New York's Video-Game-Based Public School 214
An anonymous reader writes "In Manhattan this fall, a batch of lucky sixth-graders will start at Quest To Learn, the first public school in the US with a curriculum built around playing games. They'll play Spore and Civilization, board games such as Settlers of Catan, and learn 3D modeling in Maya and Google Earth as well. Each semester concludes with a two-week 'Boss Level.'"
Awesome (Score:5, Interesting)
Basically 90% of my public school education consisted of insufferable lectures with a worksheet at the end, and maybe if you're lucky a paper to discuss. Not until I got to the very end of high school did I get to engage in anything that wasn't essentially passive rote learning. Even the dual-enrollment/AP stuff I took relied soley on often dry discussion though, and had nothing on the proposed pedagogical model put forward by Q2L.
I'm sure that my public school education is somewhat representative of the majority experience. I'm sure there is a lot of collective envy with stuff like this:
A core goal of our pedagogy is to help students learn to reason about their world. Systemic reasoning, or the ability to see the world in terms of the many interrelated systems that make it up--from biological to political to technological and social--supports students in meeting this goal.Enduring understandings include:
1. Understanding of feedback dynamics (i.e., reinforcing and balancing feedback loops): understanding that small level changes can affect macro-level processes.
2. Understanding of system dynamics: understanding that multiple (i.e. dynamic) relationships within a system.
3. Understanding hidden dimensions of a system: understanding that modifications to system elements can lead to changes that are not easily recognizable within a system.
4. Understanding of the quality of relationships within a system: understanding when a system is working or not working at optimal levels.
5. Homological understanding: understanding that similar system dynamics can exist in other systems that may appear to be entirely different.
I would kill to be able to go back in time and have an education under people pushing such an enlightened philosophy.
Re:Awesome (Score:4, Funny)
So who are you - Gary Glitter or Phillip Garrido?
Re:Awesome (Score:5, Insightful)
I kid of course, but your concise use of grammar, punctuation, etc indicates that your traditional education was not a total waste as you seem to paint it.
Re:Awesome (Score:4, Informative)
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I have to agree - I'm pretty sure the bazillion novels I read as a kid helped my vocab and grammar along very nicely.
Re:Awesome (Score:5, Insightful)
"I kid of course, but your concise use of grammar, punctuation, etc indicates that your traditional education was not a total waste as you seem to paint it."
I disagree, traditional education basically sucks the life out of kids. When we are kids there are a lot of cool things we want to do but we don't know how to go about doing them. I would have loved to have learned to program by someone leading us through the construction of small simple games and telling us why the hard boring stuff (like math) is important, kids want to accomlish their dreams and once they realize it takes hard stuff they will 1) Discipline themselves to do it (because they want to accomplish that cool goal) or 2) They will find an area more to their liking.
There are those who have the persistance to work hard and there are those kids who don't, we do a disservice to the kids with big goals and dreams and not nurtering them.
What I wouldn't give for someone like John carmack to write a book about learning to write small 2D games, etc, with feedback from those who had to learn the hardway (i.e. have insight on how to teacn and structure a lesson in terms of capturing kids interest).
Kids want to learn stuff we just suck the joy out of learning because we don't give them cool things to work on that teach teh lesson that -- cool things require lots of hard boring stuff to accomplish but the end result is awesome.
Now if we can ramp up this boring stuff by taking cool complex stuff and giving them access to chunks of stuff they can handle (i.e. take animation of cool things that blowup like say a car in burnout, and allow them to tweak matehmatical values to see the results they get)
They can start seeing a direct feedback relationship between what they are learning and doing cool stuff.
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My favorite was teaching the level 2 course where I taught kids about making 2D sprite based games in C#. We basically give them a very simple 2D engine and then teach them all the programming and math required to move things around, detect collisions and perform general game logic. It's really fun to teach because I love programming and (almost) every kid there is very eager to
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I wonder if they'd be open to posting lectures as well as coursework online, that would be a boon for people that don't live in the area.
I would have so went for something like that when I was a kid, but that was pre-interent days.
Re:Awesome (Score:4, Insightful)
... leading us through the construction of small simple games and telling us why the hard boring stuff (like math) is important.
Kids want to learn stuff we just suck the joy out of learning because we don't give them cool things to work on that teach teh lesson that -- cool things require lots of hard boring stuff to accomplish but the end result is awesome.
