Given Computers, Children Teach Themselves
Let’s face it, I’m a technocrat. My vision of the future is more tech, more computers, and a possible species-wide merging into the Anonymous meme-collective. Because I’m always right, experiments in the real world are vindicating these views.
Education scientist Sugata Mitra recently performed an interesting experiment. He buried a computer in a concrete wall, planted it in a slum where children could get at it, then walked away. When he came back, the children were using the computer in ways he couldn’t have predicted — and not just because the kids had never seen a computer before in their lives.
Here’s Sugata Mitra’s TED Conference presentation of how kids and computers mix.
Cute ideas: RPG styling for text book learning
Us voces can translate a little Nipponese but not quite enough to read the article behind this blog’s post—but the story still intrigues us.
It looks like Namco Bandai—a company that we love simply from all the enjoyment they’ve brought us—is looking into educating children using a translation from the digital world of video games into the analog world of textbooks.
It sounds like Namco Bandai is layering a choose-your-own adventure into the basic work/textbooks most students use in elementary school. Students follow an RPG storyline by, say, solving math problems and each right answer nets them a key. Scoring enough keys wins the student some kind of prize — but it’s not clear if the prize is contained within the book or something physical the teacher distributes. It could be pretty entertaining edutainment if it’s not too easy to cheat the game like you
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Virtual Worlds as Teaching Tools
As gamers, we know games are incredible learning tools. Just look at everything you’ve memorized to pwn noobs in AV, right? Hell, you knew what I meant when I said “AV.” That’s learning. On and off, the educational community has been considering the potential of games to teach real lessons in science, math, and reading, but the efforts have always been local and half-hearted. With the rise of social gaming (like, say, the World of Warcraft that Alterac Valley comes from), the scale of gaming has changed. This change allows more gamers to experience the lessons a game might teach.
The educational video games Food Force, a U.N.-produced game on the mechanics of food aid distribution, and Whyville, another game that takes place in a virtual world, each has about 4 million players, a number that far exceeds the number of students graduating each year …
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