Really cool experience because it also includes pictures of artifacts and audio commentary from scholars. They did the same for Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla aka Viking Simulator.
  - sofixa 4y ago
    It's also on Stadia, and also in the Odyssey (Ancient Greece) game.
subpixel 4y ago
I just watched this footage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySlKKe38Pnk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySlKKe38Pnk I can't help but think how awesome it would be to do that as a means of learning about WWI and WWII for example.
chrisweekly 4y ago
Related tangent - I'd love to see more games (whether or not explicitly "educational") that are more collaborative and less focused on violence. I remember playing GTA and enjoying its then-new (to me, at least) open-world dynamics and imagining a more peaceful version or mode where you'd play the role of an EMT or field surgeon, running around helping people and saving lives or something.

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Pandabob 4y ago

Off-topic but a little tangential: There's a designer named Zander Whitehurst[0] on TikTok/Youtube Shorts teaching Figma in 30 to 60 second videos and I'm in love with the format. I do wonder whether it's effective, but I've learned quite a bit of Figma from him. [0]: https://www.tiktok.com/@zander_whitehurst https://www.tiktok.com/@zander_whitehurst

WhiteOwlEd 4y ago

Working on it. As a first iteration, I am thinking video games meets data visualization. Details at https://www.whiteowleducation.com/courses/data-visualization-metaverse/ https://www.whiteowleducation.com/courses/data-visualization....

fuzzythinker 4y ago

Agree except for being "boring". I don't see educational games in anyway as boring. If you (reader, not iammjm) see it as boring, you are not the right person to build it.

nescioquid 4y ago

Simply changing a game's locale to the target language you are trying to acquire is such an amazing immersion experience with the language -- and this wasn't even intended as an educational tool! If playing Skyrim, you hear the target language constantly, utterances are subtitled so written and heard language can reinforce each other, and practically everything you look at is labeled in the target language. Best of all, you needn't feel so bad for spending all that time playing games!

qsort 4y ago
The only reason why I speak English is because I spent my teen years flaming strangers on Slashdot, you insensitive clod.
- jamiek88 4y ago
  I always like reading about, and comments from, ESL people who learned basically Internet English. Subtly different to UK and USA English but comprehensible by all.
  - adeelk93 4y ago
    Subtly different how?
    - qsort 4y ago
      I'm pretty sure even a casual observer could tell I'm not a native speaker given a sufficiently large sample of my writings. GP is right, the correct thing to do is to just embrace that I'll never be as fluent, as natural in English as I am in Italian. Learning English at a relatively young age allowed me to talk to people literally across the ocean. This very conversation we're having right now would have been impossible otherwise. I'm not upset in the slightest. I count my blessings.
    - Hextinium 4y ago
      Internet English has different "regional variety" than real life, for example I have litterally never heard "grok" in real life but I read it here fairly often.

debunn 4y ago

I work for an EdTech company called Prodigy Game ( https://www.prodigygame.com https://www.prodigygame.com ) - we have Math and English adventure games that help students in grades 1 - 8 learn at school or at home. While I don't think this is a good substitute for teachers / is going to disrupt the entire education space, I think it is an excellent supplement to what is currently in place, and can really help kids want to learn outside of schools. I'd be happy to see more products grow in this space for sure!

happymellon 4y ago

Typing of the Dead did more for my touch typing than anything else. I remember loads of educational games from my youth.

bashmelek 4y ago

I would like to see a fun game to help me with differential equations. People still want to learn more advanced topics and I feel that not enough edtech exists for learning beyond the formative years, and even less for beyond high school. As an example, Khan Academy has received much praise, but I was less impressed to be honest.

ska 4y ago

It's not a crazy idea, but also not a panacea. So not crazy, people have been having for centuries (i.e. the game part predates "computer game" part). I don't want to say there can't be a real breakthrough that makes this a much bigger educational impact, but it's probably important to remember that as an area lot of smart people have tried this pretty hard (including your characterization of open-world + encarta) , and results are not that impressive, so far.

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groby_b 4y ago

Maybe. Maybe not. I think the questions of "who pays", "who profits", and "who controls the material" matters a lot. So does learning theory (I don't think games will be the only way to learn). It is definitely a field we should pay close attention to if we care about learning. For anybody interested in the space, I strongly recommend "What Videogames Have to Teach Us About Learning And Literacy" (James Paul Gee)

porcc 4y ago

When I read this I can't help but think of the meme that goes: Why don't we just like, put nicotine in salad so everyone can get addicted to salad?

copperx 4y ago

I was watching a Pixar movie and wondered, "what if these resources were spent in creating, say, scientifically accurate animations of biological processes for people who are learning chemistry, anatomy, genetics, etc." We all have seen small animations of processes, but some are inaccurate or simplified due to time and money constraints. I've dreamed about this since I was a kid.

