(ir)Relevant tweets

This...along with Kerbal Space Program...was the sort of thing I had talks with Carl Sagan about, who viewed the growing focus upon technological advances - including video games - to have a tremendous potential for teaching new students.  He was so frustrated that video and text offered so little interactivity, the ability for a student to stop and ask questions on a more individual basis and not felt like they had to censor themselves because of embarrassment in front of their fellows, the limitations of technology at the time - and so it was discussed what it would be like to have a teaching version of the RPG games I was playing - what if your teachers were NPCs that could respond to a scope of inquiry?  As a bit of a legacy...well, that interactivity was something keenly stressed in a certain California studio's games in the 90s, helping to further plant in the idea of interactive facial AIs.

God games, and to explain why they are in part held legendary, such as Populous showed that it doesn't have to be through a character, but rather directly by the player to influence what they are seeing, to see how it responds.  Not just choice and consequences, but direct agency.

Eventually, I see a combination of the two to be used in place of textbooks.  You first have a part with an interactive instructor giving a bit of an introduction to the material with the student being able to prompt for more info, go through a bit of direct learning-through-play (with the instructor on-hand for help), and then back to the instructor for more discussion and a briefing about the next lesson episode.

This sort of thing would have been one practical application of that otherwise money pit of Robot Colony, that could have been an advanced teaching interface usable by children to learn languages, literacy, math, all sorts of things.
(Those developers really failed to market their technology worth a damn and I think just closed down the kinda clunky adventure game that cost...about $25M in technology development and game development costs, to come up with something that could possibly rival BonziBuddy in speech recognition?)

If you could make the medium itself come alive and be interactive...there you go.

I've checked this out...well, the video, because my "mobile" is Android.  

It is beautiful work, and so will give inspiration for further iterations of how educational software has advanced over the years.

Imagine if that were your "homework".

#bettergodgame

Note that I said potential.  

Practicality, getting such things into "education" has generally been a time-honoured tradition of futility, especially in some places where they don't like it when some books disagree with their own, and others when they're being notoriously cheap to even afford decent teachers.  In some places, instead of those (usually rubbish) educational aids that are rivaled by Flash programs, I could see a few adopting what I describe - not as replacements for teachers, but as teaching aides to replace common textbooks.

If you can make folks learn something while they are playing a game, that's an instructional aid on its own.  
We've also come a bit of a ways from some rote instruction methods.

For one good example, Kerbal Space Program has led people to understanding that there's a lot more to rocketry than just aiming up and pushing a button.

The interactive bit makes it a whole different thing than the old problems with trying to convert textbook into film/TV that still had the same problems as just a textbook alone - it's the teacher that makes the lessons happen.  So if the "book" can instead offer individualised question and answer feedback, then it's a definite improvement.  Note that technology can never be a replacement for teachers, but can be an increasingly helpful aid for them, as there really is no removing the human element in teaching another human because of the nature of the beast.  What I was describing would have been more for "homework" and not a replacement for the classroom itself - but it could offer students an available tutor of sorts out-of-class even at an age when internet searching may not be suitable for them, able to offer them guidance when the teacher may not be present and the parents similarly do not know.

Making the student learn while they're having fun (at least more than staring at a textbook) and in a receptive frame of mind, is the effectiveness of a good teacher and something I wholly agree with in regards to that video you posted.  4:30 is a good point, and let's be honest...most educational programming up until recently has been essentially a video with "click an answer to proceed to the next video segment" or something of the sort.  It is getting better, which I am glad to see.

The problem is indeed that technology isn't a quick-fix, but that people are trying to utilise technology with the mindset of replacing the teacher entirely.  No, you're just replacing the tools to teach with, upgrading them, such as static and expensive textbooks that need to be thrown out when they are either too worn or have been outdated (a computer program also doesn't really have material printing costs anymore).  Like using a tablet and projector instead of a chalkboard, allowing a disabled teacher to instruct where previously they could not.  As such, this application wouldn't be good for advanced classes that may change from one year to the next, but instead be useful to help teach a lot of basic sciences with minor changes every year to keep it updated.

Yes, the students who programmed the turtle didn't have any better reasoning skills...but they probably had an incentive to learn how to program the turtle to see the lesson in action in their own hands, as part of a social exercise that makes the subject seem fun to learn for the students.

Quite true, as many often have tutorials...and most of them suck, force-feed information, and can either be cumbersome and annoying to those who already know what to do or still not manage to offer enough instruction for that particular player's understanding. These are being worked upon to varying degrees, but generally game developers have been teaching gamers how to play their games while adopting new changes over time.

That would seemingly offer far advances in instructional tools. The problem most have is in bridging learning and fun (or at least able to inspire a student to be in a receptive state of mind), which is something a lot of teachers have problems with themselves.

Ah, thank you, a fascinating read.

What would be the point. No need for that really.

No I meant what is the need for holograms. It is already possible to do all of this without. The only difference is that there's no virtual presence. It would be cool to have of course.