Not a board game manual next to the board game, but explanation *inside* the board game. Not a YouTube tutorial open next to Logic, but an explanatory medium *inside* Logic.
New "letter from the lab" on mass mediums which integrate doing with explanation:
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At the risk of saying something stupid/obvious, this sounds an awful lot like how you design a video game tutorial: you teach the player first basic controls, then what the game feels like, then surprise them - they are constantly learning without feeling like they are learning.
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I once played a sort of card game called 'Werewolf Mini' with some friends. There was a companion app that guided us through each stage of the game. It was a bit like your description of playing with a more experienced friend.
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That also reminds me of a 'companion app' for the rather complicated and messy board game Arkham Horror, which helped track things; not exactly a 'learning aid' but it did stretch the experience of a board game in an interesting direction (& did some boring bits).
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It would surely be entirely possible to create a 'smart lab' full of tiny mechanisms like the ones in eg the Switch console's handsets, that could talk you through experiments/cooking recipes/golf swings - whatever - know where you were, what you were doing...
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You could combine it with cameras/projectors constantly modelling where all the students were in the space.
This isn't really a 'tool for thinking' - I don't think it lets you understand anything in a radically new way - but it would be enormously interesting to create.
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Apologies, I see you do mention video games in the article. But I think they can go further than integrating and making dynamic representation and into the realm of constant micro-feedbacks - modelling and reshaping the student's sensibilities towards the 'feel' of mastery.
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Yes, I think you're right. I'm very excited about this direction. I've been collecting (very rough) notes on the possibilities of learning from video game mechanics here:
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This is extremely interesting, thank you.
FWIW, I agree with your thinking and have had many of the same thoughts myself (including about Stephenson's Primer).
My instinct here is to actually make a learning app (or several, likely flawed) and learn from that?
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I completely agree that education apps seem to fail when they make education the primary purpose, although I have found that *apps I build myself to teach myself things* don't have that drawback. Possibly an obvious point, but there may be something there.
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FYI: We have been building this product and it results in what we would call a universal application. FWIW: the same concept is arising in math, physics, AI, and economics, and we are beginning to see why 'we lost a century' in science and math because we 'missed' this one idea.
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