Your Homework is Play Video Games

GuitarNeophyte writes "Four schools in the UK will be testing a new program idea to use video games for educational use. An IT researcher, along with Electronic Arts (the software game giant) are funding the proposition. 'We're looking at developing some of the softer skills that are needed for the 21st century, such as problem-solving, resilience, persistence and collaboration.' "

How effective are these "educational" games?

[manavendra]

There was talk early this year (or was it last year), about the game developed by WHO, to teach young kids in the developed countries, about the plight and standard of living of people in third world countries. However, it met with the same fate as the others that I heard of in the past... the launch of such a game is covered a lot by the media, but fizzles out with no updates posted about the effectivness.

On the other hand, how does one measure the effectiveness of such an initiative?

As for this trial, one has to wonder how much of a push is it from the gaming giant to lure more children into the gaming world?

Re:All your homework are belong to us.

[strider44]

Not necessarily. The capitalisations of "Play Video Games" suggest that it is a title of a subject or field of homework, in which case the grammar is correct.

This isn't exactly new.....

[8127972]

Check out these links where people have made similar arguments:

http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Hollow/1093/tva ndvideogames.html [geocities.com]

http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/116 16646.htm [siliconvalley.com]

http://www.playattention.com/attention-deficit/art icles/computer-video-games-do-have-benefits/ [playattention.com]

Re:Drivers Ed

[tont0r]

id imagine a lot of schools have simulators. i went to a really ghetto highschool and we somehow managed to get some. it wasnt really a game though. it was a machine that played a movie (same one no matter one) and it would keep a log of if you did the right things or the wrong things.

Old is new again

[couch]

This is nothing new, until the Windows platform completely wiped out the homegrown competition, we always had educational games in schools in the UK. Companies like Sherston [sherston.com], 4Mation [4mation.co.uk] and others released loads of 'games' for schools. Googling about now, I've found a few of the old-skool education games still knocking aroung (for example Granny's Garden [rm.com]), and some others that never seem to have made the jump from the 8 bit days (like Suburban Fox).

Some of the games that were created back in the 90s were very closely tied in with specific National Curiculum targets, and still manages to be quite fun to play - albeit made on quite a small budget, with the sort of money that EA has to throw at production, these new generation of education games could be really good.

Re:They were doing something right back then.

[condour75]

People coming out of the 1920's education system were far smarter than what the system is producing now.

Um. No they weren't. [wikipedia.org] Literacy [ed.gov] and intelligence have steadily gained since the 1870s.

Re:it could be worse; imagine Squaresoft games

[Psykechan]

Alright class, your homework for this weekend is to finish Squaresoft's Final Math Fantasy. It's an 80+ hour game with plenty of repetitious "math battles" and I want your Memory Card (8MB) (for Playstation 2) on my desk Monday morning.

We had this sort of thing in my time. We called it edutainment and it wasn't that popular then either.

Actually we did that in highschool

[drgonzo59]

Back in Russia in early 1990's we had just got a new classroom with IBM computers. The computer science (we called it 'informatics') teacher let us play Sokoban and Lemmings for a grade. It was really fun, made you think logically, and gave the teacher time to go out and run errands and take smoke breaks. A win-win situation if you ask me ;)