At my company we identified, at least if your target is kids, two ways to sell edu games.
1. Sell them to institutions, like governments, schools, companies, whatever. Thing is, the features they look when choosing a game to buy, are ones most likely to make the game unfun, the end result is often boring stuff noone WANTS to play.
2. Sell them to the public directly, but word of mouth here is often poor, specially if your age range is narrow, for example if your target is kids between 4 and 8, the kids will play the game, love it, but parents won't tell other parents to buy it, most of their friends probably WON'T have kids the same age.
Thus if you are going for fun games, you need path 2, and to do path 2 you need a ton of exposure that is NOT word of mouth, we found out this means or you have massive marketing budget, or you have some kind of connection to media so they advertise you cheaper.
Our biggest competitors all ended being media companies themselves, for example Disney is an obvious one, but another was Toca-Boca, at first they looked like a tiny indie studio, but somehow they ALWAYS get featured in multiple magazines, store front pages and so on, eventually I found out they were created by a multi-billion media empire named Bonnier,
Since then I found that is easier to get money from creating other things, since I don't have the necessary media connections.
Well, even NORMAL games often need media connectios (for example, Jon Blow was a journalist before he made Braid, Nintendo literally printed their own magazine for a while, the indie clique that existed around TIGSource was heavily tied to CMPMedia, many of them being presenters in events, or being friends of their employees, or working for them directly, the whole thing is very "incestuous").
We also tried to make educational games and came to a similar conclusion. The truth is, kids (or adults) don't want to play "educational" games. They just want to play fun games.
And, let's be honest, games that try to teach you math or science are just not as fun as Fortnite or Minecraft.
Now, you can make the case that some games are educational by mistake. Like Minecraft, Age of Empires, Sim City or Kerbal Space Program. But noone would see them or describe them as "educational" games.
So, what we're trying to make now are creative games. In my opinion, creativity is extremley important and there are fun ways to be creative, that are not eductional in the strict sense. For example, Lego comes to mind.
I would think Maxis actually tells you the best way to be a success. Maxis doesn't say their games are educational and players don't feel like they're trying to be. But they were, and Maxis wanted them to be. I've heard Will Wright talk about giving his kids things like microscopes as "toys" that let them play and explore which causes them to sort of learn against their best intentions. If I were to get into the educational software space, I would go the Maxis route of making games for gamers, marketing them as wholesome for all ages, and then having a secret educational agenda. That is, I'd try to straddle the line, and maybe if I were good at it, word of mouth would spread and the school administrators would hear positive feedback from their students and teachers about how engaging the games are. You would essentially have to create your own market since one doesn't exist; you'd create a need administrators don't know they have.
Alternatively, you could go Minecraft and hack in education through mods and stuff to existing games kids are already engaged in.
But I fully admit as much as I admire Maxis, I don't work in that space and unless I win the lottery I won't be quitting my job to get into educational software any time soon.
I think the indirect approach is very underrated. Our kids have all learned to read ahead of “schedule” because they wanted to understand what was happening in their games, and they’re all also coming along very quickly at arithmetic because of needing to manage the economy of whatever game they’re playing.
As a kid, I picked up a familiarity with history and geography that was miles ahead of my peers due to games like Total War and Close Combat, which aren’t sold as educational at all.
I think people innately want to learn whatever they need to know to accomplish their goals, and it’s way easier to give people goals and tools than it is to teach them about tools in the abstract.
A personal anecdote: I bought my first English dictionary to understand 1992’s Alone in the Dark. I’d probably not be talking with you guys and girls if not for videogames. I had no interest whatsoever in learning English, I just wanted to beat the games. If someone assigned me the very same game for educational purposes, I’d hate it by default.
+1, I learned English by playing Leisure Suit Larry I-III [1]. Text adventures were really useful in this regard because you had to type in more or less correct sentences. Also, at the core they were built around dialogues, that is, spoken (=not very formal) language and vocabulary.
Al Lowe, lead developer of the Larry series, probably also had some influence on my sense of humor (to this day I prefer grammar-level jokes to kicks-in-the-butt). These games were a great, intellectually twisted, multi-layered introduction to the world of adult people as well. :) Thank you, teacher!
I learned English in the MMO Runescape, bartering for items and getting help on quests. I basically never had to study for any English class since primary school because I was always slightly ahead of where the class was due to obsessively playing video games.
Same here, fun fact is that even at school and high school I was the only boy that could understand a basic text or do a basic conversation but even with that I always had troubles just to pass any test.
Learned English playing games in the early 90's
In any English test they ask me to put a phrase in passive form and I was like: the f* is that?
And most probably for maths/physics It would be funnier to do some angry birds with numbers than calculating the movement of a random body in a parabolic movement.
Actual great learning games do exist, but the real awesome ones are rare.
See this 2012 thread on a truly awesome algebra learning game, and this stays relevant to this day. To the best of my knowledge, it is still the best and fastest way to learn how to solve an equation for x. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4188579
From what I know, research does not support the idea that dragonbox is a particularly effective way to teach algebra. Which is too bad, because it seems like it would work really well:
I've seen first hand how well it works in a study with 40k kids in the US, Norway, and France. The study was led by the Center for Game Science, Washington University.
Paper: Zoran Popović. Achieving 96% Mastery at National Scale through Inspired Learning and Generative Adaptivity. Proceedings of the Second (2015) ACM Conference on Learning@ Scale, 2015.
http://dl.acm.org/ft_gateway.cfm?id=2724684&ftid=1550376&dwn...
Post-test success as used in the paper you mentioned can be a misleading indicator if transfer to pen and paper was done improperly. As kids solving equations in a game are moving terms around by touch on a screen, they need to transfer that learning to pen and paper before being able to write a line by line solution. Failing to do this transfer would predictably lead to a poor post-test performance, without actually measuring properly how much algebra had been learned and understood.
