
MIT Creates The One Video Game You'll Be Thrilled To See Your Kid Get Hooked On - jamesbritt
http://www.fastcompany.com/1748531/mit-science-game
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DarkShikari
I practically _grew up_ on edutainment when I was ~4-8 years old. My first
computer games were Math Blaster, Gizmos&Gadgets, Treasure Mountain, Oregon
Trail, Number Munchers, Outnumbered!, and Operation Neptune.

And even beyond the Super Solvers series, there were dozens of others like
these, from the game I used to learn to type, to Carmen Sandiego. And beyond
the outright edutainment games, most of the rest of my childhood was spent
playing Simcity 2000, Age of Empires, and other similar games of the era. I
even learned to "use the Internet" by playing Yahooligans' Cybersurfari. (Holy
crap, does anyone remember THAT?! Practically lost to history at this point!)

I strongly suspect a good portion of my "intelligence" was actually acquired
by exercising my brain in these ways when I very young, rather than due to
school or genetics.

I also suspect that there's a whole generation of kids -- born around the same
time during the heyday of edutainment (~1988-92) -- who had a similar
experience.

~~~
hugh3
I think that Civilization is a large part of the reason I'm a scientist today.

What's the winning strategy in Civilization? Science! As much of it as you
can! Everything else in society exists only in order to create the resources
which scientists consume (or to defend your borders to enable your scientists
to work unmolested by Aztecs and Zulus). Yep, everyone else in society is
doing a thankless, pointless job, quickly forgotten as soon as they die, but
the contributions of scientists live on forever, slowly advancing society down
the tech tree. Is there any better feeling than making a new discovery? Hells
no! Each discovery lets you make new and better stuff, as well as putting you
forever closer and closer to blasting off to Alpha Centauri. Cities and fields
and wonders of the world can burn and almost inevitably do, but nothing can
ever take away your scientific knowledge.

Suffice it to say that too much Civilization in my formative years may have
crystallized these sorts of values in my impressionable mind. I _still_ see
the world as divided into "scientists" and "support staff".

~~~
palish
I want to work at your company.

~~~
hugh3
I currently have openings in the catapult and elephant divisions.

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Dilpil
There are quite a few games I wouldn't mind seeing my kid get hooked on.

If raising a chess champion is a good thing, I can't imagine that raising a
starcraft champion is a bad thing.

~~~
astrofinch
Chess is overrated. It has an aura of prestige that doesn't have anything to
do with the game's merits.

~~~
agscala
I think that the prestige associated with chess is appropriate. It's quite a
difficult to play and there really is no entertainment value to the game
outside of the gameplay itself. Why would you say that its prestige has
nothing to do with the game's merits?

~~~
hugh3
It's a fine game, but it's still just a game. The comparison to Starcraft
makes it clear.

I'm all for filling in your spare time by playing games, but if it's _all
you're doing_ in life then that seems pretty sad.

Especially true if chess playing ability really _is_ an indicator of general
intelligence. All those grandmasters could be doing amazing things for the
human race, but nope, their brains are filled with queens and rooks.

~~~
wewyor
> _All those grandmasters could be doing amazing things for the human race_

I'm not so sure chess masters would necessarily be good at other things like
say physics as they would have to have a passion in that to even become
remotely viable for race saving. Grandmasters likely have been playing and
practicing and have been absolutely absorbed in chess for many years in order
to achieve their status, but I don't know if it would be as easy for someone
who thinks chess to become absorbed in something like medicine or aeronautics
or other such things.

Edit: if you have a subscription to the new yorker this was a pretty good
article on what a single grandmaster is like
[http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/03/21/110321fa_fact_...](http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/03/21/110321fa_fact_max?currentPage=all)
[PAYWALL]

~~~
derefr
They'd likely be equally good at things that also require large-scale, long-
term thinking about complex zero-sum competitive resource optimization
problems. Like, for example, war strategy. I don't know if it generalizes
beyond that, though.

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pbhjpbhj
Wouldn't load for me but

[http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/vanished-
smithsonian-0415...](http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/vanished-
smithsonian-0415.html) is straight from the horses mouth, and

<https://vanished.mit.edu/user/register> is the game itself.

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movingahead
Traditional classroom education is too boring. This is not limited to school,
but also in colleges unless you have that rare teacher who can make the class
interesting. Great to see MIT researchers taking the problem head-on.

~~~
DanielRibeiro
This RSA video shows some reasons why the current education systems (not only
US') has the problems it has: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U>

~~~
sebkomianos
Some great thinking on that video!

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ansy
I think you mean this: <http://www.khanacademy.org/exercisedashboard>

Shame it requires you to login with a Google or Facebook account though. Is
there any reason they can't allow email-free logins if you only want to do
exercises?

~~~
pbhjpbhj
I actually signed my lad up for Google so he could go on there. You have to be
13 for FB, it is rather limiting.

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Kilimanjaro
"What event occurred between our time and theirs that led to the loss of
civilization’s historical records?"

A: The internet.

~~~
Tangaroa
Ironically true to a point. In the time between Google and Google Books, a
citation pulled from a book or an old newspaper always lost the argument to a
citation from Bob's Biased Blog. If information was not on the Internet, it
was automatically suspect. That is not how I would choose to judge facts, but
I always lost that argument too.

Also, as college students found the Internet faster to research than finding
and reading physical books, much information entombed in books was not being
considered by the younger generation.

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Tangaroa
Tangential to the subject, I recently attended a presentation on educational
video games by Keith Devlin of Stanford's H-STAR program. The main point that
I came away with was that too many "educational" games break the immersive
experience of a video game. An example Devlin gave was of an arithmetic game
where a math equation was drawn onto a monster, and the player is expected to
solve the equation before the monster clubs him. As soon as the player sees
the math equation on the monster's belly, he is no longer playing a video
game; he is doing a math problem.

A couple of counter-examples might be Civilization and Where in the World is
Carmen Sandiego, where the educational aspects are so well integrated into the
game that one might not consider it an educational game unless it were
advertised as such.

Most games are educational in a way: they teach you something about their in-
game universe, and the player has to recognize and learn patterns to win the
game. The trick is to make a game where the patterns teach the players what
you want them to learn without breaking the immersive experience that makes
players want to continue playing a video game.

MIT's Vanished looks like it is doing well if it has produced 4,000 forum
posts from 5,000 users (actually, the count is up to 37,500; you don't need an
account to see the forum, although the comments are still hidden). The
description makes it sound like the Portal 2 marketing campaign, with puzzles
to solve in different media, rather than a video game.

~~~
TillE
Nicely put. I'm convinced that you could make, say, an educational chemistry
game where the point was to actually solve problems with chemistry. A bit like
SpaceChem plot-wise, but with nucleophilic substitution and balancing redox
reactions instead of computer programming-esque puzzles.

You could basically take homework problems, dress them up with fancy
interactive, informative graphics, and stick them in a "tycoon" game where
you're manufacturing and selling chemicals. With some side work analyzing
environmental pollutants, cleaning up accidents, reverse-engineering your
competitors' products with spectroscopy, that sort of thing. I'd play that.

~~~
tokenadult
_I'm convinced that you could make, say, an educational chemistry game where
the point was to actually solve problems with chemistry._

See what you think about this. I know the developer.

<http://bitwixt.com/jsite/>

