Learning as-you-do-it is more efficient and effective than classrooms or textbook reading.
Could academic subjects remodel themselves on meditation apps, asks?
notes.andymatuschak.org/Guided_meditat
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This is probably easier for heavily procedural subjects, like math and meditation. Note that math instruction is already a lot like this, and doing exercises feels like "sitting down to do math".
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That suggests to me that it's not the app format but the procedural nature of the domain. Sitting down to meditate or to do math is easier, and is straightforward to offer in app form. See also a million popular exercise apps. But how does one just sit down to do history?
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(I actually spent a bit of time thinking about that question, when doing my MSc thesis on educational games. It looked to me like gamification is easy and effective for math, where you can automatically generate questions and verify the answers.)
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Interesting that you see gamification as easy! Do you have a theory as to why educational games have failed as a field? (or maybe you reject that premise?)
I think gamification is pretty easy *for subjects like math*. And there seem to be lots of good math games out there - I watched a five-year old learn to solve algebraic equations while playing on a laptop. (I'm confused why there aren't more math games for higher maths, though.)
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But as I suggested in the other tweets, math seems like an exception rather than the rule; other subjects largely don't have the kinds of properties that would make it easy. (the ones that feel like they might also have promise are math-like, such as physics)
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my humble two cents as user/someone who learned english largely from videogames, is that educational games never took off because they still operate under a sort of classroom mindset and "work" by "making learning fun/interactive" rather than making learning incidental
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Yes, I share that view.
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