Civilization 1 was my foundational introduction to world history. I read every single civilopedia tech entry as it came up, and that drove a heck of a lot of follow up reading to find out if what it said was "really real".
This was exactly my experience too! I wanted to separate out the game narrative from the actual history when I played something like the campaigns in Age of Empires II, and it drove a ton of history reading.
> I think people innately want to learn whatever they need to know to accomplish their goals
Bingo. Both my parents are retired teachers, and both focused on high-risk student populations (my father at adolescent correctional facilities, and my mother with "troubled children that had learning disabilities at specialized facilities). Both with the freedom to implement alternative means of education as opposed to standardized public school curriculum.
They both found incredible success in teaching by focusing on a individual child's interests and goals. It's easy to do so in the context of parenting, but much more difficult in a school setting. Implementation of such an idea is beyond my pay grade, but I think there's promise in identifying goals/motivation and personalizing education.
> > I think people innately want to learn whatever they need to know to accomplish their goals
> Bingo. Both my parents are retired teachers, and both focused on high-risk student populations (my father at adolescent correctional facilities, and my mother with "troubled children that had learning disabilities at specialized facilities). Both with the freedom to implement alternative means of education as opposed to standardized public school curriculum.
> They both found incredible success in teaching by focusing on a individual child's interests and goals. It's easy to do so in the context of parenting, but much more difficult in a school setting. Implementation of such an idea is beyond my pay grade, but I think there's promise in identifying goals/motivation and personalizing education.
I used to teach and had many kids tell me on their first day that they hated reading and _hated_ writing (with their parents echoing the same). I hold the notion that reading is almost like an automatic process once learned—put a cereal box on the table during dinner and you almost can't avoid reading it. People _want_ to read. Aligning the material with the kid's interests is the surest way to progress. Couple that with writing prompts that are in the same genre and even the parents wouldn't believe that this child who is suddenly consuming a book a week is their own.
This is great, I had a friend in college who talked this way about reading and it always felt to me like someone saying they don't like to use their eyes to see... Like how do you even have an opinion about reading? It's just a thing that we can do, like breathing... Whether I enjoy a certain reading session depends on what I'm reading, but reading itself is value-neutral.
> I think people innately want to learn whatever they need to know to accomplish their goals
What if I told you that (morpheus.jpg) this has been common knowledge in pedagogical research for over half a century now, and that pretty much all attempts of reforming education in the light of that simple fact have failed :(
This sounds plausible and if I had to hazard a guess as to why efforts at reform have failed, I'd say it's because people who haven't thought very much about the goals of education have an idea in their heads of what education should look like and it is our current system. I think parents and politicians have a lot of control over the system and just like the "butts-in-seats" theory of business management, a lot of people think if kids aren't doing copious amounts of homework, they're not learning anything.
We're homeschooling our kids and we track their progress compared to the public school curriculum closely, and we do remarkably little that looks like formal education. The kids are easily on schedule with everything, a year or more ahead of the curriculum benchmarks, but people see what we do, and then ask when we're going to start teaching them stuff.
I rather agree with the quoted statement. I think that, if it is truly that simple fact which has failed, then it is because 'their goals' are in fact put upon them, not innately 'their goals'.* Students will of course not innately want to learn whatever they need to know to pass the exam. But they want to learn whatever they need to know to beat their friends in Fortnite.
I think more generally the problem is that pedagogy, as in _instruction_, is fundamentally at odds with _agency_ (which is what games excel at giving people). (Imagine playing a game that would explain to you how to play it at every step of the way. How fun would that be?) It's comes down to control. Who should have it: the teacher, or the student? No classroom setting would ever allow giving _all control_ over to students. Yet, that is what games do. And the wonders that it creates.. The control gives players a really _empowering_ feeling of agency and self-determination. Pedagogy, and instruction, is often more paternalistic / patronizing in its core, since it assumes "You can't do this, let me show you". Games say: "Let's see if you can do this!"
* - Education is a way of enforcing society's goals upon the individual (to create "citizens", ideally, but to create "workers", practically), and the individual adapts to it to the extent it helps him later in life, to the level he/she has aspirations and manages to forgo instant gratification.
This was the approach of my company ("games" that are secretly educational).
Even Maxis itself actually failed, they went bankrupt and EA bought them and ditched their educational games (what remained of Maxis started to just pump out The Sims series one after the other).
But unless you are aiming at a really, really wide market, and is either lucky or get exposure help, you won't go far.
I noticed for example "Kingdom Come: Deliverance" has a LOT of information about medieval era in the Holy Roman Empire, still they aimed to be a "AAA" game, and the information is tucked inside the in-game manual.
Maxis games are pretty good in that regard; Sim City was probably the most influential in a list of 'management' games, which teach you about economics, revenue vs expenses, and natural disasters; some of its successors / related games like Transport and Roller Coaster Tycoon make that even more apparent.
And The Sims simplified, but made me (and probably others) aware of quantified personal needs; you need x amount of sleep per night or you'll accrue 'sleep debt' and distress, you need social contact to fill that meter, etc.
Minecraft has an educational mode / version btw, there was one game our son was playing that basically made him go out into the sea and identify various types of sea life. I mean it's all Minecraftified (?) and abstracted, but they do pick up a lot of things from it.
I'd still like him to read more books though, given that his language skills are pretty bad.
> "Like Minecraft, Age of Empires, Sim City or Kerbal Space Program. But noone would see them or describe them as "educational" games."
And that's the problem. Because they are educational. And because they are both educational and fun, people are much more engaged to learn from them than from "real" educational games.
