[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.

[TeMPOraL]

> 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.

What made all the difference for me was a mod (Kerbal Engineering ...something?) that calculated ∆v for each stage as you were building your rocket. Coupled with a ∆v "subway map" of the game's solar system, this solved the problem of running out of fuel half-way through the mission. I eventually learned how to do the math on my own, but I would've given up long before that happened, if not for this mod. It's been some time since I last played KSP, but I hear that this functionality is now built into the stock game.

Good luck with your game! Give me a shout if and when you need someone to play-test it :).

[throwawaymobule]

They put something like that in ksp2. very useful, even if the numbers aren't 100% right.

Very glad I'm living in a post-ksp world, even of I'm not playing it, for the real life rocketry it enabled.

[chalst]

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