MMOG Teaches Kids About Traffic Safety
- Thread starter John Funk
- Start date
Well my opinion is that educational game producers are basically at odds with the whole idea of making a game. It's sort of like those mockable "knowing is half the battle" bits at the end of GI Joe Cartoons that existed to provide minimal educational content. They were tacked on, pointless, and totally detached from reality. You did however see them because if you were the right age you watched GI Joe and the show itself entertained you.
The thing with educational games though is that they are all about the message, and put as little actual game into them as possible, which of course means they are boring to play and nobody gets the message anyway.
I see the above idea as being an interesting attempt, but I'm vaguely reminded of an MMO someone developed (and which was reviewed on Something Awful) about teaching kids to conserve electricity which basically involved convincing kids to run around and unplug power strips and mess around with people's laptops (should they leave them unattended). A matter of a bad game, an okay message, and the encouragement of W T F behavior. In this case with the traps and spells and such I have to question what, if any message kids are actually going to take away from this, and how rapidly they are going to get smacked if they do.
Truthfully the only educational game I know of that ever seemed to be worth a bloody d@mn was Carmen Sandiego , it was an interesting take on trivia and managed to be amusing enough to get kids to look stuff up in fact books. It worked the compromise well.
As far as most games like various incarnations of "Math Blaster" or whatever they basically amount to a fancy tableau to display a problem just like a chalk board.
Personally if I was going to develop an online game or "MMO" based on educational principles I'd take a queue from some of the "space mission" alternative schools they have run. The idea being to send kids to the equivilent of "Space Camp" for a couple of weeks, and present all of their school work such as mathematics and the like into the format of having to operate a spacecraft performing a mission, complete with props and such. So as a result instead of a math program showing up superimposed over a ship with an alien heading towards it "solve this problem in the time limit" the is no problem expressly stated as part of the exercise with the kid having to figure out what the problem is to begin with. I've read about such things (as limited as they are) in the newspaper and such through the years.
At any rate most schools can't afford to send everyone to such programs, or run them full time. However I figure a similar enviroment could be recreated using computers with a similar attitude to presenting the problems. Like the above programs such things would be presented as an alternative to normal school work/classrooms (ie work in front of a comptuer) rather than with it.
Of course teamwork being a key component of such things, and of course it might not work with certain self validation principles of education. I mean if little timmy messes up and the ship goes careening into the astroid, peer pressure is part of it, and the teacher needs to make it bloody clear everyone is F@cking dead, and he needs to do better, even if he's like 11 or 12. Heck, I'd even have the other team members put into coffins/boxes at the beginning of the next class and make him walk by and apologize to rub in the point.
Okay, okay well maybe the last bit is a bit much, but still that's how I'd try and design an educational game intended for use in schools or whatever. I'm sorry but "spirit trails" and such are ridiculous, and I always thought even on the limited subject of enviromentalism things like "Captain Planet" really seemed to miss the point of the entire issue from either side. Heck, half the time there WAS no other side, it was "Oh no, some guy is decimating a forest just because it gets his rocks off or whatever, let's go beat him down!".
The thing with educational games though is that they are all about the message, and put as little actual game into them as possible, which of course means they are boring to play and nobody gets the message anyway.
I see the above idea as being an interesting attempt, but I'm vaguely reminded of an MMO someone developed (and which was reviewed on Something Awful) about teaching kids to conserve electricity which basically involved convincing kids to run around and unplug power strips and mess around with people's laptops (should they leave them unattended). A matter of a bad game, an okay message, and the encouragement of W T F behavior. In this case with the traps and spells and such I have to question what, if any message kids are actually going to take away from this, and how rapidly they are going to get smacked if they do.
Truthfully the only educational game I know of that ever seemed to be worth a bloody d@mn was Carmen Sandiego , it was an interesting take on trivia and managed to be amusing enough to get kids to look stuff up in fact books. It worked the compromise well.
As far as most games like various incarnations of "Math Blaster" or whatever they basically amount to a fancy tableau to display a problem just like a chalk board.
Personally if I was going to develop an online game or "MMO" based on educational principles I'd take a queue from some of the "space mission" alternative schools they have run. The idea being to send kids to the equivilent of "Space Camp" for a couple of weeks, and present all of their school work such as mathematics and the like into the format of having to operate a spacecraft performing a mission, complete with props and such. So as a result instead of a math program showing up superimposed over a ship with an alien heading towards it "solve this problem in the time limit" the is no problem expressly stated as part of the exercise with the kid having to figure out what the problem is to begin with. I've read about such things (as limited as they are) in the newspaper and such through the years.
At any rate most schools can't afford to send everyone to such programs, or run them full time. However I figure a similar enviroment could be recreated using computers with a similar attitude to presenting the problems. Like the above programs such things would be presented as an alternative to normal school work/classrooms (ie work in front of a comptuer) rather than with it.
Of course teamwork being a key component of such things, and of course it might not work with certain self validation principles of education. I mean if little timmy messes up and the ship goes careening into the astroid, peer pressure is part of it, and the teacher needs to make it bloody clear everyone is F@cking dead, and he needs to do better, even if he's like 11 or 12. Heck, I'd even have the other team members put into coffins/boxes at the beginning of the next class and make him walk by and apologize to rub in the point.
Okay, okay well maybe the last bit is a bit much, but still that's how I'd try and design an educational game intended for use in schools or whatever. I'm sorry but "spirit trails" and such are ridiculous, and I always thought even on the limited subject of enviromentalism things like "Captain Planet" really seemed to miss the point of the entire issue from either side. Heck, half the time there WAS no other side, it was "Oh no, some guy is decimating a forest just because it gets his rocks off or whatever, let's go beat him down!".
Do you have kids? Have you ever tried to teach one? Every little bit helps.Capo Taco said:
This is really cool. It looks good graphically. The story sounds tight. So it should be entertaining enough for them while helping teach them a good lesson. maybe I should play it as well. I never look both ways lol.
If you were thinking it would play like Frogger then you may be surprised it looks like this [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HkKbnm_fblc&feature=related]
Skip to 1:40 and you'll see it's like a turn based combat system where you have to set traps for thecars beasts.
Hopefully kids only take advice of the looking left and right and not setting traps =P
And at least it may get people off runescape!
Skip to 1:40 and you'll see it's like a turn based combat system where you have to set traps for the
Hopefully kids only take advice of the looking left and right and not setting traps =P
And at least it may get people off runescape!
Surprisingly doesn't look horrible. Sure, it's a bit silly, but I do love me some turn-based combat.
Ahahahaha!!!"Oh my gosh Timmy just got run over call 911!" "Stupid daddy, hes just battling a monster" Ok jokes aside why didn't they just make this like a frogger game? Or better yet just make a SHORT flash game and have schools post it. This game is really a epic fail though lol.
"Alright we've got our group, wrench ready?" "Check" "Dog ready?" "Check" "Alright lets go fight those monsters!" "Wait! Wont those cars just run us over?" "Shut up Timmy, or do you not want to play with us?" "*Sniffle*Ok..."
"Alright we've got our group, wrench ready?" "Check" "Dog ready?" "Check" "Alright lets go fight those monsters!" "Wait! Wont those cars just run us over?" "Shut up Timmy, or do you not want to play with us?" "*Sniffle*Ok..."