It's a good thing I didn't grow up with your definitions of "boring" and "cool". Your statement that math is important is laudable but it is deeply contaminated by the addenda that it is also hard and boring. From my point of view, computing is merely a quaint little example of how a teeny tiny fraction of most aesthetically superb* piece of ... magic is the only word for it ... created by the human race can be applied for purposes of relieving the human mind of repetitive calculations (and perhaps entertainment).
:P. But we're discussing pre-college stuff. Rarely does one see any but the most superficial math in programming courses and that's fine. What I object to is actually institutionalizing that weird attitude. It's like the difference between a stripper and a ballet dancer - in one case, the details of the music aren't all that important ;).
:P. Cool is fine for kiddies, mature children should be introduced to the concept of "profound" as soon as possible. The horrible way we do it now grants the senile old farts a monopoly over it and that's just stupid.
:P
Teaching with the attitude I inferred from your post (and please correct me if my inference was in error) would simply create a bunch of superficial coders. I've seen firsthand the results of "real-world numerical" teaching styles taken to the extreme in (for instance) early physics education. It prevents students from seeing some of the grandest mysteries ever encountered and how our scientific ancestors frakking solved them instead of just staring stupidly at them. Imparting (among other things of course) the magnificence of the intersection of mathematics and reality (especially in everyday situations) should be one of the critical goals of science education.
Now, of course I wouldn't advocate that teaching philosophy in a college level programming course - you're there to learn to code, not contemplate mathematical mysteries
Just because the current way of teaching is not the best way doesn't mean that "cool" should be the new standard for good education
_______________________
*imho ofc
Re:Awesome (Score:4, Insightful)
"It's a good thing I didn't grow up with your definitions of "boring" and "cool". Your statement that math is important is laudable but it is deeply contaminated by the addenda that it is also hard and boring."
You have to understand that for most many kids it is a boring subject because they can't see the relevance of it in their daily lives, even though they know it's important for certain jobs, many kids simply wont' learn to love learning about math if it is not handled well by who-ever's teaching it. I'm absolutely sure math education is handled badly in many places (from my own experience).
Now it's not that math is necessarily boring but it IS how it is taught that gives kids the perception that math is hard and boring.
Trust me on this one I'd argue with you that current mathematicians and mathematics teachers have not approached the teaching math correclty in many regards, I know this because I had to go about learning certain how to observe the world first using more basic principles before one even gets to symbolic computation.
I know because I came across debates and alternative framings of mathematics in my travels such as:
http://www.symmetryperfect.com/ [symmetryperfect.com]
Youd' never learn in school that you were taught math was only one group of men's way of viewing mathematics.
Also check out Mayan numerals here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayan_numerals [wikipedia.org]
There are many ways to frame mathematical concepts in better ways that give one a better conceptual foundation on how to observe and conceive mathematically before one even does any kind of computation.
Take myself for instance: Most of my thought is entirely visual, i.e. geometric, graphic.
My weakness is juggling symbols, therefore I have a preference for visualizing numbers as objects interacting physically to understand something.
Things like graphs, charts, shapes, models, figures are better fit then teaching raw equations out of a textbook for me, this is why I had such a frustrating time with mathematics.
I'm currently doing original research and hope to compile it into a book so others can see that math is much deeper then anyone has yet thought of.
I respect those in the profession and do not deny their great achievements and contributions but they do not have a monopoly on the truth about mathematics or how something can be seen radically differently from how matehmatics has been tradtionally structured.
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Question is (because as usual, it's NOT black and white): How much worse would it have been? Enough to matter? Under what definition of bad? That of a grammar Nazi, or that of a practical thinking person? :)
Re:Awesome (Score:5, Interesting)
In other words, I might have loved to go to video game school as a child, but as an adult I would hate to have gone to it.
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It's interesting to hear this, coming from someone that had a similar experience.
I've always wondered whether my self perceived lazyness was a product of my personality, or the fact that I had such an easy time in K-12.
( Then again, in what am interested in, i'm FAR from lazy... )
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But how would you have learned all of that? Would you have been made to write essays about these subjects, create a poster with glue, scissors and hand-colored diagrams (alternatively use Powerpoint), write a biography of the researchers, go on school outings to museums and mathematical institutions, or given class assignments to complete real-world experiments or write programs to demonstrate each of these concepts?