People who play Europe Universalis learn way more about early modern history than they ever learned at school. As Randal Munroe pointed out, you learn way more about orbital mechanics from KSP.
If you want to make truly educational games, you shouldn't focus on the educational part, but take the educational part and wrap it in tons of fun.
Of course there are topics where this is going to be hard. I have absolutely no idea how anyone could make a fun game that revolves around German grammar. (Or do I? The best way to learn a language always seems to be to actually use it with a native speaker. Having a friend who speaks the language you're trying to learn would be a great way to do that. There might be something here.)
But something like geology could be part of a simulation where you need to find certain resources, and that's easier once you understand how those resources are formed. And then there needs to be something fun to do with those resources, of course.
> If you want to make truly educational games, you shouldn't focus on the educational part, but take the educational part and wrap it in tons of fun.
That's the problem. I think if you define "educational" as the curriculum taught in school, this is not possible. There's no way around working a ton of math problems to get better at math. You maybe can make it a bit more engaging if you pack it in a video game, but it will never be fun for most people.
Therefore, I think, the educational role of video games must be to spark interest. For example, KSP sparks interest in aerospace engineering, and I bet there's a significant number of people who went on to study rocketry because they played KSP.
Sparking interest is an important function. In fact, I think it becomes increasingly important as a lot of material and courses are now available for little money ubiquitously. Great education starts with a spark of interest.
Let me explain in more detail:
Back in the days, an important part of going to school was having access to knowledge. Now, thanks to the internet and millions of amazing humans, knowledge is accessible all over the place, virtually for no money.
Today, the motivation to learn something is therefore more important. To get motivated, first you need to know that something exists, and second you need to know if you like it or not. Before motivation comes sparking interest. And here, video games have an extremely important role to play - and unlike "educational" video games that are math exercises disguised as video games, video games that can try to achieve the spark can be genuinely fun to play.
But honestly, humans don't learn languages by understand their grammars with the logic part of their brain. Games would be ideal to produce comprehensible input, and test players on their comprehension via actions, instead of making them reply with words.
There's some evidence that trying to produce language to early in your learning just ingrains bad habits. So instead you can just follow increasingly complex instructions to show that you understand. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input_hypothesis
> But honestly, humans don't learn languages by understand their grammars with the logic part of their brain.
As a native German speaker, I disagree. For me, the German grammar (in particular the declination system) is what I would consider the type system of the German language. So yes, I do think a lot about German sentences in terms of types/grammar that are/is involved.
EDIT: When I was a pupil at school, the only thing that I loved about the German classes (for native speakers) were the grammatical concepts. At that time, I really couldn't understand why these weren't taught in math classes ...
When you're a native speaker at school you already speak the language, you just learn the rules to better understand some corner cases and to be able to pursue some careers that would otherwise be impossible for you.
But you first learn a language intuitively at home, by using it a lot and developing intuition for what sounds right and what doesn't.
I'm a native Polish speaker (which has a "typesystem" much more complicated than the German one nevermind the English one). I've learnt German for 4 years in secondary school. I remember the system to be pretty intuitive and simple (mostly you change the articles not the words, there's just 4 cases, no verb aspects, just 1 kind of plural, just 3 genders, etc.).
So it was definitely easy to remember the rules and I did at one point (not anymore ;) ). But still to speak German you can't pause every 3 seconds to do a table lookup for the correct conjugation and rules, that would be far too slow. You have to use the language and have that "ouch" feeling when you use the wrong case so eventually you know intuitively which word to use.
A game to teach a language should just be a game using that language and giving immediate feedback.
Well, you did learn to understand German sentences way before school and grammar, I think that was the point. A baby can learn any language without studying its grammar, and in the early period not being able to pronounce the words.
> Well, you did learn to understand German sentences way before school and grammar, I think that was the point.
Learning the first language as a baby takes many years - and even after these years, you are still only on a "baby talk level". That is why I don't consider these "natural" approaches for learning a language to be a good idea - they are far too slow to be economical.
+1 for Dwarf Fortress. That is a mind expanding game no matter who you are or how you approach it. It would be interesting seeing it played among a wide range of children. I know first-hand it really helped me through geology, remembering different rock types and the nuances involved with them.
When Islamic State was up and coming, the news reported that its capital was Al-Raqqa. I didn't bat an eye. I did bat an eye at my own non-eye batting. EU4 and the (save scumming) glorious return of the Byzantine Empire had forever seared into my brain where the place is.
A German language game would focus around getting language learners in touch with native speakers. Perhaps something like "Keep talking and nobody explodes" with a German manual?
> I have absolutely no idea how anyone could make a fun game that revolves around German grammar.
WWII is a pretty common setting for games. Making the German protagonists communicating only in German would be a first step to incentive learning the language.
Have an English language game where enemies talk in German, where being able to understand them gives you an advantage, for example because you know what they're about to do.
Then mix and match for different languages.
Of course the things they say should be more detailed and diverse than just some standard sound clips.
There's an old adage in screenwriting: Don't give the audience 4, give them 2+2. This is the Kuleshov Effect [0] for scripts.
By giving them the little details, you engage the audience (well, most of them) and make the work more compelling. Medical and Crime procedurals are this in spades. Sherlock Holmes is still idolized.
Educational genres are explicitly against the Kuleshov Effect. The whole point is to get to 4. The audience is not exactly unengaged (video games are engaging by definition), but they aren't drawn in. There are no compelling mysteries or 'flaws' that they help solve with the story of the game. Just a computer holding back an answer.
The progression of the Sherlock subplot in Star Trek: The Next Generation is a good example of this. It starts with Data trying to solve a case too fast, then ends with the computer creating a holographic life form to outwit Data.
