covert.creations

When the U.S. Army wants to teach you something, they don’t arbitrarily push you into a classroom to listen to a two-hour lecture. When they need to teach you something, they simulate. They exact the essential details of a subject, create its environment, and then put you right into it. Sometimes, they spend a lot of energy to motivate you properly. Life and death, reward and punishment, esprit de corps, and so on.Makes sense doesn’t it? From basic training to air combat, they’re reproducing the environment to ensure that you know what you need to know. As an example, if I need to understand how jetfuel loaders work, am I jammed into a room with 45 other jetfuel technicians and then graduate with a head full of knowledge? Sounds like a ridiculous way to learn anything, really. But the U.S. armed forces does it all over the map, changing difficult machine parts, flying extremely expensive aircraft, all that. Combat, non-combat, you name it, they do it, and they do it very well.

So why then, do today’s high schools operate identically to the old one-room schools of over half a century ago? If we have so much knowledge and experience teaching, why does it look and taste exactly the same as it always has? Does it work? Is heads-down, obedient learning still considered a virtuous rite of passage?

Nope. Its not working. Its done. We simply do not live in the same world anymore.

Allow me to frame it like this. think of the universe of distractions that clamour for the attentions of every student. IM, cellphones, TiVO, videogames, CDs, flash jokes, advertising, email, etc. etc. How can one ensure the success of a growing mind in the face of this endless sea of fireworks and fun?

We can’t. We lost. The battle is already over.

As my teacher friends tell me : students today learn things differently than they did before. Why is it that so many highschoolers and young people grab hold of new technologies like its nothing, and then learn it better than their teachers? Its because of the world they live in, steeped in a daily deluge of information and exchange.

The current debate surrounding technology in schools sadly revolves around how to teach technology to students. Unfortunately, people don’t get that this problems is a sideshow. The students already get it – in fact, they get it better than you or I. Its time to stop oohing and ahhing over the tech, and just bury it into the lessons themselves. Don’t teach it. USE IT to teach.

The U.S. Army has proven to be very accepting of simulation and gaming as a means of conveying information. This is presumably because they are highly motivated! We need to be, and could conceivably benefit by taking a page from their book.
Some Ideas on Motivation

How do we get kids interested these days? Do we keep telling them that getting proper grades is necessary so that they can graduate, go on to graduate again, and then go and get a job…blah blah. Does it work? We need to understand what advertisers have known forever : For kids, Friday night is the most important thing on their mind. Why fault kids for not getting the lesson of “why should we learn?”. I realise that I am no expert, but I wonder what would happen if we tried :

• Create immediacy around their actions : by a proper and convincing reward and punishment scale. Grades work, yes. But what about rewarding negatively – like, detention for failure? No more Friday night? Or weekend study camp? Don’t like that? How about rewarding positively closer to the vein of companies that want the goldmine that is teenagers’ wallets : Free, paid cellular hours? Starbucks dollars? How about earned “time off”? Or more choices?These are “new world” rewards. The advertisers are doing it, so why can’t highschools?
• Collectivize students’ fate : create an esprit de corps between students. One student helps another in a crowded class and you both do better? Reward. Don’t help anyone? Then the whole class suffers. Teachers are already stretched too thinly in the class, so shifting learning to group learning is a natural consequence.

Simulating Lessons

Nothing compares to actually doing the work. But to augment and explain in a world where there are less teachers and more students, retention and understanding can be gained through simulation and characterization. I don’t necessarily mean via a videogame, but an “un-game” that so happens to be running under the Quake 3 or Source engines. Take any topic. Create a lesson that demonstrates in 3d space, with interactivity and characterization, the whys, hows and whats of what you’re trying to convey. The content need only be limited by your imagination, i.e. complex, visually oriented ideas can be effectively demonstrated within a simulation. More specifically (as some examples) :

• Physics – incline on a plane; the step-by-step introduction of the theories of friction and force vectors. If the students can see and play with this in a 3d “un-game”, does it not seem completely obvious that this is a better demonstration? Its repeatable, its cheaper than experimentation, and allows the un-game to link in ancillary information that may benefit the “lesson” (i.e. the math!). Once the theory/formula is demonstrated, I’d bet they’d get it easily and be more engaged.
• History – a complex series of events detailed within a simulation. Have the students interact or witness the acts of historical figures. Meet them. Fight in their wars. Build their houses. Set up the motivation and the implications of history, and you’re effectively channeling a student’s uncanny ability to memorize all of the names of their favourite bands, videogame characters and moviestars. If they practically lived in a period as part of the history lesson, well you can be sure they’ll know history better than anyone else in, well, history. As an example, Age of Empires III has the promise
  of demonstrating and motivating history within the confines of its simulation.
• English – playacting shakespeare in a virtual drama. Let the student experience shakespeare as if they were there. Great works of literature could be reinterpreted in a “place”, and thus their own lessons of language and expression.
• Chemistry – prompting discovery within a simulated world. Find elements and combine them with varying technology to create new substances, discover new elemental properties. Motivate them with in-game rewards and challenges to keep them moving forward. This is the future of experimentation and education, without schools having to buy 100 bunsen burners.

As I said, these are just examples of ways in which simulation could augment education (but not replace old-fashioned homework). Doesn’t it make sense? Can you think of other examples? Its heartening to see how some progress – my brother-in-law is working on the beginnings of new ways of testing and teaching. Check it out over the next few months as he rolls it out. Its great stuff.

Remember, its not about the technology, but what we do with it. We need to face the stark, staring truth that the world is changing. Now is the time for schools to be there when it does. If we don’t do it, someone else will (and sell it back to us).