DailyDirt: That's Edutainment!
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
Some folks are out to actively dismantle (or disrupt) the existing education system, and the revolution in public education has only just started. Educational software is getting a lot of buzz for being able to motivate students and more accurately track their progress -- and for its potential to be incredibly cost effective (if everything works perfectly). Here are just a few examples of educational developments aimed at kids these days.- Educational apps are on every platform, but should parents really expect to pay more than couple bucks for a kid's app? Parents should also remember to make sure their kids can't rack up huge bills from in-app purchases. [url]
- Experience points instead of grades sounds like an interesting idea, but a 4.0 grading scale is a much more established system -- and it's a bit more standardized. Prof Sheldon notes, "There will always be a portion of the class who will not be motivated to learn no matter what an instructor may try..." [url]
- Can every class be taught as a video game? There are a bunch of startups like DimensionU that are going to find out soon enough. [url]
- To discover more interesting education-related content, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]
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Filed Under: apps, education, experience points, games, gamification, grades, school
Companies: dimensionu
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games don't motivate people; ppl motivate ppl?
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Fun Edutaitnment Games still used today...
1. Oregon Trail.....All throughout my school years right through college, this game was used to teach various things about pioneer life along the Oregon Trail that started in Missouri and ended in Oregon. Anyway, during my Schiller years we had version 2.0 where we used the mouse to hunt. My American History professor at Ohio State used the original MS-DOS version to teach the hardshhips they faced (through a no mouse interface for most of my class....hunting was trickier).
2. Number Maze for the Macintosh. The concept here was to teach math throught the use of opening up gates. The pawns or avatars used were moved by clicking the mouse and if you hit a grated out area...you had to do math to get through it.
3. SuperSolvers Gizmos and Gadgets: Oh my lord this game caused the people who ran my Jr. High computer lab (full of those Allinone Power Macintoshes) to literally break the sound controls. The concept of the game was to teach you various things about the physical sciences.
4. In my Kindergarten youth I remember playing a game on the school's Apple /// computer where you moved a turtoise on the screen using pascal or basic (cannot remember which). We were learning programming in Kindergarten enough said...
If you define being able to write your own family's epitaphs (Oregon Trail DOS version), using black and white animations to make math interesting, and building your own vehicle to race which the outcome depended on how hard you looked and how many puzzles you solved added to the score as fun, give me the Glory Days of edutainment when less exposition meant a lot more :-)
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Re: Fun Edutaitnment Games still used today...
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Re: Fun Edutaitnment Games still used today...
Remember classic games like Zoombinis: A Logical Journey, Where On Earth/In Time Is Carmen Sandiego or 3001: A Reading and Math Odyssey (learning maths and literature via Greek myths)?
I've still got them on their original 3.5" floppies and CD's they came on (and they still work).
Also, am I the only one who thought of Tom Lehrer's "That's Mathematics!" with this article title? :D
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More Edutainment
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