I am too old to have had educational videogames as a child so I have always wondered if they actually were "educational." Do people who played these games as a kid feel as if they actually learned something from them?
(Of course we can learn things from any game but I'm just wondering if people feel educational games were more educational than, say, Civilization)
You can probably guess from the conflation of entertainment with education in the article:
Buckleitner, who has been reviewing educational games since 1984, assured me of their quality. “They were good!” he said. “They had animation, music… for the first time you had actors speaking, kind of like comic books. They teach higher order thinking, so they fit well with school curricula.” That I never thought about it means they were doing their job.
Personally, I never felt I learned much from TLC games as a kid (although I enjoyed some games), and what I did learn I could've learned as well or better reading books or doing regular exercises.
In general, educational and brain-training games don't work, likewise, handing out laptops, and the better the experiment you run, the smaller the effects are. (This is true of education experiments in general, where effects are typically near zero.) Just because something is entertaining doesn't mean it's educational, and just because something is educational, doesn't mean it's more educational than what a kid would otherwise be doing, or educational about useful things.
Personally, I never felt I learned much from TLC games as a kid (although I enjoyed some games), and what I did learn I could've learned as well or better reading books or doing regular exercises.
But would you have read those books or done those exercises as willingly as you played the games? That's valuable enough on its own.
I certainly learned a wealth of trivia from the Carmen Sandiego games on the Apple II. I don't know that it specifically enriched my education, but I enjoy knowing trivia.
"Rocky's Boots" was great fun and stealthily teaches fundamental logical concepts. I never got to play "Robot Odyssey" (the sequel) as a kid, but playing it as an adult was fun and I could totally see how it would boost logical / computational thinking.
I grew up with Civilization, and the first one really was educational! Especially because the copy protection was “answer this question about what it says about this technology on this page of your manual in order to play.” We owned the game, but we had either lost the manual or it was too much trouble to fish it out of the box. I had the text of the technology tree memorized, knew what all the ancient wonders were (although not their history), and got pretty good at tactics/strategy. It’s a shame, really, that the later Civ games did not have the same level of educational value baked in.
Absolutely. If nothing else, they gave me a hunger to build things of my own. I started programming by writing games in Macromedia Flash (years before the Adobe acquisition), mostly by copying concepts I saw in these educational games.
Not exactly an education game, but Shadow President is why I know my world political geography much better than most.
Various games taught me more about the rough timeline of (especially) ancient history than school ever did. Crusader Kings II let me follow the unstated meat of the plot of Hamlet intuitively, in a way that I'd guess the vast majority of modern people without some equivalent experience or very specific education could not.
Mavis Beacon taught me to type correctly. Early Web free-for-all chatrooms and FPS in-game messaging taught me to type fast.
Comments
I am too old to have had educational videogames as a child so I have always wondered if they actually were "educational." Do people who played these games as a kid feel as if they actually learned something from them?
(Of course we can learn things from any game but I'm just wondering if people feel educational games were more educational than, say, Civilization)
You can probably guess from the conflation of entertainment with education in the article:
Personally, I never felt I learned much from TLC games as a kid (although I enjoyed some games), and what I did learn I could've learned as well or better reading books or doing regular exercises.
In general, educational and brain-training games don't work, likewise, handing out laptops, and the better the experiment you run, the smaller the effects are. (This is true of education experiments in general, where effects are typically near zero.) Just because something is entertaining doesn't mean it's educational, and just because something is educational, doesn't mean it's more educational than what a kid would otherwise be doing, or educational about useful things.
But would you have read those books or done those exercises as willingly as you played the games? That's valuable enough on its own.
That's a very weak justification for what were very expensive computers and software.
I certainly learned a wealth of trivia from the Carmen Sandiego games on the Apple II. I don't know that it specifically enriched my education, but I enjoy knowing trivia.
"Rocky's Boots" was great fun and stealthily teaches fundamental logical concepts. I never got to play "Robot Odyssey" (the sequel) as a kid, but playing it as an adult was fun and I could totally see how it would boost logical / computational thinking.
Yes, Rocky's Boots taught me the basics of computing. I think having an intuitive grasp of logic gates at a young age made it easier to learn to code.
I also think that I learned a lot from games that weren't explicitly intended to be educational, like planning and independent problem-solving skills.
I grew up with Civilization, and the first one really was educational! Especially because the copy protection was “answer this question about what it says about this technology on this page of your manual in order to play.” We owned the game, but we had either lost the manual or it was too much trouble to fish it out of the box. I had the text of the technology tree memorized, knew what all the ancient wonders were (although not their history), and got pretty good at tactics/strategy. It’s a shame, really, that the later Civ games did not have the same level of educational value baked in.
Absolutely. If nothing else, they gave me a hunger to build things of my own. I started programming by writing games in Macromedia Flash (years before the Adobe acquisition), mostly by copying concepts I saw in these educational games.
Not exactly an education game, but Shadow President is why I know my world political geography much better than most.
Various games taught me more about the rough timeline of (especially) ancient history than school ever did. Crusader Kings II let me follow the unstated meat of the plot of Hamlet intuitively, in a way that I'd guess the vast majority of modern people without some equivalent experience or very specific education could not.
Mavis Beacon taught me to type correctly. Early Web free-for-all chatrooms and FPS in-game messaging taught me to type fast.