[extropy-chat] Science in K-12 Education

[Adrian Tymes]

--- Nicholas Anthony MacDonald
<namacdon at ole.augie.edu> wrote:
> I didn't learn to appreciate science or history in
> my classes.  I learned about both on my computer-
> playing SimEarth, SimLife, and Civilization... which
> lead me to reading Sagan, Dawkins, Gould, Diamond,
> and various historical works that were far more
> interesting than anything ever thrown at me in
> school.  It's a damn shame that Maxis is busy making
> junk entertainment like "The Sims" rather than
> updating their amazing educational software. 
> SimEarth, SimLife, and SimAnt not only taught
> ecology and genetics, but made it fun.  Most
> "educational" software is designed for hand-holding
> and has, by definition, gained a bad reputation- not
> these games.  We need more like them.

And it's surprising that more schools aren't using
these types of games as official cirriculum, since
they do demonstrably teach certain concepts better
than traditional methods.

I still remember, in high school, a substitute teacher
running a (non-computer) game that I later learned was
similar to CONTACT/COTI.  (Too bad I didn't stay in
touch with the teacher, else I could have asked if
this was deliberate.)  Students were put in groups of
4-5, and asked to design a world that humans would
colonize, including describing the initial colonist
society (and how they got along with the native
primitive sentients - and what those sentients were
like).  It was designed to get across the concept of
thinking about how things interact - for instance, if
the natives prefer seawater to freshwater, then they
would logically prefer coastal land (conveniently
leaving the inlands for humanity, assuming an
Earth-like water cycle).  But so far as I could tell,
teachers trying ideas like that were denied tenure
(and thus, a seat at the table when discussing changes
to cirricula) precisely because they were trying ideas
like that, regardless of how well they worked.