Video Games

Games TEACH to those who play them, and all the more as the stimuli of modern video games get closer to real life stimuli, and all the more as the learning feedback loop can be more closely controlled in virtual worlds than in reality. This implies two concepts very important to me: 1) we should have better rules to control what video games TEACH to our children and 2) we should use games to teach the things we want our children to learn, whether they are video or not.

Once we start to use games to teach, we can develop more clever e-teaching software that can tailor itself to each student and recognize automatically their strengths and weaknesses, assisted by remote human assistants. Then, putting back fun in teaching, some people might start to continually learn, as a hobby, instead of a mere boring pre-life requirement...

Kurzweil predicted something very close to this:

• Intelligent courseware that can tailor itself to each student by recognizing their strengths and weaknesses. Media technology allows students to manipulate and interact with virtual depictions of the systems and personalities they are studying.
• Most learning is accomplished through intelligent, adaptive courseware presented by computer-simulated teachers. In the learning process, human adults fill the counselor and mentor roles instead of being academic instructors. These assistants are often not physically present, and help students remotely.
• Students still learn together and socialize, though this is often done remotely via computers.
• All students have access to computers.
• Most human workers spend the majority of their time acquiring new skills and knowledge. (http://www.kurzweilai.net)

The guy sometimes talks like a lunatic and I do not believe that those predictions will inherently happen out of the blue, but I believe that we need this to happen, if only to raise the people who will have the wits to solve our problems of pollution, over population, living on an exposed sole planet in an exposed sole solar system.