The lesson here reminds me of one of my favorite Malcolm Gladwell essays about McDonald's failure to market healthy fast food back in the 90's:
The McLean was a flop, and four years later it was off the market. What happened? Part of the problem appears to have been that McDonald's rushed the burger to market before many of the production kinks had been worked out. More important, though, was the psychological handicap the burger faced. People liked AU Lean in blind taste tests because they didn't know it was AU Lean; they were fooled into thinking it was regular ground beef. But nobody was fooled when it came to the McLean Deluxe. It was sold as the healthy choice--and who goes to McDonald's for health food?
It absolutely must be, because they have even vegan options here and there. Sweden, for instance, has had vegan burgers for several years (first McBean and now McVegan). I know other countries have something similar.
It seems to me that US McDonald's must be scared of diluting their brand by also going after the veggie crowd. Perhaps due to McLean failing or that they just bide their time until they can make a whole new set of restaurants under a different brand name like McDonald's Green or something?
> or that they just bide their time until they can make a whole new set of restaurants under a different brand name like McDonald's Green or something?
Would be fascinating if they did something like that. Pret a Manger did this recently by adding stores called Veggie Pret. Might be tough for McDonald’s to pull that off, though, since they also cater a lot to kids. By introducing two stores, veggie vs non-veggie, wonder if that would create signaling issues of healthiness with audiences?
They can't compete with Fortnite or Minecraft, but Castle of Dr. Brain was so good I played it back in the day and didn't think of it as educational ;)
I used to play so many of those educational point and click games as a kid. Don't remember the details well but it seems the style has died out in the last decade.
Every game that contains an element of simulation that strives for realism is educational in that you walk out knowing a lot more about the simulated topic than before, often more than you ever wanted, and often more than what's in the sim. E.g. when I was playing counterstrike I found myself embarrassingly well-read in the Wikipedia pages about the history of modern firearms. Who would have guessed that "the Startgate gun" isn't just a very creative movie prop?
But this kind of knowledge acquisition only ever teaches the lowest hanging fruits, it's no substitute for drilling in the basics. Even lifetimes spent passing KSP won't bring you to a point were you could design your own rocket.
> But this kind of knowledge acquisition only ever teaches the lowest hanging fruits, it's no substitute for drilling in the basics. Even lifetimes spent passing KSP won't bring you to a point were you could design your own rocket.
Yes. Though it can probably teach you enough that you have enough scaffolding already in your brain that you can get through a textbook without getting lost?
I think the real value of KSP is orthogonal to textbooks. Like it says in that one xkcd strip, it gives you an intuitive understanding of orbital mechanics by letting you interact directly (and with a goal) with orbital trajectories. I think you'd have a hard time getting the same visual intuition about how the ellipse stretches and rotates depending on whether you burn retrograde or radially out from a textbook.
The great value, here, I think, is that you can have a process completely alien to humans and get an intuition of it about as good as what we can get from playing around with a ball. In high school physics, ballistics (and therefore gravity) is taught using a ball being thrown in the air for a reason- most people have this sort of intuition for that process, and find it easier to get from there to the mathematical model.
Before games/simulators like KSP, the only way to get an intuition of orbital mechanics like that would be to simulate it in your head a bunch, arduously.
I think this is a potential great source of value: games/simulator can give you otherwise-very-hard-to-get intuitive knowledge of (models of) subjects. Not a replacement for the maths and the crunch, but would probably make it easier in a revolutionary way.
I wonder if this is already happening? There must be a generation of aerospace engineering students now who have sent rockets to the Mun.
Again, the scaffolding effect. Greatly illustrated by how the civ games teach about history: they teach absolutely nothing, all their models are fantastically wrong and a core element is the counterfactual nature of how a game plays out (culminating in Gandhi's bomb threats). But they give mental scaffolding that is valuable in those topics where you'd otherwise start from an empty slate. When for example you know nothing about west African history and read a text about it for the first time, just having that image of the Mansa Musa avatar in your mind will give you a retention advantage over someone who doesn't have it. It works much like a condensation seed then, a mental bookmark to which new information can be attached before getting lost as essentially noise.
But I wonder if that might also come as a disadvantage in the classroom, where the remaining facts and methods grind has to be enforced: if, for some reason, you felt the need to make pupils knowledgeable in the sequence of popes, that incredibly boring class would naturally be spiced up with anecdotes of dual antipopes, the cadaver synod and so on. Would that last hope of making that class somewhat bearable be lost on someone who already knew those rare fun parts in between all the numbers, e.g. because of playing CK2?
When you are making pupils memorize sequence of popes and are spicing it up with anecdotes taken out of their historical context just to be interesting, imo, the solution is not to have them play game.
The solution is to work on curriculum and textbook some more.
>And, let's be honest, games that try to teach you math or science are just not as fun as Fortnite or Minecraft.
Only if you try to do it very naively. Most of the time, these "games" are "lets put blinky lights around match equations."
That's definitely not how you turn math and science into games. You turn them into games by making engineering games.
There was a really great paper I ran into a decade ago that looked at the theory making by players of World of Warcraft. Players were coming up with complex mathematical models for how to play the game most efficiently. THAT is how you make math a game.
The goal of the game shouldn't be "let's solve these math problems."
The goal of the game should be anything but that, and then you setup the game so that the best way to reach that goal is to use math.
Science opens the door even further, because hypothesis and experimentation is a fundamental part of playing games.
There was a recent post on here regarding the best ways to learn electricity. One of the top replies was to use some minecraft mod. I don't know anything about that mod, but that fact that it was one of the recommendations really said a lot to me.