Each of these is a valid method of teaching, though to a geek the latter three would probabl
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Games - by definition - first have to succeed as games.
You want to see compelling game play and the emergence of relatively simple - clearly defined strategies - the path to victory.
Real life holds surprises.
Expanding trade opens the door to lethal pandemics like the Black Plague.
Building the monument - the Pyramid, The Cathedral of Notre Dame, The Golden Gate Bridge, The Great Wall of China - is fun. But do you really understand its significance? Your time might be better spent watching a rerun of Mulan.
Re:Awesome (Score:5, Insightful)
Building the monument - the Pyramid, The Cathedral of Notre Dame, The Golden Gate Bridge, The Great Wall of China - is fun. But do you really understand its significance?
If you don't -go and find out!
My 6 and 8 year old have recently started playing CivIV. While it would be overstating the case to say that their interest in learning has been entirely sparked by the exclusively by the game (the 6 year old was already obsessed with all things Ancient Egypt), these kind of wonders especially have resulted in greater attention being paid to the kind of History documentaries I like to expose them to. Last week they watched a show called "Great Wonders of the Islamic World" with the kind of attention that was previously reserved for StarWars, TMNT, and David Attenborough Nature docos. The 6 year old is extending his obsession to Aztecs (they have pyramids too!) as a result of this game.
This has demonstrated very clearly to me that at least some games (well at least Civilization), have a valuable role to play in fostering involvement with younger children. This is not to say that education should consist solely of electronic game-playing.
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I bet I played more video games when I was in grad school than these kids do. And today, PhD in hand, I am ranked #2473 in the world in Burnout Paradise!
I tell the kids in my class this and they think I'm screwing with them. Little do they know...
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I was once asked to sit in on the education division's monthly meeting. The meeting was an eye opener for me. More than being open to the idea of changing how we teach, they were actively pursuing those ideas in live teaching environments. Here's a few of the ideas they were investigating: afterschool club activities, in-class workshops, hands-on activities with real science equipment, pers
Misguided at best (Score:5, Insightful)
I like playing games more than most, but this is another poor attempt to make learning "fun". I see this problem at all levels of public education and it is fundamentally flawed. Instead of pandering to the attitude that learning isn't fun, more effort should be made to instill a different attitude towards learning. "Tricking" students into thinking they aren't being taught is never going to inspire the next great scientist or artist. Achievement requires hard work and we should not pretend otherwise and we should certainly not teach that notion to students.
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I think you are spot on. If anything students need to learn that learning is not fun, studying is not palatable and it all takes work. Then they need to learn how much fun it is to take some newly acquired knowledge and apply it to the creation or execution of something they could not do before. I say make the sixth graders sit through a lecture or two in physical science class on Bernoulli principle. Let them learn a few basic algebraic equations, and then they get to build a glider.
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Why? Though it takes work, learning certainly can be fun.
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So... (Score:5, Funny)
What they will get is the Ancient Egyptians made nuclear weapons. Sheep can be traded for Bricks, The success of evolution is based on the intelligence of the designer, with the attempt to zoom into the beaches in Brazil. Well I guess that is as good as american Education gets. You not really raising the bar. But the kids get the same education and have fun at it.
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Sheep really can be traded for bricks.
Until you find out that the other guy wanted to give you sheep and accept bricks, not vice versa, and that you handed him two sheep and he handed you two sheep and you're both left sitting there saying "What the fuck?" to each other. Then the guy who's got a city on a brick 6/wood 8 junction and has built the goddamn Great Wall of Catan out of roads so you can't GET to the bricks anymore starts laughing....
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Everything I know about the stock market I learned from Pit.
Two! Two! Two! Anyone got Two?!
Re:So... (Score:5, Funny)
Q: What did the one Scotsman say to the other Scotsman while they were playing Settlers of Catan?
A: I've got Wood for Sheep!
Thank you, thank you. I'll be here all week. Try the ve^H^Hlamb!
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Q:What's the difference between a Scotsman and a Rolling Stone?
A:The Rolling Stone says "Hey you, get off of my cloud!" - the Scotsman says "Hey McCloud, get off of my sheep!"