Darkskynet 4y ago
On the topic of 'scientifically accurate animations of biological processes'. You may know of these videos, but I thought these might be worth sharing for others interested in this topic: Here is a TEDTalk by Drew Berry: Animations of unseeable biology. (uploaded in 2012) https://youtu.be/WFCvkkDSfIU https://youtu.be/WFCvkkDSfIU Here is also a more recent video by Veritasium on YT that also talks about these animations. (uploaded in 2017) https://youtu.be/X_tYrnv_o6A https://youtu.be/X_tYrnv_o6A
- copperx 4y ago
  I did not. That's fantastic. Thank you.

WheelsAtLarge 4y ago

Agree, education via a game makes lots of sense. Math is one of those that is perfectly suited since repetition helps to learn it. There have been companies that specilized in educational games in the past yet they are no more. In the late nighties there were a few that were giants. If I remember well Software Toolsworks was one of them. It got acquired but now it's gone. I suspect the reason we don't see more of them is that education in the US is mostly free so it make's little sense for parents to spend money on something they already have. And teachers don't want to introduce something that threatens their lively hood and way of working. It's just a guess on my part.

bdw5204 4y ago
That's why you'd probably want to target the homeschool market if you had a startup making educational games. Homeschooling seems to be increasingly popular since the pandemic so that's a growing market and one that is probably not as dominated by very religious families as it used to be.
buscoquadnary 4y ago
> And teachers don't want to introduce something that threatens their lively hood and way of working. It's just a guess on my part. This is wholy untrue, my mother has several decades in elementary education and they would love something like that. The problem is that teachers and schools often don't have the autonomy to acquire these things, a teacher can't buy 20 copies of a game for students as even at 10 bucks that's 200 dollars. So at the budget level required to make games available you then have to go up to the district level. (Stop me if this next part sounds familiar) the District administration is pretty far removed from the students that will be using the product and the teachers using it to teach. Because of this technology companies are incentivized to build their product to the wishes of the district administrators rather than for the students and teachers using the product. This process is helped by the trips, gifts, and "favors" the sales people can use while pitching to the district level decision makers. So the district goes with the product that checks off the most items on a big checklist, as well as if they are a bad administrator, gives them more control over the students and classrooms. Meanwhile the product that was actually purchased doesn't actually help the students, or facilitate learning because it turns out it is way easier to put together a "study" that shows "leading educators" (who were former district administrators) assure that it will increase X metric by Y%. Sorry, had to get this off my chest.

arminiusreturns 4y ago

I pitched such a thing to a department of education grant program and got rejected. I called it the Meta Educational Environment for Simulation and Gaming (MEESG) (long before FB thought about turning into Meta). The pitch was to create a core open source platform for which subject matter experts could create their own specialized training packages, tied in with a web interface for teachers/students to track progress, gamifying the educational process, which was the key to engaging the students (feedback on progress). Oh well, I still like the idea though. One of the biggest benefits was that certain trainings are either very expensive just due to materials, etc, or are very dangerous (high-voltage electrician stuff for example), and doing it virtually would have a much lower risk and cost less.

gault8121 4y ago
That's basically what I am doing with Quill.org (I'm the founder / executive director). Quill is a platform for learning tools and games - we support six web applications that plug into a common, open source platform where teachers can assign activities to students and monitor results. At the moment, our applications are all focused on literacy, and they are more "tool-like" than "game-like". However, we use AI to assess writing, and the AI creates a game-like experience of writing different responses and getting different pieces of feedback (somewhat like a MUD RPG). We're creating the applications in-house now, and the API is not public, but the hope is to open it up in the future to allow others to launch tools and game on our platform. Quill is now serving more than six million students across the United States, about 12% of all K-12 students.

rochak 4y ago

As an alternative, wouldn't it be better to invest into games that teach you something or sharpen your thinking? Playing fun games that elicited curiosity and boosted logical thinking had a lot to do with how I ended up doing what I do for a living (software engineering).

