Educational Game Mechanic

[FJeff]

This might be off topic,

but... uh...

I have often thought to myself how much more fun I would think school was if it were a video game. Fundamentally the same, only virtual.

I think many things have been reinvented and in some cases, entirely replaced by their virtual counterparts. Example: they no longer manufacture the breadboards needed to build pinball machines. Hence their growing commodity status, as the "transferable market value" of pinball machine repairmen. Now, arcades are nearly dead, yes yes? But; EVERY CHILD I KNOW can whoopass at pinball. How is this? the familiarity that bonds today's child to that game is just as strong- we just grew up playing it on the Apple II GS, or the NES, and now our children are playing tennis on the wii. Same exact game, new look, and the fundamental difference is, it is moved INTO the house rather than out of it.

This makes room for nuancing that manufacturing cant allow. it is far more expensive to manufacture an adams family pinball machine alongside a KISS pinball machine than it is to do the same with software.

(I got mad respect for software folks, but I have done manufacturing design, and I have worked in software development, and I'm telling you; one task is simply more expensive and time consming than the other. Dont mean to offend anyone.)

That said, I think a semiserious joke brightpearl lay on me a week ago hits home with this issue- and that is...

"Ive been considering homeschooling my kids so that they're taught evolution"

Schools are underfunded and in america, the curriculum not only sucks but is chock full of idiot patriotic lies, and frankly, pretty much everywhere else save for germany and france. But even there; so help you god if you dont pass the Bac, or whatever the german equivalent is called. Then its metro boulot dodo for life.

I say that "one laptop per child" would be INSANELY REASONABLE if legitimate middle and high schools were made even partially virtual. Imagine the commute time it could save. Imagine how many families would be saved the burden of selling their home and buying a new one elsewhere because they discovered that the elementary school was only stellar at the cost of the underfunded overcrowded middle school. Your french class, your japanese class, could easily be taught in virtual france, or japan, and you could be right back in time for grammar.

Anyway. this may have been the wrong place to post such thoughts,
It feels at first like an idea thats so already done and yet impossible to realize...

All Im sayin is; If I were to see an educational learning tool, I would want it to be an MMOG.