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Re:So... (Score:4, Funny)
Ancient Egyptians didn't make nuclear weapons, silly. They made stargates.
When Corporations Write the Curriculum (Score:3, Insightful)
Skills For Life (Score:2, Insightful)
If you want to be unemployed playing games in a basement.
What's wrong with maths, english and science these days?
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In related news... (Score:2, Informative)
what crap... (Score:3, Insightful)
This is the legacy of No Child Left Behind... We've dumbed education down to the lowest common denominator. There are fewer and fewer gifted programs. Everyone's straight-jacketed into the same curriculum at the same pace, and should someone demonstrate superior intelligence they're practically punished for it because it might harm some other precious snowflake's self-esteem to know! Net result -- kids don't try as hard, so standards slip and slip and slip, to adjust to the new low point. Video games -- Seriously. You know, it used to be a treat to get a movie in class and it was read, read, read. It was all about reading. Nowadays it's all about learning via glowing rectangles.
Sad.
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I think you read a little too much Ayn Rand or something. No child left behind certainly sucks, but I don't see it advocating policies of punishing children for being too smart.
Re:what crap... (Score:5, Insightful)
Forgive me if I am treading on your lawn but frankly, the school system as it stands now is a broken piece of shit (which you seem to agree with). Currently we stuff kids into a room, unload an unending string of partially garbled speech at them (through teachers that can hardly make sense of their own thoughts), and expect them to absorb it all like a sponge. Then we ask them to barf the crap they just heard back onto papers in an automaton fashion so that they can be rewarded with a pat on the head in the form of good grades. It's ridiculous, stifling, and completely fails to teach children how to learn (it succeeds very well in teaching them to accept what they are told though).
The program described in the article, while it may end up failing or may end up succeeding (I don't know which), is at least an attempt to break free of that massively screwed system. It puts the children in a technologically immersed learning environment (that alone should pay off in an ever-increasingly technologically linked world) and gives them the opportunity to approach education in a way that makes sense to them (with guidance from their teachers). This not only gives them a chance to try new things in a safe environment (last I checked kids don't get hurt from video games), but it also gives them a chance to approach problems and knowledge by a means that works for them. That freedom and that freedom alone makes this program worth observing and not just dismissing out of hand.
Furthermore, it appears that the games and programs kids will use to do their schoolwork vary from fun games to practical computer programs such as Adobe flash. As the article and summary both point out, these will give them a tech saviness that is lacking in kids these days. It gives them a chance to approach what are normally boring things for young kids (ancient Babylonian poetry) through a fun and creative medium (develop your own graphic novel) which could give them an intimate knowledge of something that most kids would just sleep through in normal school.
Don't get me wrong, I am as embittered as anyone that my own education was a patterned succession of memorizing crap right up until college, but that doesn't mean that I am going to slam any alternative education model that comes along just because I feel like it. Frankly, this idea is one worth pursuing if for no other reason to see if it works or not. If it doesn't, hopefully a better program will come along that will. Until then however, I have to say that I think this program deserves a little more inspection than, "What Crap."
Re:what crap... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the legacy of No Child Left Behind... We've dumbed education down to the lowest common denominator. There are fewer and fewer gifted programs. Everyone's straight-jacketed into the same curriculum at the same pace
No, it's much worse than that. We always had essentially the same curriculum for everyone if your school couldn't afford "gifted" courses, and most schools couldn't for more than maybe a couple subjects -- e.g one elementary school I went to had "advanced" math, but not science, history, english or anything else, so if your "gift" involved something other than math, tough luck!
The problem with No Child Left Behind is that the curriculum now revolves entirely, 100%, around passing the stupid tests. Teachers don't teach anymore, they train and coach in how to pass tests. They don't teach things the test doesn't cover. They don't teach the principles, they teach the technique needed to pass the test. Because they can't afford to do anything else or they'll risk losing money and then whatever few interesting programs they have left will be gone.
It'd be one thing if it was an actual education based on the lowest common denominator. But it's not even that good. Ever cram for an exam where you didn't care at all about the subject, you only cared about passing the exam, because if you didn't pass the exam your GPA would drop and you'd lose your financial aid? Was that the best learning experience? Now imagine your professor had exactly the same motivation. That's what No Child Left Behind has done to our education.
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To be fair, teaching to the test is an OK thing to do.... assuming the test is any good.