theonething 4y ago

Short attention span is in large part because of computers, phones, etc. So putting ed games on them doesn't seem to address the core problem. Our solution has been a no screen time policy. Education is strictly non-digital and a lot of real world, hands on learning and dialogue with real people. And our kid has loved books since infancy. Does it have to be so strict? I'm not sure, but I do know that our society is inundated with screens designed to addict us and if I give in a little, they just beg for more. We'll introduce screens eventually because it's inevitable, but delaying that as long as possible especially during the formative years has worked well for us so far.

wussboy 4y ago
I agree. Screens are the problem, not the solution.

ab-dm 4y ago

Time to remaster Logical journey of the zoombinis. Such an amazing game.

atribecalledqst 4y ago
It's actually been remastered a couple times. Wikipedia says there were remakes in 2001 and 2015. (Though of course, 2015 was seven years ago... old enough to remaster again?)

throwaway4837 4y ago

As a kid, the Encarta virtual 3D tours of historical places was extremely fun. I used to spend hours running around and exploring those.

buscoquadnary 4y ago

Recently I got the game "The Logical Journey of the Zoombinis" for my kids to play on steam since I got young kids and I remember loving that game when I was younger. The game is amazing, the way it combines fun, learning, and engaging kids without ever feeling like it's a lesson. Seriously my 5 year old now has a basic understanding of set theory because of it. It feels like educational games peaked in the late 90's and early 2000's and everything since then has been a regression that spends too much time trying to explain things to students rather than letting them discover and explore for themselves.

fasthands9 4y ago
I loved this as a kid! And also played it for a couple days as an adult recently ha. Even though I don't play much games anymore. Some of the logic puzzles were actually still very tricky. Was very impressed.

thenerdhead 4y ago

Why does education have to be entertaining? Interactive, sure. But not entertaining due to attention spans dwindling.

Aeolun 4y ago
More like attention spans for boring stuff were always short for humans. Making it more entertaining means people don’t have such a hard time remaining focused.
barrysteve 4y ago
Short attention spans can be absorbed into poetry/philosophy and expanded by chasing the meaning of the tiny sentences. With skill you can put a lot of information into a shorter song. Chain those short sentences together and you can educate and entertain across a rythym. Just saying it's possible.

i_like_apis 4y ago

If there’s anyone from Meta who works on Oculus here: I want to build an educational VR app for Quest, but where would it go in the store? There’s no educational section in the store. So can I get any sales for an educational app?

boredtofears 4y ago

Games already do this all the time. Hades is essentially a fantastic retelling of many Greek mythologies.

tuatoru 4y ago

Lots of sibling comments have talked about games to learn logic, maths, etc. To me, the less explored area is games (or computer assistance) that explicitly teach how to know and master your own emotions and how to get on with other people. Edit: also games to teach basic household finance, critical thinking, and practical probability. (Academic probability teaching totally slides by unacademic people.) Life skills, in short.

askvictor 4y ago

Agree in principle, though taking the human (i.e. teacher) out of the loop is a very dangerous proposition (consider the current wave of book-banning in Texas). At one level, even the idea of studying computer games as literary texts is quite tricky, as they tend to be expensive, require expensive hardware, require teachers to have played them (would you expect a teacher to teach a book/film without having read/watched it?), and everyone's experience of it diverges. At the other end, the idea of a massive game (like the "Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" from "The Diamond Age" where you learn everything as you explore the game world sounds very appealing, but is a massive undertaking even for a game company (you're talking about codify most of the curriculum), so would need massive state funding. Parents tend to want things done at school as they had to do them at school (even if those were crap), so you'd struggle to find schools actually willing to take this on board (and that's before the resistance you'd get from teachers).

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chernevik 4y ago

Strongly disagree. Teaching and learning have been solved problems for a long time, for those that want them solved. "attention span is short" -- b/c we have stopped rewarding its development. The answer is insisting people develop longer attention windows, not trying to stuff real learning into atrophied attention windows.

aaron695 4y ago

zem 4y ago

any good open source ones people are involved in?

jschveibinz 4y ago

“Legends of Learning” is looking for educational game developers for those who are interested: https://www.legendsoflearning.com/interested-game-developer/ https://www.legendsoflearning.com/interested-game-developer/

master_yoda_1 4y ago

Totally agree, learning geometry or linear algebra through AR/VR would be so easy and intuitive

dubcee349 4y ago

I think graphic text books is also a super interesting field that is starting to be more heavily explored. I did play many MS DOS learning games as a kid and i think they were helpful. (math blaster would be one that i remember the most)

tmaly 4y ago

I don't think everything could be a game, but we could definitely teach with newer technologies. Think of how Scratch programming can be used to teach problem solving or even math concepts. I think accessibility will depend on what we can run in the browser. And what we can run in the browser will depend a lot on where JavaScript goes.

