[drorco]

Same. I really struggle to learn anything which I can't see a practical use for.

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.

[Solvency]

It's mindboggling to me that every teacher doesn't just debut the subject with videogames as a reference.

"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).

[drorco]

Totally! One of the first thing I did after learning Newton's law of gravity, was to write down a small simulation of planets in orbit and how they "dance" around each other. This little exercise totally blew my mind and the code was really simple to code.

There's probably an untapped opportunity here, but ed-tech is such a difficult industry.

[poorbutdebtfree]

Ed-tech can easily make smart kids smarter but that is a difficult sell to the virtuous.

[TeMPOraL]

I'm sure someone actually working in ed-tech will correct me, or perhaps even laugh me out of the room, but I still believe in what I figured out around highschool: that edtech, particularly "educational games", have it all backwards.

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.

[drorco]

They call these kind of games "chocolate covered broccoli" and I totally agree.

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.

[TeMPOraL]

Thank you! Not only I 100% agree with you, you've also managed to provide a few terms and phrases I've been missing, which could've cut my previous comment down to 1/4 of its size, without loss of meaning. Specifically:

- "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.

[drorco]

:D

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.

[chalst]

I recall encountering a simple domain-specific PL in school in the late 1980s that allowed physical systems to be easily modelled.

[grugagag]

Back when I studied these videogames were much simpler. I was explained instead calculating areas and volumes for various functions and that was enough for me to get it. The thing is that not everyone was confused and some can take in theory without a practical application. They’re different modes of thinking and I appreciate both, I just happen to fall in the practical group.

[TeMPOraL]

Wonder how many people here have similar story.

In primary and secondary school, I had troubles with math - mostly caused by me not doing homework exercises and generally avoiding work (probably an early indication of an issue that took 20 more years to diagnose...). It all changed when I got interested in gamedev - suddenly, I've caught up with most of the material I was bad at, quickly learned trigonometry beyond the secondary school program, and then some basic vector and matrix algebra - and I distinctly remember it all starting with a simple problem: how to make a sprite rotate and move in circles?

Couple decades later, I still have a kind of theory+applications mindset: I always seek to generalize and abstract, but I feel lost when presented with a new abstraction without any context. Over the years, I realized I learn and understand things most effectively by seeking out answers to the question: why?. Not in the sense of, "what will I ever use this for?", but in the sense of "why was this invented?", "what were the problems people who invented it were trying to solve?". I trace the topic back in time until I find the point where the "why" and "how" are both apparent, and then go forward from there.

[jerf]

I would love to have some sort of statistics on what the proportion of this feeling is. My suspicion is that the practical approach is probably about 90% of the population (who is willing to learn math at all). Would be helpful in trying to figure out how to tune learning programs. (I say this as one who is perfectly content to learn the theory directly and with little-to-no practical motivation, but my impression is I'm very much in the minority on that.)

I was going to say that the curriculum is tuned in favor of those who can just learn by theory, but then I realized that's not even true. It's tuned in favor of those who will simply swallow it without any idea what it is for; it is neither contextualized in terms of what it is practically good for, nor is it contextualized in terms of theory. It's just... there.

[grugagag]

I’d be curious to see that as well. I loved math until it became too abstract for me to grasp so I lost interest in it. And that worked pretty well as a self selection for the field, well, a large part of it. I wouldn’t want to be in the academia anyways…

[siftrics]

> I really struggle to learn anything which I can't see a practical use for.

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?

[TeMPOraL]

> Much of the world's most important advancements were made before any practical use could be seen.

In a sense, yes. But usually this was kind of accidental - as in, people making those breakthroughs weren't doing it because they loved manipulating abstract symbols, or believed that someone, somewhen will find it useful; rather, they had some immediate-term reason for doing the work - a problem to solve, a person to impress, or just doing it for shits and giggles - and only later it turned out their work was the key to something transformative.

I have a similar "mental make" as GP too. Over the years I realized that for me, it's not about practical use to me - it's about knowing why something was invented, what problems the inventors were trying to solve. Learning the historical motivation "grounds" the concept for me, and makes it much easier to understand.

[drorco]

It's just the way my mind works and motivated. Motivation is a very elusive feeling that I did not find easy ways to manipulate. It's not as if I'm totally blocked from learning stuff with no clear purpose, but it will require much more mental capacity that is often difficult to muster in the day-to-day routine. Another example, is I did try to learn what I perceive as totally theoretical math such as "prove that there are infinite primary numbers" which was a nice idea to entertain, but it didn't really make me want to dig in further. On the other hand, learning about linear algebra in the context of machine learning, suddenly got Linear Algebra a lot more interesting and easy to learn.

[siftrics]

Makes sense. Somewhat related --- I find procrastination to be a very similar feeling. I know what I should do, but I feel compelled not to do it, for whatever reason.

I think procrastination and what you are describing are slightly different, though, because procrastination stems from stress and emotions for me, whereas with what you describe, it doesn't sound like you have to be stressed to experience it.

[qorrect]

> Why do you think that way?

Probably the same reason that you're such an ass (genes).

[siftrics]

Sorry man. Just asking an honest question. It's interesting to me that one can hold two opposing ideas and see no issue:

- History has demonstrated clear value in discovering and understanding concepts that have no practical use today

- One should not care to understand things that have no practical use today

Seems bizarre to think both things. That's why I asked.

[dangerlibrary]

You are shadowboxing - fighting an argument nobody is making. Someone is describing their personal experience of the world, not arguing that this is the best way to think about the world. It's an opportunity to learn about the ways that people learn things differently, if you can be curious and kind about it.

[siftrics]

You're right. I could've been kinder. Apologies.