For more fairness, the various tests pretty much suck, so your point is valid (and I don't have a windmill in my beard)
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To be fair, teaching to the test is an OK thing to do.... assuming the test is any good.
For more fairness, the various tests pretty much suck, so your point is valid (and I don't have a windmill in my beard)
No, it's a fair point, it's just that a national standardized multiple-choice test, combined with a proverbial Sword of Damocles over the entire school for failing to meet test standards, is not an environment where teaching to the test is going to result in a healthy education.
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Sex Ed (Score:4, Insightful)
Will sex ed get taught with porn?
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Will sex ed get taught with porn?
What? Don't be stupid. No self-respecting video game based public school would dare resort to something as vile and debased as a porn movie!
It'll be taught with hentai Flash games off Newgrounds, of course!!
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we all know porn is not a game - it's a vocation.
Awesome! Err... Maybe not (Score:2)
Wonderful (Score:2)
Wonderful - a new generation of special snowflakes who will grow up expecting to be pandered to and for everything to be 'fun'. They'll have a rude awakening when they discover how fun mopping the floor at McTGIBurger at midnight is.
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You don't even have to look to McJobs. Most professional jobs also have some drudgery (which is part of why we're paid to do them).
However, it might be nice to see if this sort of learning could cause a cultural shift that might alleviate that drudgery. Hrm.
When i was in a self paced program i was almost a full year ahead of my peers. When i went back to the regular school system i was a D student. i wonder what i could have done in a system that accommodated me.
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We can already see the effects of ongoing attempts to make learning 'fun' and 'relevant'. We don't need to turn ideas known to be stupid up to 11.
It's not how
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You would think, but we have the technology now for robots to take all the McJobs, yet they have not done so. It is a shame. It would eliminate the need for a slave caste.
Spore? (Score:5, Insightful)
My kids play Spore. It looks like an entertaining game with no relation to reality whatsoever. If they use it to teach evolution (or anything about biology, really), I would pull my kid out the next day. It's pure fantasy - nothing wrong with that, but it doesn't belong in a science class.
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will the systems even have gpu / cpu power for thi (Score:4, Interesting)
will the systems even have gpu / cpu power for this or will they be trying to do this with low systems with POS intel gma video? amd + ati on board video is a little better but not real good for trying to do any real gameing and civ 4 is a real cpu + gpu hog.
GO AMERICA! (Score:2, Insightful)
Down the shitter, of course.
Then after school.... (Score:5, Insightful)
...they can play "Try to find work in a struggling world economy competing against foreign jobseekers with real educations"
I'm not saying that all students will fall flat... the ones that are bright and feel that school is easy will not have a problem.
It's possible they will even excel.
It's the majority of lazy students that will suffer.
Spore? (Score:5, Funny)
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You forgot the important lesson called "defective by design" :D
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School Will Kill Video Games. (Score:3, Insightful)
Uhm, gentlemen... Do you guys really think that this will somehow make homework fun?
"Your assignment due next Friday is to beat Xenogears [60+ hours easily], and write a 5 page report on the aspects of yadda yadda yadda."
If being forced to play the game doesn't kill the fun, the deadlines and summary reports certainly will.
Games are fun because they are an escape from reality. Turning them into work will kill them.
Facepalm (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know which is worse, that anyone can be dumb enough to actually make that happen, or that it would garner our praise. In our defence, Slashdot is full of people who think that education should be all about learning to think. That's utter bullshit, learning to think is only one aspect of education, and as a matter of fact it's more a by-product of "learning things". School is for learning basic knowledge and basic skills, like reading, counting, writing, or knowing about ancient Greece or being able to put Belgium or the Potomac River on a map. So, learning multiplication by reciting look-up tables isn't fun? Well tough luck, cause you need that in life, and that's not by making homoerotic monsters in Spore that you'll learn that. Just stop with the experimental education, good education doesn't need innovation, lots of kids 100 years ago received a better education than most of your offsprings ever will.
Disclaimer, I went to private school in France, I know what receiving a decent education is like. How do you think my English became this good, by learning critical thinking? More like by being forced to learn lists of irregular verbs.
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Re:Facepalm (Score:4, Interesting)
Some kids got a fantastic education 100 years ago. We only know about the ones who made it. Most were thrown on the scrapheap once they could read or write. Today, we have a vastly better educated populace than we have ever had, and there is plenty more potential there.