And as a "video game"-like free alternative to 'real Lego' there are LeoCAD app + LDraw Parts Library, which are suitable for creating 'digital Lego' models by kids.[0,1,2]
I came to the same conclusion for software that caters to teachers.
Teachers don't buy that, the administration does. They don't feel the pain
the teachers are having.
It also applies to programming lessons. Yes, everybody thinks it's important.
No, it's hard to make a living selling it.
We do. See the success of teacherspayteachers.com or tes.com. As a teacher I have spent hundreds of dollars of my own money to buy resources. Simply because I don't have the time for the admin to claim the expense.
The problem is that most resources are bad, if not terrible. The ones that are good are not adapted to what you need, not customisable, etc. You may have come up with a great resource but it has to tick a lot of boxes. Not because the teachers don't love real learning ... but because our hands are tied.
We have this huge volume of content to cover in a limited amount of time and standardised tests await. If your resource doesn't use the same notation, terminology, depth ... some students may be more confused than helped (of course the very smart ones will make deep connections ... but you have to teach for everybody). It's not an easy problem to solve but more time / money for good teachers is the obvious place to start.
You do- sort of. The problem I ran into is that a lot of what we know comes from educational “gurus”- not science. So if you have software that disagrees with what the teacher thinks is the right way to teach, they won’t budge even if all the data show that you’re giving them a better way.
I don’t hold it against them though. Nobody was going to tell me how to teach physics.
Fun fact(?): Back when I was teacher my friend Eddie (math teacher) decided we could teach pretty sophisticated ideas to our community college students if we used this fancy program called “Mathematica.” We wrote a grant and got a good price from Wolfram and after that they introduced a pricing for community colleges. This was way back in the ‘90s- but I don’t remember the year.
The point is, nobody sold me software. I decided what my problem was and set about solving it. I suspect most teachers either (a) do that too or (b) want an accepted solution.
More money for teachers might help but I think it should be an entirely separate job description. Automation [in my view] should be something invested in for a while, enough to make it work, have a period of maintenance then do it again. Gradual improvement may get stuck.
It seems the author is not thinking about games (educational or not) in the common sense, but in way broader terms:
> A video game is just:
>
> (a) a simulation of reality
> (b) with fast feedback loops.
I’d agree with both of you.
“Educational” games are a hard sell. I’m a parent and the educational mini-games pushed by school is boring to death and won’t stick with my kid. It’s hard to articulate, but the underlying principle of trying to teach a specific thing doesn’t go well. Yet the ones that I found that seemed to work ok had way lower “educational” focus, and it was hard to recommend over any other standard game.
Then simulations stick very well.
Minecraft is a barebone one and “teaches” a ton of true and untrue stuff. Racing simulations stuck, flight simulator stuck, hell even lego simulator stuck. I see animal crossing in the same vein, and am trying to find a serious fishing simulator as a beginner’s guide to fishing. And kids can spend hours on Streetview for the same reason.
I'd argue that micro controllers and educational/programmable robots fit into this category as well. They allow the kind of play and learning that makes them both engaging and valuable for education.
Totally. The lego technic sets are a boon in that respect, mindstorms being a very good entrypoint to programming (“telling a machine to do stuff on its own”) in particular, and to engineering in general.
I spend hundreds of hours on this series (from 2000 to 4) and I love it yet I don’t think I learnt much out of it. "People and companies want low taxes", "nuclear power plant are dangerous" and "wind power is inefficient", that’s pretty much it.
Also when I was kind I wasn’t really able to build a good city. I understood years later this is because the game expects cities to be built in the US fashion: big residencial/commercial/industrial zones separated from each other, linked by roads, lot of roads. And square based layouts. That was totally different from where I lived so I’ve always found the cities layout that works in the game where very artificial. So there wasn’t too much to learn about city planning.
> Also when I was kind I wasn’t really able to build a good city. I understood years later this is because the game expects cities to be built in the US fashion: big residencial/commercial/industrial zones separated from each other, linked by roads, lot of roads. And square based layouts.
It...does not. It uses and underlying low-level simulation model which can be satisfied lots of different ways, but what you describe is not one that works particularly well for it.
How does your quantitative implicit data about how good your game is, for example retention and session length, tell the difference between a a game kids like to play and a game that parents force their kids to play, because parents believes it improves test scores?
Is cram school popular with kids, just because they are in cram school day after day and spend most of their time there? It definitely improves test scores.
Anyway, my point is, your quantitative feedback for fun, it is confounded by being educational ie parents anticipate it will improve test scores or whatever.
Coercion is the placebo not the treatment. That is why this article is sort of bunk. It’s adults literally discussing how to meddle with what their kids are interested in, in the exact same breath as describing how the best and most educational parts of childhood occurred in the absence of adults and their priorities.
I think this post wasn't about dedicated educational games, but rather education they occured naturally through gaming. E.g. Kerbal space program teaching basics of aerospace. One of the most prominent examples I had in my childhood was Fire Emblem for thr game boy. It's basically Kumon, you're constantly doing basic multiplication, addition, and substraction to tell whether a given unit will win in a fight. Similarly world of Warcraft teaches basic economics, if you want to turn a profit selling stuff on the AH.
But how much are you learning relative to the amount of time you spend playing the game? I would expect a little of learning for a lot of time. You may as well study for a while and go play with your friends later.
At least for fire emblem it was more about practicing basic math operations. You don't really learn anything in Kumon either. You just get better at math through practice.
I think I didn't so much learn new things so much as I got an applied perspective on things that I had already learned. It's one thing to read about value added in a textbook, it's another thing to actually experience it in person buying reagents and selling potions in WoW. You can read about the benefit of fuel transferring lifting stages (aka "asparagus staging") in an article it's another thing to reach that design in KSP, and understand why SpaceX tried to do it.
