Jonathan Blow (of Braid and The Witness) with an awesome, awesome talk on video games and education. I loved this.
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@ejames_c I'm thinking this is right up your alley: twitch.tv/videos/6787295
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"When information enters the brain through non-verbal means, (then) it's difficult to explain. But some people are able to explain what they're doing (...) these are the ones who are explaining things to themselves as they go along."
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"This thing that I showed with lots of bounces, is a very low probability event if you were to look at actual Feynman diagrams." Blow goes on to say that it's ok, you want to be true to the game and make a good game, and the goal is to teach the intuition, not the specifics.
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But, yeah, holy shit, Blow actually tried to make a game around Feynman diagrams.
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The main thrust of Blow's argument is that games teach the meta-skill of systems thinking. Every game is a system you need to understand, manipulate, and overcome. This has lots of real world applications: job markets, macroecons, etc.
From personal experience, this rings true.
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It's also interesting that Blow argues for games first, to teach intuition ("it's one thing to read about non-linear responses to inputs, and quite another to experience it by getting burnt by it").
This mirrors everything that Seymour Papert discovered more than 20 years ago.
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