It's not the point. The point is that innovation is irrelevant to good education.
As for your experience, you went to school with a bunch of cosmopolitan, well off, middle-class kids. You should be holding yourself to a different standard than the average output of the French school system.
Too bad you have no idea what you're talking about. Private schools there are nothing like private schools in America, and actually there's not a lot of differences with public schools in terms of results (actually private schools are typically Catholic, whereas public schools cannot be, so where you go depends on how religious your parents are. Or how much they loathe Muslims. Although once again this has nothing in common with Catholic schools in North America, and there's not much difference in education style or curriculum with public schools). In France what really makes a difference is where you live. If it's in a ZEP [wikipedia.org] then you'll get a shitty education. Otherwise everybody does about as good.
DOSBox a prerequisite (Score:2, Funny)
16 years later, (Score:2)
Re:Spore for education (Score:5, Insightful)
Uh, you do realize that Spore is as creationist as you can get? It's intelligent design (well, mostly semi-intelligent), because you're doing the designing yourself.
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Spore actually presents the creationist viewpoint in a silly and satirical fassion
Hm. I fail to see why that should be in schools, then.
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I think you missed the article and went straight to the comments. I'll summarize...
School - Based - On - Only - Video Games.
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Wouldn't you rather your kids actually live life than be stuck to a goddamn raster and then cry and kick their feet like babies when their first PHB eats them for breakfast?
Gaming one's life away after school/work is bad enough...
Re:Spore for education (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, generalized Darwinian evolution is a process that, in addition to its source in biology, has been shown to have some utility in explaining other processes, and which occurs pretty much by definition where certain sets of features are present (a source of random variations which affect fitness, a system which largely but not entirely preserves traits, etc.)
OTOH, the basic required features are completely absent from Spore. As I understand, prerelease versions of the game had at least a kind of trait preservation (lacking the essentially unrestricted changes of the released version of the game), though they still lacked random variation.
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I'm not going to try to tell you what to believe, but at least have the intellectual honesty to ackno
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Just because it allows you to design different creatures doesn't mean it advocates an ideology. That's just way off the deep end retarded.
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Is this the first self-inflicted whoosh on Slashdot?
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Creationism isn't tied to Christianity, there are several religions that teach it. In Spore, you're taught that you created a species a few minutes/hours ago and that all improvements are due to Your Holy Hand applying them in the creature editor. That's very similar to the way it is taught in Christianity, just the variables are different (time, number of species, etc.). I agree though that it's a rather satirical implementation, the question is just whether this can actually add something to biology class
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Sorry, no. Creationism is a term that was created recently to describe a political movement by religious people to clothe their Christianity as alternative scientific belief for the explicit purpose of getting it taught under diversity principles in schools. The word does not mean "all forms of religious belief which involve a divine origin viewpoint."
Just because you assume a word to mean something does not make it so. Ple
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I agree though that it's a rather satirical implementation, the question is just whether this can actually add something to biology classes.
Absolutely, in much the same way Beavis and Butthead taught me good morals and common sense!
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Very few creationists claim that God created the Earth 5000 years ago (Young Earth Creationists favor a date just over 6,000 years ago, and plenty of creationists don't specifically espouse a young-earth view. Creationists also generally don't show, or even pretend to show, that there is no such thing as evolution, they just accept it on faith, though som
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By this logic, creationism also isn't creationist.
(Preparing for trolling by people who don't get it and assume I must be defending creationism.)
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I fucking love Spore but... yeah, it's a very entertaining mimicry of science that shouldn't be confused with anything plausible.
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Uh, you do realize that Spore is as creationist as you can get? It's intelligent design (well, mostly semi-intelligent), because you're doing the designing yourself.
True, but that's just the games's mechanics. Philosophically though it's a game about evolution. The thing is, while I personally find watching computer-generated simulations of evolution randomly trying out solutions to problems without my interference to be fascinating, I don't think that makes for much of a game. So instead of having rando
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"So what did the narwhal eat to get its tusk?"
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I hope driving games aren't a great intro to get them to understand basic driving principles...
I'm one of those incredibly stupid, ignorant, Bible believing Christians, but I don't even think anything considered "scientific" should really have it's basic intro as a game... it seems like it'd be far to ambiguous, too subjective, etc.