Yes, that applied perspective is extremely important.
Especially for more abstract topics like, why does a market work better at discovering information than central command-and-control?
A game can't help but have some mechanisms. The mechanisms don't necessarily reflect reality, but they have to bear more weight of themselves than eg just a story does.
Game design shows at least some unintended consequences.
Especially the more simulation type games like Sim City where the game world ticks along without your input, as compared to more heavily scripted player focused games like an FPS.
>You may as well study for a while and go play with your friends later.
You're making the massive assumption that someone plays a game with the goal of learning something. Learning is something that happens subconsciously during game play and that's why games are so effective. I played KSP for a few months but I would never go out of my way to learn orbital mechanics or rocket design on my own. If you told me I need a 4-5 year degree then I wouldn't even start.
Heck, I wouldn't even start with a short technical book because I have no reason to read one. In KSP you are put into an environment where your learned knowledge is actively useful in completing game objectives. The reality is that people would just skip learning entirely.
I also take issue with the idea of hyper optimizing learning as a beginner. Most people don't know what the most effective method of learning is for a given topic is precisely because they are beginners. Even if someone wants to actively study a topic it can take quite a while to get into the mindset and find the necessary resources. You know what? Finding a good game is hard but finding a good book can be even harder! Usually the fastest way to find good books is to just read a lot of books and eventually you just happen to read a good one. Learning the same thing that the game taught you through books probably takes more time than you think simply because the book would have to be equivalent to the game.
The takeaway should be that playing a game and active studying are so far apart they might as well not even belong in the same comment.
Good point. Being more of a movie guy than a gamer watching some of the stuff these days on screen I keep wondering what education would be like if the people behind the Matrix or Pixar or Tom Cruise were involved in the design (alongside the pedagogical expert).
Spot on. I received a small ($150k) NSF grant back in 2010 and made a semi-popular science education app/game for iPad. It was featured by Apple a few times and was even in an iPad commercial - it made basically no money.
I'm actually still working on something similar but, basically, no longer trying to run a business selling educational games (more, profits from commercial development contracts with actual budgets funding the cooler projects).
Good questions. I don't know for sure, but I know a couple of my apps have been delisted because I haven't updated them (they worked just fine and since then I upgraded and lost the development environment used).
It is true that making games is hard and making a profit on them even harder. I disagree, however, that adrenaline/story/polish necessarily compete with the educational aspect. I think The Learning Company soundly disproved that through the mid-90s.
I happened to be in the right place at the right time to benefit from the height of the education game boom in the early/mid-90s, so I got to play the fun Math Blasters, ClueFinders, Carmen Sandiegos, Incredible Machines, Dr. Brains, Zoombinis, and also a bunch of adventure games which featured some logical/observation puzzles like the Myst series (never mind others mentioned like Oregon Trail, Civilization, etc). So I'm a strong believer that -someone- could pick up the magic that The Learning Company (and Broderbund) once owned.
You have a lot of laments about "media connections" to let people know about your business. I think you're looking at this wrong.
It's not about "connections." It's about doing business the old-fashioned way: advertising, and hiring a public relations agency.
Advertising is self-explanatory. But for some reason a lot of tech companies don't hire PR firms. They like to cheap out and do PR in-house, or they simply never think of it.
It's the PR firm's job to have the "media connections" you so desperately crave. Tech people are notoriously bad at public relations, so it's perfectly logical to farm this out to people who specialize in just this sort of thing. There are even boutique PR agencies for various industries, including tech. But in your case, you should have hired one of the several hundred that specialize in education.
Do you have any hints on how to pick a good PR firm? The last thing anyone needs is to hire one who thinks it's a really neato idea to buy a few weeks' worth of pop-unders on the OANN website.
Any meaningful connection is going to be too expensive for someone like GP, I am afraid.
This is a false generalization. You don't have to choose a big-name New York PR agency. There are thousands of other shops that are quite affordable. Some are just one or two people, and can be surprisingly effective if you pick the right one.
The PR firm is not what I said is expensive, but whatever deal you reach with the contacts they provide you.
In other words, even if the PR firm is small and one of the best and cheap, they cannot really influence much whatever their contacts offer. They may have some leverage, but the price is the price...
How is it any different from selling any other non-entertainment service?
#1 Institutions means administrators with budgets.
a) What do they want their budgets to do?
b) These things are presumably on networked computers. Can you aggregate and present data to those purse-string holders to justify their expense on an ongoing basis? Do your stats make their spending look smart?
#2 The public means people who spend money on things for kids. Likely parents.
a) Do you just get parents to buy things to get their children to stop asking for them (unlikely for educational software) or do you figure out what else parents expect as a result?
b) Do you show parents results? On an ongoing basis do you show them progress? Maybe text them in the middle of the afternoon when their kids achieve something meaningful?
I’ve served on a school board and can say at a high level that parents get pretty crazy about weird things, games included. Boring stuff that checks boxes is the safe answer for an institution.
If it’s fun, the school will get bombarded with complaints about taxpayers paying for games, the devil inside the computer, etc. Parents tend to not care or think about outcomes if the angry box is ticked.
The best fun things are maker projects. The tangible outcome is understandable to people. The educational content/value varies though.
> The best fun things are maker projects. The tangible outcome is understandable to people. The educational content/value varies though.
Yeah, every parent these days seems to have the attitude "god forbid we teach more than one algorithm for addition, but it's unacceptable that you don't have CS in middle school!" And even get outright angry if you try to point out that teaching more than one algorithm that meets the specifications of addition over naturals is CS. But have the kids "build" some kit robot and you're a damn hero.
