Video Games are the Future of Education - Essay
# Information
- Source: Nabeel Querehesi; https://nabeelqu.co/education
- Tags: #games #education #learning #innovation
- Notes:
# Highlights
1. The things you learn by yourself stick; the things that are “taught” to you do not stick.
The fundamental principle of education is to ==give students an environment, and tools, where they can make discoveries themselves==. This requires ==space, and time, and autonomy. ==
Students also need to be able to choose what they learn and how they learn it, something that modern rigid curriculums and prison-like school environments do not permit.
2. Video games provide a much deeper understanding of most subjects than classical education does.
3. Schooling mostly fails at giving you this ==deep understanding.==
It took humans thousands of years to really figure out that reality was made of atoms, and understand why this was true. Reality has a surprising amount of detail. The deeper you get into these questions, the more you realize that nothing is simple. ==But school didn’t leave us room to dive deep into these questions; we had to pass exams, which meant dutifully learning to calculate molecular weights, etc, without actually understanding a thing. == The net result is: no understanding, years of waste.
This sounds absurd, but consider that simulations are already used widely for learning:
A video game is just: ==(a) a simulation of reality (b) with fast feedback loops.==
Learning is just the act of engaging with an external thing and performing many conjecture/criticism loops, forming conclusions, and building on them to form a body of knowledge.
So it makes sense that video games would be the primary educational environment of the future: ==they are the best way we have of (a) creating simulations of reality (b) with fast feedback loops (c) accessible at low cost.==
5. Where games mostly fall short is that they’re not that transferable to the real world. The skills you learn are highly specific to that game. This will change.
6. It is currently too hard to make video games. Making it easier to create video games will massively increase the supply of good video games and cause a gradual revolution in education.
One thesis of the internet that always stuck with me comes from Evan Williams, who founded Twitter/Blogger/Medium. ==He said that the best way to create a giant internet company is to take something people want to do and make it 10x easier.==
Another insight is that ==making things easier has nonlinear effects. ==Making something 10x easier can cause 1000x more of that thing to happen. Hence the explosion of online creativity you see on YouTube, with chess, Minecraft, math videos, Khan Academy, Twitchstreams, Soundcloud, etc; you remove a small bit of friction and get a large result.
this is also why AI is important for human productivity. Most of the discourse is about how AI will “replace” humans. I prefer the Licklider school of thought: human-computer symbiosis. AI will make humans vastly more effective by automating tedious tasks. For example, humans can use text AI such as GPT-3 to generate ideas/boilerplate writing to get around the terror of the blank page, and then simply pick the best ones and refine/iterate on those. (AI Dril, which was based on GPT-2, was an early example of this). ==As AI gets better, “assistive creativity” will become a bigger thing, enabling humans to create sophisticated artifacts (including video games!) easier and better than ever.==
relate to Sources/Computers and Creativity - Thesis, and how blockchain simplifies things (code -> makes it easier to creat and to trust)