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.
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".
Most of the video games my wife and I played during late childhood stretched and exercised our brains, despite not being classified as "edutainment".
Games like Descent led to extremely developed spatial reasoning skills. Games like Nethack led to a level of meticulousness and a never-give-up, use-every-trick-in-the-book mentality. Games like Starcraft helped develop a sense of complex system dynamics. I was consistently observing the environment, solving puzzles, making tradeoffs and efficiency decisions (do I skip this area? Is it worth crossing that lava to get that powerup?), learning diligence and persistence, and doing controlled experiments to teach me about the games.
I also played a fair number of "edutainment" titles, including one my dad coded himself in the early 1980s, and many of those on your list. They were quite good and certainly helped me exercise my brain, but not to the degree that games like Descent, Starcraft, and Nethack did.
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?
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.
Yes, that's a very good point. The perfect example of this was Emanuel Lasker. He was an extremely talented mathematician, noted for work in commutative algebra, but he poured the vast majority of his efforts into chess. He was world champion for 27 years, easily the most dominant player of his era and amongst the best ever.
Just imagine if mathematics had been his passion and chess the side hobby!
> 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.
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.
There are a lot of ways to use your intellect that don't benefit the world: crossword puzzles, inventing new programming languages, World of Warcraft, and sudoku all come to mind. Chess is one of the few that can get you laid. That doesn't change the fact that you're not helping anyone.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.