The most frustrating thing about education is trying to explain to voters why their child has to learn something (at a young age) that the parent doesn't understand.
You see this a lot in parental complaints about Common Core math.
Over-involved stay-at-home moms who still can't add double digit numbers without using their fingers will complain that they don't understand their first grader's math homework. The point of the math homework is to teach mental math strategies for adding numbers together.
Also, parents of fifth grade kids who are frustrated that they can't help their kids understand conditional probabilities, and express that frustration by telling us to "stop teaching their kids about gambling".
It's impossible as a school board member to say "look, it's embarrassing that 10 year old German kids are better than you at math. Sorry we failed you. We're trying to do better by your kid."
The ignorance around math is amazing to me. When I went to a public school in NYC in the 80s, I had 1960s textbooks and a pretty poor initial math literacy — I struggled into middle school.
When I look at the common core stuff with my young son, he gets what he’s doing in a more fundamental way. In first grade, he basically “discovered” division on his own and was incredibly happy about it. Not something I would have done for sure!
>Also, parents of fifth grade kids who are frustrated that they can't help their kids understand conditional probabilities, and express that frustration by telling us to "stop teaching their kids about gambling".
That's funny. Back in school my statistics/probability classes involved lots of examples showing how rigged lotteries and gambling are. Once you do the math it becomes strikingly obvious. If you don't teach people about gambling they will simply gamble because of ignorance.
And German kids aren't even particularly smart about math. The German schooling systems just sucks slightly less, I guess. Perhaps because they don't vote local school boards. The democratic process interferes at state level.
(I grew up in Germany and now live in extra-nerdy Singapore.)
perhaps a short list of things for parents to study, a little bit of reading/study material along with some tests. Shouldn't be to hard to pick some topics and crudely compile something for parents who are interested.
Suggesting upper middle class stay-at-home moms should take night classes because their addition skills are worse than your average second grader sounds like a great way to _spectacularly_ lose a school board election. These people are king makers in local politics.
Someone taught me a cool bit of willful ignorance long ago: After choosing a profession one should try to solve all problems from that domain however poorly it fits. That way one learns relevant stuff rather than lose oneself in a second or 3rd profession. Of course it turns things into impossible challenges but if you get better at what you do the time is always worth it. A gardener should solve all his problems with gardening.
You "win" the elections by teaching (deliberately not doing everything else)
> The most frustrating thing about education is trying to explain to voters why their child has to learn something (at a young age) that the parent doesn't understand.
You mean the most challenging thing is to teach the voter why one has to learn something at a young age.
It has teaching in it twice! I would love to share my thoughts but you have near infinitely more experience doing this. (you have been warned haha!)
The challenge would be to get people to sit themselves down in front of your blackboard. Use youtube if necessary.
Then you simply brag endlessly about what you do, why you do it, what the students though hard work, your effort and good parenting have accomplished and how that will benefit them later on. Use examples!
We have a garden 6 by 12 meter with a shed in it 3 by 3 meters. The tiles are 30 by 30 cm. 72 square meter minus 9 is 63 square meters! How many tiles do we need?
10 by 10 is 100 tiles, the tiles are 30 cm long so 10 of them is 3 meters! 3 times 3 is 9 square meter! One tile is therefore?
Then you point at mum (the camera) and say correct! 9 meter is 900 cm divided by 100 is 9 square cm per tile!
We needed 63 meters which is 6300 cm therefore we need 6300 divided by 9 is 700 tiles!
Thanks to my sophisticated arithmetic I'm able to calculate such things and order my tiles without giving it a second thought.
Your kids can learn this too (point at the audience or camera again) and take on ever greater challenges in life.
~the end~
I would stand on my desk saying that but you have to give it your own style of course.
Unfortunately, the response to that is going to be something to the effect of "Are you calling me stupid?"
Many parents are not going to accept that they had a bad education and could use some catch up. Even fewer are going to accept it if the catch up in question is of elementary school level.
Increase test scores, keep themselves employed and friendly SB members in office, and reform the institution/field in their image (or, for the cynical ones, make them look like leaders in the field). In that order. And lots of other stuff that's not really relevant to software (e.g., maintain the physical plant, retain good teachers, etc.)
> #2 The public means people who spend money on things for kids. Likely parents.
Meh. IME parents have almost no influence in software purchasing decisions (because they mostly just don't care). Even the board doesn't really dive that deep into the administration's budgets unless they're considering a change-of-command. In fact, the superintendent might not even weigh in on software depending on the size of the district. Activist yahoos might gripe about budget items, but can usually be safely ignored. Especially for software, which is often a rounding error even in the IT portion of the budget.
Had a similar problem in medicine in a startup, which also failed. Although people did want to pay, you can only have large scale deployments if your are able to finance multiple studies over multiple years. By then smaller manufacturers are most certainly broke.
Want to make money there? Don't try to find cures or therapies for indications a small percent of people suffer from. Just invent another beauty cream, that's where the money is. No, I’m not bitter either, just maybe a little.
Making games, especially ones that sell at any volume, as the blog suggests, is extremely hard. And that's why the 'Educational' market is traditionally believed (or possibly, 'percieved') to be very tough (i.e. Professor Layton, or Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego).
Those games will always exist.
But what the blog author appears to allude to, is a latent category of games, that already exist, but he believes their true market value to be hidden.
Kerbal Space Program appears to be the most overt example of the class of games the author identifies, but I'd argue that most of the EA licensed sports games offer a similar experiential quality (I'd worked at a sports analytics company and know, for example, that FIFA rankings are used as a starting point for some lines of investigation).
I also remember learning more about cars from Gran Turismo, than from any other source of information I had access to. Including the internet.
