Adding educational content to games *spawn

[Deleted member 86764]

Probably not exactly the correct thread for it, but I’ve thought up of an interesting idea for future Xboxes / Playstations. You could have a family focused device that actually has a country’s school curriculum and major apps based around them. So little Johnny gets an hour of gaming time once they’ve completed xyz task from within the machine and can’t game until that work or test has been completed.

I guess it wouldn’t cause further sales to adult gamers (unless they have school age children), but kind of a fun way of getting your console to teach the kids if you’re too lazy.

 

[Deleted member 86764]

Clearly a popular idea.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Consoles teaching kids isn't a realistic notion. Entertaining educational apps are extremely hard to do. I'd even suggest in the long run, impossible unless the 'educational' aspect is a side line, like MineCraft being 'educational'. A game centred around learning grammar or algebra or thermodynamics is likely to be a poop game, a bunch of show pieces and exercises wrapped up in a score of some form. Since the 8bit era we've had educational apps and they have never remained fun for their audience (save younger kids) for any length of time to the point they are a niche market children use only when forced to. There's a reason why Sony and MS and EA and Ubisoft aren't making and selling educational games.

The best concept I've had in that regard is when making my dungeon crawler, to create a tile-based game where you have to input coordinates/transformations/lines of graphs to control your avatar. But I know that where a decent addition to a maths lesson, it'd never be a go-to experience for entertainment.

As for locking out children from games until they've done their work, that's really taken care of by just being a parent and refusing access to the console until the homework's done.

So I don't think there's really room for a child-focused console. That only seems to have traction in the early years via mobile apps and VTech like educational computers and toys. Once the kids get old enough, they recognise attempts to educate them no matter how disguised and will generally rebel if its not of genuine interest to them.

 

[tongue_of_colicab]

There used to be a whole bunch of games like redcat that were fun to play and tried to teach you something. If it's not game like a think it would be better to have kids sit in a quiet room with a book.

Another problem is that it would be very hard to obtain the same educational content as schools are offering. At least in the Netherlands you can forget about publishers sharing content at a reasonable price.

 

[Deleted member 86764]

I don't even mean educational games, I just mean basic education. English / punctuation tests, etc

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Why is console a good target for that rather than PC or tablet? They have better interfaces.

"No, you can't play FIFA until you've finished 'English Trainer Pro's' 20 minute daily task on your iPad!"

 

[Deleted member 86764]

Why is console a good target for that rather than PC or tablet? They have better interfaces.

"No, you can't play FIFA until you've finished 'English Trainer Pro's' 20 minute daily task on your iPad!"

Screw you dad, I don't give two shits about iPad, I'm gonna go play Xbox".

My kids forever say things like that.

(they don't)

 

[orangpelupa]

games already told me lots of things, from English, Japanese, different cultures of the world (west game tend to be like this and JAP games to be like that, etc)..

heck, i scored 7 on my history exam on high school because Metal Gear Solid 3. I even got called by the teacher lol. Because it is very unusual for me to pass history exam, usually i got 0-3 on history and need to to make-up exam multiple times to get the passing grade.

my classmates even helped me explain to the teacher that what i told the teacher is not bullshit (that i know the answers from playing video game).

for me, video game give THE BEST KIND of learning. Video game make you learn without making you feeling like you are studying. Video game make learning feels like playing.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

That's 'accidental' learning that fits a video game and your interests. How much algebra or chemistry have you learnt from games? How many games can incorporate those things? So yeah, you can learn stuff for sure, like you can anything in life, but academic learning is fairly limited. I learnt a fair bit about Norse mythology from Heimdall, and lots of history from Age of Empires and Civ. Wings was a great insight into First World War pilots. None of it applied to the National Curriculum or my exams though.