Softworlds

(Written in 2000; nothing's changed)

Son: They're not letting us play Warcraft at school anymore.

Father: The other shoe dropped?

Son: Huh?

Father: You told me they were looking for a reason to stop the gaming.

Son: Yeah, I don't think they ever wanted us playing games. Teachers were always complaining.

Father: Complaining about what?

Son: Noise, language, not letting the little kids play, that only boys play Warcraft. Mostly, they complain that Warcraft's not educational and shouldn't be played in school.

Father: What do you think? What do you do in Warcraft?

Son: Try to kill the other team.

Father: That's it? What's fun about it?

Son: It's fun to work with your partner. There're four computers networked for games. We usually play two against two.

Father: You like the teamwork. What do you like about it?

Son: Yeah I like working with someone to beat the other team. We explore the area, try to figure out what the other team is going to do, and make plans.

Father: Hmm...collaboration, research, strategy -- sounds like the foundation of business, science, athletics or any professional endeavor. I wonder what those who don't want you playing games mean by educational?

Son: They seem to like math games, programs that read a story, and Carmen Sandiego.

Father: Yes, the old favorites. Software that emphasizes tricks and procedures, memorization, and looking things up.

Son: What does that mean?

Father: Tricks and procedures is what you do in arithmetic -- addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division; or, as Lewis Carrol put it: "ambition, distraction, uglification, and derision." Arithmetic is learning the tricks and procedures of calculation. This is in contrast to mathematics which is the study of formal relations. Arithmetic is tricks and procedures; mathematics is about ideas.

Son: You think that learning arithmetic isn't important?

Father: It's nice to know your times tables and to be able to do arithmetic but it doesn't deserve the devotion it gets. Tricks and procedures are either understood or not. If the tricks and procedures of arithmetic are understood, then you're going to get almost every calculation correct. If they're not understood, then you'll usually get the calculation wrong. If you've learned calculation, you don't need to practice much. If you haven't learned calculation, you'll need further instruction -- practice won't help. Most arithmetic software is not designed to help you learn calculation. I'd be far more impressed if I saw some useful math software, for example, about statistics in everyday life. How about a program that taught gambling odds? We'll call it, You Betcha, the game that sheds light on your winning chances in games -- from Blackjack to state lotteries. You'd learn that you have the same chance at winning the lottery as you do of falling off a cliff and landing in a pile of hundred-dollar bills.

Son: Are you okay, Dad? You got a little excited.

Father: Guess I did. I just don't see why calculation games, interactive books, and Carmen Sandiego have become sacred in so many schools. Calculation is a useful but trivial skill, the acquisition which is not much helped by a computer. Interactive books are a poor and relatively expensive, substitute for real books read by Mom and Dad. Carmen is basically the game of Clue with history facts. Simple statistics, on the other hand, can be quite useful to learn. And, by the way, a good way to begin learning statistics is by playing computer games -- especially role playing, strategy, and war games.

What happened to educational software is that it went through a couple of stages and disappeared. In the first stage, computers were so novel that anything done with one was considered useful preparation for the future. Kids would go to their school’s computer lab for a session and practice “keyboarding skills,” play dumb math games or the ubiquitous Oregon Trail and Carmen Sandiego games.

Over time, teachers, parents, and the children realized that computers plus crummy software, while more fun than doing math exercises out of books, is not equal to magical teaching machine. And since by then the kids also had video-game machines, they knew that, not only did dumb math games not teach them math, they weren’t very good games.

The next stage was the “epiphany” that computers were just tools and should be used by children the same way they were being used by adults — for their dull and clumsy office applications such as word processors and spreadsheets. This change in perception, not coincidentally, came about as many adults were buying “serious” personal computers for their homes. Time for kids to be as bored as adults were by modern technology. Luckily for the kids, they still had those video-game machines, which, unlike educational software, were getting better all the time.

It’s not that educational software ceased to exist, it’s that the enthusiasm for its promise evaporated. First, the ambitious and creative companies sold out to conglomerates (which are now mostly part of Riverdeep.net) who milk profits out of designs that are at least 15 years old. Second, grant-funding charities, such as the Markle Foundation, stopped funding research in educational software. So while educational titles get facelifts, there aren’t any new designs. It would be as if General Motors was selling cars with 15-year-old engineering covered by new sheet metal. (Oh, wait-a-second, they are.)

So innovation in educational software is long dead. What’s left is surfing the Internet, exchanging gossip on MySpace, and playing World of Warcraft, definitely an educational upgrade over struggling with Microsoft Office.

I think that the death of educational software is a good thing. You couldn’t exaggerate its death too much for my taste, because I think that it never existed. Most of what we called educational software was book-learning transferred to the screen and animated. If a new technology is going to change what we learn, it needs to change how we learn.