As a lifelong video-game enthusiast, the article resonated with me, as I've always believed this potentially educational property of great video-games to be one of the most valuable parts of them. Though to date, it feels like successful manifestations have proven to be surreptitious, rather than prevalent, or even recognised at all for such qualities.
This reminds me of surgical simulation where there was always the debate between making more realistic and educational simulations or, on the other hand, making the graphics more shiny because that tends to impress the person making the actual purchasing decision at hospitals.
A solution to this is having user-chosen programmes with an allotted study budget. This is the model in UK post-grad medical education.
I know around London there are a couple of schemes running that teach practical skills using outdated non-sexy software that nevertheless works because of its strong educational underpinnings and excellent practical execution.
I've spent a lot of time thinking about this. I had a fairly blasé education that involved switching schools a lot. Looking back, I can see that most of the information recall I have came from video games. The Civilization series taught me history, math science and logic came from the Dr. Brain series and a hodgepodge of other games, time and resource management came from Sim City and real-time strategy games, and more formal and specific subjects from Khan Academy.
The problem here is one of reward. I loved the challenge inherent with Dr. Brain; the puzzles did a great job at teaching basics of chemistry, biology, math, and I was actually accomplishing goals I was interested in. I think that the disconnect it that the people making these purchasing decisions do not remember what motivates children, what goals they are interested in achieving.
I don't think the author is referring to video games specifically geared towards education. If anything, real video games, especially social multiplayer ones, provide complex environments to learn from, and sufficiently open-ended games reward innovation and creativity, while also encouraging gamers to reverse engineer game dynamics.
For example, I learned the ideas behind "merchanting" (i.e. arbitrage and price discovery) at a young age through Runescape, where some time and patience could leverage capital to buy small amount of coal from casual gamers on less populated servers and sell large amounts on busy servers at a 50% markup.
It’s similar to many other industries, such as enterprise B2B software, where your buyer is not necessarily the actual user of the product, so you end up marketing and building features catering to the buyer (school administrations, parents) instead.
Hmm, The Oregon Trail comes to mind as an educational game which was quite fun, and clearly sold to a lot of institutions. Do you have any thoughts on how that came about?
Ugh that sure were early times! Nevertheless Wikipedia says: "By 1995, The Oregon Trail comprised about one-third of MECC's $30 million in annual revenue."
And it doesn't matter how much of it was sold to institutions. What matters is how many users benefited from this game and similar ones (Railroad Tycoon, Civilization, etc. come to mind).
I played civilization a lot back in the day mainly because it was the only game my computer could play. I monitor was so crummy I think it had EGA graphics. because of this now I know what the gardens of Hammurabi and a lot of other of the wonders of the world just by building them and knowing a little bit about what they did for the civilization that actually built them.
factoria is another good one that's really really fun and can also be really really educational if you think about the materials and resources and how you combine them. also if you really want to go crazy with it learning some math will help you fully optimize your factory but it's some pretty complicated math, at least for me.
I'm not sure how educational it is. They clearly are selling to the schools first as we wouldn't have found it without our teacher assigning some activities for home schooling. I thought about paying for it, but I want my kids to spend more time outside instead of in the house... They act better for more time outside.
Bonner basically owns and runs Scandinavia and parts of mainland Europe, you’re going up against a few countries. It’s hard, I wish you luck.
Side note: Bonnier, apart from being a media empire they can destroy your life in seconds also has a schtick where they got a few companies pretending to be startups, like the example you just posted now. Some get acquired others get started by them.
Is that strictly a bad thing? Ok, we've got industry that makes non-educational games (I'm thinking the headshooting type, truly non-boring stuff). But there is small-ish money in that market, it's just retail after all! The same industry will happily jump onto a wagon containing some REAL part of the education budget.
Create some captivating productions, spend real money, because I don't get that assumption that education deserves only cheap boring educational "games" of today.
That's a political program - deep cut of the less effective part of 19-century structures. Kids generally like learning, parents know that, and they see how bad schools are now, so political gains are waiting right there.
They don't really own countries though, it's just a multinational media company. I don't find it very surprising that you use your mother company to increase your media presence, that seems like the right move to me?
Toca Boca was part of their venture arm [0] until 2016. They invest in companies with growth potential. Sometimes those companies are early stage companies, sometimes they're a bit older.
Long story short: it doesn't sell.
At my company we identified, at least if your target is kids, two ways to sell edu games.
1. Sell them to institutions, like governments, schools, companies, whatever. Thing is, the features they look when choosing a game to buy, are ones most likely to make the game unfun, the end result is often boring stuff noone WANTS to play.
2. Sell them to the public directly, but word of mouth here is often poor, specially if your age range is narrow, for example if your target is kids between 4 and 8, the kids will play the game, love it, but parents won't tell other parents to buy it, most of their friends probably WON'T have kids the same age.
Thus if you are going for fun games, you need path 2, and to do path 2 you need a ton of exposure that is NOT word of mouth, we found out this means or you have massive marketing budget, or you have some kind of connection to media so they advertise you cheaper.
Our biggest competitors all ended being media companies themselves, for example Disney is an obvious one, but another was Toca-Boca, at first they looked like a tiny indie studio, but somehow they ALWAYS get featured in multiple magazines, store front pages and so on, eventually I found out they were created by a multi-billion media empire named Bonnier,
Since then I found that is easier to get money from creating other things, since I don't have the necessary media connections.
Well, even NORMAL games often need media connectios (for example, Jon Blow was a journalist before he made Braid, Nintendo literally printed their own magazine for a while, the indie clique that existed around TIGSource was heavily tied to CMPMedia, many of them being presenters in events, or being friends of their employees, or working for them directly, the whole thing is very "incestuous").