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Comment by bananamerica | Hacker News Reader

A personal anecdote: I bought my first English dictionary to understand 1992’s Alone in the Dark. I’d probably not be talking with you guys and girls if not for videogames. I had no interest whatsoever in learning English, I just wanted to beat the games. If someone assigned me the very same game for educational purposes, I’d hate it by default.

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+1, I learned English by playing Leisure Suit Larry I-III [1]. Text adventures were really useful in this regard because you had to type in more or less correct sentences. Also, at the core they were built around dialogues, that is, spoken (=not very formal) language and vocabulary.

Al Lowe, lead developer of the Larry series, probably also had some influence on my sense of humor (to this day I prefer grammar-level jokes to kicks-in-the-butt). These games were a great, intellectually twisted, multi-layered introduction to the world of adult people as well. :) Thank you, teacher!

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leisure_Suit_Larry_in_the_Land...

I learned English in the MMO Runescape, bartering for items and getting help on quests. I basically never had to study for any English class since primary school because I was always slightly ahead of where the class was due to obsessively playing video games.

Same here, fun fact is that even at school and high school I was the only boy that could understand a basic text or do a basic conversation but even with that I always had troubles just to pass any test.

Learned English playing games in the early 90's

In any English test they ask me to put a phrase in passive form and I was like: the f* is that?

And most probably for maths/physics It would be funnier to do some angry birds with numbers than calculating the movement of a random body in a parabolic movement.

I learned English from Guybrush Trephwood, the mighty pirate.

Same here. Early Lucasarts adventure games drove me and my younger brother to learn english as a second language from around the age of 6.

Actual great learning games do exist, but the real awesome ones are rare.

See this 2012 thread on a truly awesome algebra learning game, and this stays relevant to this day. To the best of my knowledge, it is still the best and fastest way to learn how to solve an equation for x. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4188579

From what I know, research does not support the idea that dragonbox is a particularly effective way to teach algebra. Which is too bad, because it seems like it would work really well:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3057889

I've seen first hand how well it works in a study with 40k kids in the US, Norway, and France. The study was led by the Center for Game Science, Washington University.

Paper: Zoran Popović. Achieving 96% Mastery at National Scale through Inspired Learning and Generative Adaptivity. Proceedings of the Second (2015) ACM Conference on Learning@ Scale, 2015. http://dl.acm.org/ft_gateway.cfm?id=2724684&ftid=1550376&dwn...

Post-test success as used in the paper you mentioned can be a misleading indicator if transfer to pen and paper was done improperly. As kids solving equations in a game are moving terms around by touch on a screen, they need to transfer that learning to pen and paper before being able to write a line by line solution. Failing to do this transfer would predictably lead to a poor post-test performance, without actually measuring properly how much algebra had been learned and understood.

Well, it is not In my experience. Sample size of 1, though.

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