Age of Empires 101
"Games act as an impetus, a catalyst, to get the kids and the teachers excited. Kids don't care about The Mexican-American War until they get to play the part of Santa Ana. Then they get it."We do the same thing with The History Channel, A&E, all the major movie studios and the TV networks. Rather than learn from a textbook, people can learn from Spielberg or HBO. You have a much better chance with kids by involving them with TV, film or videogames."
Publisher Microsoft actually pays for the privelege of having its game exposed to high school students around the country, which raises some questions--in the case of regular textbooks, of course, it works the other way around. However, Ehrlic claims that "there's no commercial or message," unlike traditional advertising. So what do you think? Is this the sort of thing worth having in schools? Mine sure didn't, but it would have been nice to be told to exterminate the Vikings for homework.
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Sparhawk6
replyit can be used to get students interested and give them a basic grounding which can then by filled in by more traditional means.
That's the most important idea of the interview. Sure, these are great gateways into history, but far too many kids believe that what happened in Gladiator really happened.-
Exactly. If games are to be used in the classroom, they really need to be historically accurate. As we've seen from both games and movies this is rarely the case. Otherwise I'm all for progressive learning methods that deviate from what most people are used to. Not everyone can learn from a text book.
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You would be surprised what history is still "in dispute." I'm taking an American civil war class and the "facts" of that part of history are still very much in dispute.
Something else that is interesting is an account I was watching a Brit give of what their Navy did to the Spanish Armada on a show that was supposed to be about history. He put forth the argument that the Brittish Navy destroyed the Spanish Armada. I had always been taught that the Spanish Armada was destroyed by an Atlantic storm.
Personally I think this ought to be the mantra taught in all history classes:
What history you learn depends on what side you learn it from. :)
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I remember taking Algebra in High School and hating it ("Who gives a shit what X is? What'd I ever do to X?!"). But writing scripts for games and programming while in College sure changed my tune. I'm surprised they haven't done this years ago or implemented it as a learning tool in other school subjects. It's about the interaction, understanding, and reward. Not memorize and regurgitate.
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The reason why you dont see programming in advanced algebra courses is that it is hard enough to teach the kids math, let alone math and programming.
I have students in advanced algebra that struggle with the process of graphing a line. I'm not terribly excited about adding the overhead of a computer programming syntax and style in addition to the mathematics.
--Hadron
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It's also silly that classroom time should be wasted on it. Sure, have the teacher encourage them to go out and pick up the new AOE game. Have an extra credit project for them to go see/rent a movie like Gladiator and write a short review of it.
It's certainly true that something fun someone experiences can open them up to a new field of interest or a new hobby or career pursuit, however, the classroom is there for the actual teaching to be done. Get them excited on their own time so when they get to class they can actually learn something instead of wasting classtime jerking around with computer games.
Of course if I was a game developer I'd be all for this other idea of games in the classroom because I could see the dollar signs if contracts could be made with school systems to supply a quantity of my game at a discounted price directly to them. Wow would that bump the 'units sold' nicely and generate some nice revenue in the process. Mmmm.
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