ThisMemento

Have you been following the current media furor over kids easily accessing porn? I’ve had friends & family who are teachers telling me stories about how teens are circulating hard-core porn between each other – more Redtube than YouTube – & how teachers are using fake Twitter accounts to keep track on their students; “Sorry sir I didn’t do my homework cos I was sick,” doesn’t cut it anymore when teach can respond with, “Ummm really? I saw your tweet saying you were out all night”.

It’s a complicated & seemingly tense relationship between students, teachers and technology.

This TED talk by Sir Ken Robinson talk sprang to mind when thinking about where’s it all heading. Could or should it be heading away from ‘fast-food’, generic education, towards ‘organic’ and student-driven learning? Which got us thinking. How could a gaming layer play a part in the education process?

Kids and human beings have natural, intuitive tendency to learn by repetitive play. Doctors and pilots (& scarily terrorists) are reaching their magic 10,000 hours of training,  using games and simulators & new conceptual schools like Quest 2 Learn, embed game-learning into their school program. Students learn in systems thinking education & create solutions by participating in ‘games’, learning the practices and behaviours of characters. The school wants to equip students for what life and work will be when they finish studying.

But maybe we as a society are not yet ready for that type of approach towards education. We live in an ironic human-digital system where we embrace Moore’s Law and have faster, smaller cheaper gadgets and devices, but as a society we seem to be limited in our social acceptance of digital possibilities in other areas.

One area that does not seem to shun the possibilities digital technology opens up is the world of giving & sustainability. Microsoft have an annual event called Imagine Cup, where they challenge young developers to create games that bring world issues to the forefront of play. It’s on different levels so that players can immerse themselves in the game, the message or both & Al Gore was an endorser of the Climate Reality 24 hour avatar game, another concept to bring gamers together to consider how to solve the world’s environmental problems.

As kids move inexorably & speedily forward, so society has to keep up or get ahead of the game. Teaching institutions can think about how they can use the game layer to encourage kids to tackle difficult subjects; chocolate on top of broccoli if you will. Young people shouldn’t have to wait for teaching institutions to catch up, they want to control their own destiny. It’s not just a game to them, it’s their future.