

Teaching in the Age of Minecraft - wallflower
http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/02/teaching-in-the-age-of-minecraft/385231/?single_page=true

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germinalphrase
The most significant limitation on bringing games into the formal learning
environment is the time investment to make it work effectively. The article
notes that teachers want to create their own teaching tools (and subsequently
98% of their content is teacher created) but the take away should not be that
teachers _want_ to create this content - but that the commercial creators were
not creating useful content on the behalf of these teachers. It's classic
design 'empathy' breakdown.

The time constraints on teachers operate on several different levels: very
limited time for planning, unpaid overtime to prep these materials, and most
importantly the limited amount of time teachers can devote To specific
learning targets (fast and good is often better than slow and very good).

I am actually bullish on the utility of 'games' for education - but I rarely
hear a realistic discussion of the constraints on teachers as part of the
discussion. For this reason, I see these efforts as far more likely to succeed
in non-traditional/informal learning environments.

