What a brilliant idea to use the theory of human learning built into good video games for teaching and learning! Isn’t that just the right way to set students’ minds on fire in the digital era?
Video games are both frustrating and life enhancing. So are and should learning be. But why most of us (at lease for me for sure) love playing video games more than learning? Because the former gives much more fun! Can we make learning more fun than it is now? Yes I think we can.
Check this video out:
It’s a simple program that you can download and compile without warning (according to most comments below) and OMG! Look at how beautiful it is! How diverse it can be! Now think about this: instead of making math, physics and coding the most boring thing in the world, you combine them in a single program and make it so much fun! Now I’m imagining taking the codes, making it incomplete, giving it to the students and asking them to make their own animation on whatever fluid process. Isn’t that a perfect learning game? I would love that!
If we don’t treat learning as such a serious topic, we can actually have fun with it. We play, and we learn!
What is this program called? Looks cool.
If you hold “command” and hit the video, it will take you to the original youtube site and the author posts the program in the video description section. I’m glad you like it! 🙂
Yi, I love your creativity! Yes, it would be wonderful to have some difficult and somewhat dry material turned into something you can learn or experience in a fun and exciting way. This seems to really go into that area of 21st Century learning helping students learn in ways they do not realize they are expanding their knowledge on several levels.
There is an entire genre of youtubers that do “Let’s Plays”. Though they are slightly different in message and are focused on playing video games (most are not targeted at educational games). However, you raise a good point. Could there be a way of taking the “Let’s Play” style of gaming and do it for certain topics like fluids at a larger scale?
This is really cool! Thanks so much for sharing. I wanted to put the #codedwithlove Gif that I made for Valentine’s day here, but the comment field won’t take it. 😉
Interesting video! I like the idea. It is useful to attract kids’/students’ attention and arouse their interest. Then it is easier to teach them something related and it is easier for them to learn something related.
First of all, I really liked the music in this video, I searched online and it seems to be an old orchestra from Handel called “Water Music” :).
Anyway, the idea of learning through playing is very effective. It is used with kids from their first days through educational toys. When it comes to video games, it might be hard to teach all subjects through video games. It for sure will work with programming and not only in command window, it was already used in GUI applications to let students move objects in a frame. For other subjects it may be tricky to use the same method. However, the idea of teaching through playing remains very interesting and needs to be developed to cover many subjects.
Thanks for sharing the video, and I love your ideas about making learning more fun! It would be great to see education move more toward project and play-based learning. What if, instead of sitting through an hour and fifteen minutes of lecture, teachers/professors gave a short lecture, and then let students explore the ideas on their own. Some subjects would lend themselves very well to this type of learning.
Thanks for sharing this valuable video.
I was wondering if we can use this type of games for graduate students as well. I mean a method on involve the students more and more.
I really love the idea of getting more games involved in learning, whether video games or “real world” games. There are so many ways you can simulate different things, from fluid dynamics to history, that could dry topics more fun. (As an aside, I wish we’d had any fluid simulator at all when I took fluid dynamics in college. The subject might have actually made sense to me.) I agree with Abdel that some topics, like calculus, may be tricky, and the game definitely couldn’t be the entire class, but maybe it could be done.
This is a great concept! I think games make learning much more fun and diverse! It would be really awesome to see more fields begin to adapt technology in game form to facilitate learning!
Wow! This is incredible! Coding was/is always such a brutal experience for me! I am sure that I would have learned a lot more if I tried to develop a code that is as fun as this! One other take away from this exercise is to let the learners design what they care for and if we have to assign a certain project to all students then try to embed all the important take ways of the project in fun activities…