Readit NewsI did it once, now doing it for the second time. I think most people will not bear it, but for me it feels like the only natural thing to do.
I can never imagine enjoying either running a hyper-growth VC funded company or being an employee, and I realize most people are not like that.
So on that end, maybe ask yourself if you were OK with cutting costs like losing the car, moving to a smaller apartment (even back with your parents) etc. and be happy about it even if your company flops.
- "chocolate covered broccoli"
- "catalyst for learning"
- "inspiration to learn"
> I learned and practiced most of my English from playing video games, and they were the catalyst to make me WANT to learn English, but they didn't exactly teach* me English.*
English is my second language, and I've also learned most of it from video games. Mostly from exposure, but initially through focused effort - I still vividly remember that time when I was maybe 10 or 12 years old, when I made screenshots from loading screens in Star Trek: Generations, and printed them out on paper, one by one, directly from MS Paint, to take back into my room and meticulously translate the story text on those screens, looking up every single word in an English->Polish dictionary. I also remember keeping that dictionary around when playing Fallout 1. The need to understand the stories and dialogues in games is what bootstrapped my English.
> I bet if you sample today's scientists and engineers at places like NASA, you'd probably find that a lot of them loved watching Star Trek/Star Wars as kids. So while sci-fi hasn't taught them how to work with Schrodinger's equation, it probably had a major part of what sparked their motivation to get started.
I agree. And Star Trek is, in fact, what got me interested in STEM. I owe my entire career and most of who I am as a person, to early exposure to captain Picard and the adventures of Enterprise-D.
(A lot of my early STEM self-education was driven by trying to understand the so-called "technobabble", which - at least in TNG - actually made sense. Probably because, in those days, they had proper scientific advisors.)
> Games probably do that too, and then some, thanks to interactivity.
Yup. I mentioned KSP for a reason - not only have I read the accounts of parents impressed by how much advanced math and physics their 8-12 years old kids can pick up, just for the sake of getting better at the game, but myself I also learned these things for the same reason. While Star Trek is what got me interested in space in the first place, KSP is what got me to finally grok how orbital mechanics and rocketry work in reality. It also made me no longer able to fully enjoy any space travel fiction, except for diamond-hard sci-fi.
I should probably give KSP a try again. I guess there's an initial threshold I got to power through first, as I got a bit exhausted after the first mission hehe.
I'm actually working now on a game of my own, with themes of science, and it's indeed a game-first approach rather than an educational game, but I do hope to maybe inspire some ideas and motivation with at least a few players.
I totally believe there's a lot of untapped potential in this area, and advancing towards cracking learning motivation + capabilities could have a huge impact.
Kids aren't stupid. If you take the usual boring curriculum with choreful exercises, and try to "make it more fun" by half-heartedly sprinkling in some colors, characters and cheesy stories, it will backfire spectacularly - kids will see you're just trying to trick them, and not even putting much effort into it.
The right way is the reverse: you need to make something honestly, inherently fun, but design it so that it educates users/players as a side effect. Take Kerbal Space Program: it's not designed to be an educational game, but it's fun, and models real-world physics well enough that you get 12 years old researching and understanding the math of orbital mechanics, all because they'd like to do better than "point roughly half-turn ahead of the Moon and go full throttle", and they'd like to not run out of fuel on the way. Or, look how Minecraft is tricking kids into learning electronics, boolean logic, low-level programming, etc.
(I'd mention Factorio, but I think it's a wash - any gains society gets from the game educating kids are cancelled out by the amount of productivity loss the mere exposure to this game inflicts on software devs.)
(EDIT: or, remember Colobot? A very simple third-person perspective game that had you find and refine resources to build robots, which then you used to kill some big bugs. The twist being, instead of controlling the robots like in a shooter, you had an option to program them in a Java-like DSL, inside the game. It was a great way to organically learn programming. The IP owners later made a "fork" of the game, Ceebot, that was pretty much the same, except it focused on teaching you to program robots instead of having fun exploring and shooting stuff. Predictably, that simple change of focus made the game flop.)
It doesn't even have to be a game: leave a kid in front of Google Earth, and they'll learn geography much faster and much more thoroughly than they would from a globe or a book. Not because the software is better at teaching, but because the kid is just messing around with a virutal model of Earth, and learning stuff along the way.
Etc. Etd.
I think it's a tough sell to adults, particularly parents and educators - that if you want to motivate kids to learn, you need to... stop trying to motivate them to learn. Give them something that's honestly fun, involving or benefiting from real-life knowledge and skills, but actually trying to teach them - and then trust that they'll pick that knowledge up on their own.
I think games, have lots to teach, but that most of the time they are a catalyst for learning or inspiration to learn, but on their own, they will rarely actually teach you. It's hard to put the finger on it, as for example, I'm not a native English speaker, but I learned and practiced most of my English from playing video games, and they were the catalyst to make me WANT to learn English, but they didn't exactly *teach* me English.
Another part of it, is I bet if you sample today's scientists and engineers at places like NASA, you'd probably find that a lot of them loved watching Star Trek/Star Wars as kids. So while sci-fi hasn't taught them how to work with Schrodinger's equation, it probably had a major part of what sparked their motivation to get started. Games probably do that too, and then some, thanks to interactivity.
That's a close-minded, ignorant world view. Much of the world's most important advancements were made before any practical use could be seen. Why do you think that way?
"Alright everyone, let's make a video game character out of triangles".
"Let's make a little cannon that you can change the angle of. How do you calculate the angle? Funny you should ask.."
"Now let's learn how you'd make the fireball move up and down as it travels. That's a sine wave!"
Every single student understands the basic concept of a game visually, even if they don't play them regularly. It's just a perfect frame of reference and context for applying the concepts in 2D, and then in 3D. And it's so easy to help the students understand how easily those concepts get extrapolated to other things (engineering, sports, whatever).
There's probably an untapped opportunity here, but ed-tech is such a difficult industry.
Just as an example, in high school learning trigonometry was really difficult for me, like why would I even care about finding an angle in a triangle, etc.?
Only once I studied physics or game dev, this has started to become relevant, and then studying it got SO MUCH easier.
As a game dev, I think at this stage AI can be a helpful utility, but it does not replace a designer's touch for professionally looking games.
Before visiting Japan, I learned to read in both Hiragana and Katakana, but I didn't really know more than a dozen or so words in Japanese. While visiting Japan, I found Katakana to be a lot more useful, because it's commonly used and often is just English words converted to Japanese letters. I think all my Hiragana reading abilities were completely useless as I couldn't tell what I was reading.