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Comment by potatolicious | Hacker News Reader

> "And with that in mind, maybe games are already doing this."

They are. I'm playing the new Assassin's Creed right now, and as you explore the city of Constantinople you'll run into landmarks and people, each of whom have an in-game encyclopedia entry that you can quick-key into. It doesn't have anything to do with gameplay, and is merely there to satisfy your curiosity. The dialogue and story also make an attempt to communicate the political and economic intrigue of the era.

That and it takes place in a specific period of history that also touches on many famous people in that era, albeit fictionally. I have to say, every time I play an AC game I end up reading Wikipedia about the real-life people, places, and history that it depicts, because it's just so damned interesting.

I can't be the only one. But it certainly beats most "educational" games that smack you over the head. "Now, who can tell me when the Byzantine Empire fell?"

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That's a great point. It is certainly possible to teach history through interactive gaming.

The question is, can we do this for science/engineering/math? Is there a way to make learning STEM material through interactive gaming? Perhaps a 3d gaming world where you put together atoms, or a minecraft-type game where you learn about physics or civil engineering principles...the options are endless, and it could do a lot of good in getting kids interested and skilled at the more technical subjects

There are several bridge building games, the oldest I can think of is called Pontifex. In the original Pontifex when you went to test your bridge it would dynamically color all of your beams according load and stresses and was my first introduction to Statics and Dynamics. It gave me a chance to explore why bridges are the way they are long before I learned calculus.

that's interesting. But I guess it's missing that fun factor...there has to something else to it to attract the attention of kids

You don't have to lead players along by the nose - open-world games are surprisingly attractive even to kids (maybe especially to kids, who haven't yet been conditioned that everything needs to be structured with explicit step-by-step goals).

When I was in high school I did a lot of volunteering at the local science-museum where we had terminals set up with the Incredible Machine. They were always occupied.

Kids have an innate love for exploring, moreso than adults. We beat it out of them later, but in the mean time open world, unstructured games are some of the best ways to teach things to people. Look at SimCity, Incredible Machine, etc etc.

Or maybe a game that allows you to use real-life physics and maths knowledge to your in-game advantage? Like, giving you enough data to compute the angle for a cannon to shoot at, while hinting you very delicately towards what knowledge you need to acquire to do that?

One of the biggest problems of maths and science education is that they're useless and boring as hell. Or, at least that's how it looks like from kids' perspective. I think that a first step towards teaching them those skills in an interactive way would be to create an interactive environment where maths (or physics, or chemistry, or biology, or astronomy) could be actually useful. Some way for knowledge to give you in-game advantage, or at least expand your gameplay. A game in which you could actually read where's north from the trees and stars. Etc.

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