elsagold: the WUMBLOG

I just came across this video of Steve Jobs where he explains that games can be learning environments — akin to the central ideas of my TEDx talk.

Steve says: “I remember the video game phenomenon. What was the most interesting thing about the video game phenomenon to me was that within a few years after its beginning, kids and non kids were putting in 2 and a half billion dollars worth of quarters into these things a year. You can look at these things as games and dismiss them. Or you can look at them as very simple simulated learning environments. So for example in a simple pong game, the game is constantly telling you how well you’re doing by how well you score. And so the more you learn the underlying principles, the better you score. So the underlying principles in the case of most of these games were fairly simple — but carry the concept much further. Imagine if the underlying principles are a sophisticated macroeconomic model of how France might have functioned in the time of Louis the XIVth. This type of simulation then becomes a little less trivial than the videogame, and yet the principles are still the same. And you can imagine what it will be like if we could use the historical material in the Library of Congress coupled with the interactive computer technology that we’re developing to do these things. These simulations will become what most of our students are learning from.”

(special bonus: he’s speaking here with Stewart Brand, the subject of my thesis!)