This is an essay for a film scholarship, so these words are the script to be read over video. Please keep in mind that it is meant to be heard, rather than read. I hope this works.
Thanks in advance for any criticism! Really, bring out your mud cannons and fling it at me!
I want to talk to you about games.
People see kids playing games and assume they’re wasting time; fruitlessly throwing away the best parts of their life on a digital world. Although many games are indeed useless, there are games that aid and engage young minds in their journey through learning.
When I was younger, I spent hours trying to memorize the multiplication tables by reading them over and over. My mother understood that I was slaving away at it yet going nowhere, so she introduced me to flash cards. I and my siblings would try to beat each other to the answer, hoping to have a largest stack of cards by the end. Dynamic elements and the vigour of competition really caught my attention and, as you might have guessed, taught me the multiplication tables.
It’s no little surprise that I became interested in game programming at the age of 13. My older brother taught me what he knew, and introduced me to an amazing program, “Game Maker”. I would spend hours coding, debugging, testing, and coding again. My game taught me logic and math I didn’t know existed. I would share my games online and receive feedback on what I’d done right or wrong.
At the age of fifteen, I created a times-table game for my younger brothers. It took me several tries, learning what interested them, what bored them and what gameplay was too advanced for their skills. Eventually, I established a game that was exciting, taught the subject and was just the right level of difficulty.
The entire experiment led me to believe me that there is a great future in educational gaming. I believe that one day most of our learning, from kindergarten and upwards, will be achieved through games.
For example: Khanacademy, a renowned educational website run by the amazing Mr. Salman Kahn, functions very much like a game with points, achievements and a progression system.
Code Academy is a similar educational website that teaches programming languages. It too utilizes a score system with badges and achievements. Your skills can be publicly displayed to show off how much you’ve learned.
These highly successful and useful sites demonstrate that people learn amazingly well when motivated by a simple digital goal, that, no matter how insignificant, can bring so much happiness. I myself was ecstatic when I finally achieved a badge that I had worked on for hours, or sometimes days.
Games have much to teach us in ways that work so well with the young mind. Creative minds can rapturously explode in Minecraft. Games like Age of Empires and Civilisation bring out the relentless strategists and put them in their element. The recently successful Kerbal Space Program brings physics to the table accurately enough that real space-flight techniques can actually be carried out successfully.
Our educational future is in this direction.
So I suppose I should sign off.
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