There's a vast difference between a science class and a "general idea" view of something. The "general idea view" of something isn't something I feel like my tax dollars should
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Are these related? Serious question.
Possibly. I was homeschooled, but primarily for education reasons, not religious reasons.
If I could've had a decent grounding in 3D modelling when I was a kid, instead of pissing about on Imagine on my Amiga (not that Imagine was a bad package or Amiga a bad platform, just that I'd have liked some classes in what I was actually doing), I'd probably have a more interesting job than I do right now.
Hmmm. But does that mean it belongs in a 6th grade course? 6th grade seems like people are still going to be learning core subjects, aren't they? 3D modeling seems like a big jump. Sure, maybe as an after school or extracurricular thing, but that wasn't mentioned... and it seems like public funding should get the core subjects down before spending more on a Maya class. I'm not anti-3D modeling, either. I don't do
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The original Theme Park was great.
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Sorry for double posting.
I also loved Dungeon Keeper.
The more recent games by Molyneux, however, aren't so hot ;)
And you're kinda right about Will Wright.
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Just like Molyneux (Populous good, the rest were over-hyped shit).
Spoken like someone who never played Dungeon Keeper.
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Elementary schools in the 70s used a different term than "gifted program"; but they did get to play lots of games too. They had "put the fries in the little box", and "sort the little metal disks". I'm sure that civilisation and quake are an improvement, but I can't imagine the sort of carnage we'll see in junk-food restaurants in 10 years...
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In the mid-90's I was in a program called Talented and Gifted - simply called "TAG" for short. Essentially, all the 'smart' kids (recommended by teachers, guidance counselors, and 'anomalous' test scores) were put into a room in middle school for one period (45 minutes) a day. Essentially, all we did was play games. There were occasions where we learned about other cultures and exchanged letters with students in Russia, but for the most part it was a period in middle school devoted specifically to games of all sorts.
However, the games were quite serious, at least as far as games go. I remember one in particular, where our whole class was informed we had 'woken up' in a bomb shelter, supposedly after a nuclear attack. We were given no general background of the setting of our dilemma, only the vague recollection that something *bad* had happened. None of us could quite remember exactly what happened, or how in particular we got there. We remembered our personal histories, but the information was on cards that were given to us by our TAG teacher, and we were not allowed to show them to other students - we had to 'express' what was on the card in interim periods between decisions. A little like a character sheet, if you ask me.
We were then given one direction by the "MC" of the game, the AI programmed into the bomb shelter - choose a leader. The whole game then revolved around a process of negotiation amongst the survivors with said leader , as said leader decided whether or not to enter into different communications with different camps in this post-apocalyptic world, something which the AI explicitly advised against. The climax of the game involved one decision: will you open the door to your shelter past the airlock (i.e, not safe, if the world was irradiated you would die) and check outside? Both the AI and the other camps advise against this through nearly the entire game. However, I remember our team deciding to open the door. We did, and found that not a singular nuclear missile had gone off, and that everyone was in hiding. In the end, what the game 'taught' was that neither the AI nor the other camps could be trusted, and the best conclusions were the ones we came to ourselves.
Obviously, you can't teach Mathematics through a video game. You can, however, clarify some of the more obscure portions of Mathematics through demonstration, and video games are an excellent way to demonstrate.
I think the good people of the Manhattan Public School Department will quickly find, however, that games meant for general consumption (i.e., non-educational purposes) are not fit for the task. For instance, I would not pick EA's "Dante's Inferno" to quickly teach kids in my history class the impact Dante Allegheri had on how people viewed religion, or its relationship to politics. I might opt for something more along the lines of this [enterthestory.com], which does gloss over some details, but hits the heart of the matter pretty neatly.
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Obviously, you can't teach Mathematics through a video game. You can, however, clarify some of the more obscure portions of Mathematics through demonstration, and video games are an excellent way to demonstrate.
Not that monstrosity that they call mathematics (and which really has not much to do with it), that's right. :)
But real mathematics.. I think Paul Lockhart would strongly disagree [maa.org].
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That is an awesome story. Thanks for sharing!
Reminds me of the Fallout game series (I haven't played the original games myself, but have read about the story numerous times).
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SketchUp, perhaps?