Why Games Are Redefining Education — Take A Look At The Radical Paradigm Shift Ahead

When Elon Musk defined the issues worth solving, i.e. those that would most affect the future of humanity and that he wanted to dedicate his life to, games were part of his considerations, but he ultimately decided he could achieve a more significant impact in the areas of “the internet; sustainable energy; space exploration, in particular the permanent extension of life beyond Earth; artificial intelligence; and reprogramming the human genetic code.”

I have deep respect for his choice and admire his progress in the areas he’s tackling. At the same time, I believe we can achieve very meaningful progress for mankind in elevating education to a new paradigm through the creation of immersive education games. To this and the improvement of political discourse, I dedicate my life.

“Ready Player One” — A glimpse of the future of VR and learning

In the best-selling book that will soon be turned into a movie directed by Steven Spielberg, “Ready Player One”, Ernest Cline shows a world in which most of life happens in the OASIS, the ultimate virtual reality simulation of our world that becomes so real that the politics within that world become more important than those in the offline, “real” world. Facebook’s/Oculus VR’s engineers are big fans of the Cline’s ideas:

In the books, part of what’s been driving humanity’s push into virtual reality (VR) was the lack of affordable, high quality education in the offline world. In an immersive virtual classroom, however, one teacher could present to countless students. Support jobs for that virtual world soon gave employment to many more and step by step the OASIS became the centre of most people’s lives.

For some more insights into the book without reading it yourself (which you should!), check out this session with the author:

The case of pooling educational resources into a few, ultra-quality, immersive experiences

In the real world, the idea can be taken even further. Why have a teacher present live at all? Why not invest even so much as $1 billion into the ultimate game teaching each subject? If each of these simulations taught just 1 billion people (less than the average amount of monthly active users on Facebook today) over the course of their entire lifetime, the cost per student is just $1 (less than even just the average acquisition cost per install for a simple, free mobile app today). Why do we still have millions of teachers each find their own didactical approach to teaching the same topics across the globe instead of pooling efforts and creating a few best motivational, immersive experiences that transfer the knowledge in ways effective beyond our imagination today. The freed resources, i.e. the teachers, can then much more effectively dedicate their time to supporting students wherever they struggle instead of content delivery and knowledge.

The case study of “Little Traders” — Financial literacy through a 1920’s mobile stock market game

Only 7% of the world’s population participates directly or indirectly in the stock market, contributing to a widening income gap, while already 20% access Facebook on a monthly basis. Last week, we’ve released Little Traders, a mobile stock market game, to help change that. It’s just a tiny step into the direction I’ve described above, but it gives evidence of the point I’m trying to make:

The game takes the player into the 1920’s stock market where they help Mrs Mueller and her friends invest their money wisely in the crazy market of the Roaring Twenties.

Mission by mission, the player expands their Wall Street empire from a dodgy cellar to more floors, hires traders and unlocks new skills. Very subtly, the 2,500 players who’ve downloaded the game over the last 2 weeks, are learning about the stock market and feel some of the distance between them and the financial world diminish.

That’s what we’ve set out to achieve. Three years ago, we started an online school for financial markets which attracted over three million students to date; yet many struggled to relate to the seemingly abstract and complex world of trading and investing, lacked time to spend on reading and watching videos or were too scared to start. We realised that we needed to support our serious education with a more playful approach that can captivate people and infuse them with the motivation that is needed to learn more. My ex-girlfriend for example never cared about our financial education site, but she’s been playing the game non-stop for three hours last weekend. On Twitter and Reddit, people have been asking me how they can get better at this game and asked for more educational missions that point them towards valuable articles and videos on our site even though we originally thought that would be perceived as advertisement and therefore kept the number down to three. But they are not even realising that they’re learning about the financial markets. They just want to beat the game.

For further information on the game and some ideas behind it, check out this article in iDigitalTimes: ‘Little Traders’: This Addictive iOS Investment Game Is Trying To Change The World, One Tiny Investor At A Time

Case study 2: Hopscotch — programming for kids

Last Christmas, when I was visiting my family in Germany, I was looking for playful ways to help my eight and ten year old cousins learn to program. I had heard about great games in this area and after researching for a little while, I found Hopscotch — Make Games! Learn to code. Coding made easy!. It was only available in English which they don’t speak yet, but nevertheless I thought I’d give it a try and see how they react to it. The eight year old girl didn’t even know what programming was, but she wanted to help the little creatures in the initial missions Hopscotch has set up to help children ease into programming without realising they’re programming. And not only was she keen on getting that done, but she and her brother suddenly also understood why they really had to learn English as soon as those classes would start in their school and already started finding terms they needed to get the levels done in their mom’s dictionary. See for yourself how that is used in some schools already today:

What’s holding us back today?

We’ll still have to see further progress and distribution of VR hardware and the games industry will have to open people’s eyes to the full range of possibilities before there is much hope for a political process leading to any kind of resource pooling as I envisioned it above. Perhaps the innovation will have to come from companies that dare to challenge the status quo of education and just go ahead and create educational quality 4.0. Marc Zuckerberg is already helping create software that elevates teacher effectiveness and integrates online materials and is starting his own school together with his wife Priscilla Chan that brings health care and education together. Udacity does a great and effective job at creating new developers for Silicon Valley and Coursera is making elite university content accessible to a wider audience. One doesn’t have to jump far to see them or other companies embrace VR long before the public school system of any country does. Who’s to say there’ll still be space for a public school system once they’re done?

On the bright side, there is also openness within politics for the topic, at least in the U.S., see also the White House’s Game Jam.