havercosine 4y ago

Shameless plug. I'm building this, a fun but curricular platform for games focused on mathematics grades 8 onwards. Please check https://pledu.co/trigo-shooter https://pledu.co/trigo-shooter (no login needed). The game levels are designed to gradually expose you to one concept at a time. Currently live with 3 games on Trigonometry, Vectors, co-ordinate geometry. I am all ears for feedback!

python273 4y ago
The controls are quite inconvenient. A common type of controls for top-down games is WASD movement relative to camera + mouse to rotate and shoot. If you spam shooting button, it starts showing the same "not enough power" warning many times. For shooting it would be better to simultaneously play the animation and spawn the bullet, not waiting for the animation. The tutorial windows can be replaced with text on screen to not block movement (controls, level objective; power warning replaced with animation maybe)

vasili111 4y ago

I would add to that educational animations. For example, in biology/medicine good animation are trully helpful to understand better and form more memorable associations. Animations cannot replace textbooks but can complement them and make learning much more easy.

moomoo11 4y ago

Will I need to buy 800 edupoints so I can unlock the organic chemistry module? Or some micro transaction like that?

kaba0 4y ago

Attention span is not a well-defined term, and according to most researcher there is not even any reason to believe there is only a singular value — the “kid who can’t sit on his ass” can play a video game/learn something from youtube for hours just fine, it all depends on the activity at hand. So the “decreasing attention span” is a myth.

barrysteve 4y ago

I agree with the idea mostly. Games are limited in the sense that they teach frozen symbols and mechanics. Great for learning a large number of mechanics, engineering concepts and 'settled science'. Getting your hands on broad concepts, blank paper and a relationship with a master/teacher/prof will always be necessary to teach higher concepts. I will also note that youtube, khan acamedy, and comment sections have done a lot of education, intentionally or otherwise and do a decent job at conveying the master's perspective on the topic being discussed. Video is education that can be done at a low cost vocally and visually, rather than developing it into a game, one of the most expensive and difficult art forms.

simonebrunozzi 4y ago

Strongly agree. I would be happy to see the emergence of a few startups doing this.

jamesfisher 4y ago

We've been writing a data science course [1] which feels like a game. Although it's more like Monkey Island meets MS Encarta, or a choose-your-own-adventure. It's a written story, where you frequently make choices through multiple-choice buttons. [1]: https://tigyog.app/d/C-I1weB9CpTH/r/everyday-data-science https://tigyog.app/d/C-I1weB9CpTH/r/everyday-data-science

heurisko 4y ago

The reality of "technology in the classroom" for me was just a bunch of classmates goofing around and getting distracted with computers, whilst they could be reading a book combined with interacting with each other.

snird 4y ago

I work on a gamification product. We have schools as customers, they made a game that engaged the students and in an a/b testing showed much better results over time. They pay 0.1% of what other, non-education customers pay. Because that's all they could spare and allow. Needless to say, the servers alone cost more than what they pay. Not to talk about the massive amount of support they consume. So if you wonder why it's not widespread - that's why.

techdragon 4y ago
Ding ding ding… we have a winner. Scrolled all the way down waiting for someone else to mention the hard truth that they have even less money for educational software that they have for teacher’s supplies, which is so bad you’ll find teachers having to pay for supplies for their class. It’s nice to suggest the idea, but it’s not currently a sustainable business for deeper educational material due to support costs and the low ability of the customer to pay in the first place.

mschoeffler 4y ago

You're thinking on the right path, but I'd suggest going wider than videogames. I built a math program in Newark that worked stunningly well because it took the level assessment/lessons/testing from Khan and gamified it. Not gamification in the electronic badge/"you did it!!!"/points sense, but contests between kids, with teams rooting each other on and parents helping run the show. Education needs genuine praise and involvement to inspire children to put in the necessary effort. But videogaming the experience is a solution in search of a problem. We need less isolation and more coaching.

tresqotheq 4y ago

>attention span is short, Fix that first. Because without that, education only serve to create decoys/rubber stamps/plants.

monissiddiqui 4y ago

Here is a very relevant podcast episode on what you are talking about. I enjoyed listening to this one a lot and am a fan of the podcast in general. https://deepfuture.tech/podcast/video-games-optimized-learning-environments-with-david-edery/ https://deepfuture.tech/podcast/video-games-optimized-learni...