Fundamentals of Fun and Innovation in Education and Learning

Video Game Delivered Education and E-Learning With the ever changing world, explosion of new content that students and learners of all ages across the world have to quickly and effectively learn with limited time on their hand, it is high time that educationists develop perfect fit modes and platforms, for curricular and lifelong learning have changed very little since most of us were students. The academic institutions starting from preschool though high school, college and university that prepare professionals and scholars in all vocations have changed very little. Even continuing and lifelong education which need to keep up with fast changing professional and industrial demands for keeping up with new manufacturing and service industry work environments have essentially changed very little. The curricular modes of teaching and tools, and surely the education environment have stayed unchanged for many decades. Our attention spans have reduced to minutes, not hours. We all know that attention grabbing modes of learning, and even the life experiences, are impacting, impressionistic, and automatically get stored in our brains for long term and even in permanent memories. Recall rates and efficiency are significantly higher for things experienced and learned during attention grabbing moments and events in our life. In addition, if the moments and events are fun and enjoyable, the learning is even more at fundamental levels. As the author Dr. KRS Murthy always says, “Fun stimulates and prepares our brain mentally for fundamental learning and thinking”. Another attention grabbing mode in our brain is when faced with challenge. Challenge requires utmost focus; Education and learning also requires a lot of focus. Thus, when an environment of challenge is created, learning happens automatically. Challenge also triggers creativity. Surprisingly, most of the curricular education in schools, colleges and universities is not challenging on the creativity, innovation and originality for the syudent. Text books, class rooms and other aspects and techniques in our academic institutions are very much 'boring” and not interactive. Teaching is mostly like preaching, telling and enforcing the students that there is one and only way to learn. Interactivity is a rare phenomenon in current and archaic education institutions. Interactivity validates, verifies and reinforces positively the information, knowledge, techniques and tools that we learn. Interactivity also helps us to be creative. Being social animals, learning interactively is very innate and natural to all of us. As infants and kids, we learned everything interactively from toys. We interacted with our parents, siblings and friends as kids, boys and girls that made learning many things in life so natural that we may have to think back to realize that most of life and social skills were learned interactively.


In order to excel, competition is vital. We all need to compete peers. We need to compete as a group or team with other groups and teams. Most importantly we need to compete with ourselves, in order to continuously improve, either incrementally or sometimes even in large steps.


As teams, we learn to cooperate with each other in the team, in order to compete and win against another team. Cooperation builds trust, reinforcement, role playing and work or responsibility sharing. If we summarize the key points of the previous paragraphs, the following are the keys to effective education and learning for all ages: attention, fun, challenge, interactivity, competition and cooperation. Video Games based Education There are many ways, tools and techniques to integrate these keys into education and lifelong learning. One of the most effective and holistically integration fit platforms are video games. Video games based education and other online, mobile and offline e-learning, when appropriately adapted holistically lend themselves many needs for education, formal, informal and lifelong. Dr. KRS Murthy is available for Key Note and featured talks. His presentation expounds the advantages, substantiating the perfect fit of video games for design with built in education contents or adapting and re-purposing them for education vertical. The author argues that the most important advantage of a gaming platform to use in education and e-learning vertical is that the video games are inherently engaging, highly interactive, a personal experience, very relaxing and fun to the players, which places the players minds in an excited mental state, making it the best opportunity to strategically embed education contents. In such a unique frame of mind, the player is playing the game to win, yet enjoying the challenge. That frame of mind is also the best suited to learn, not just passively as in reading a book, but actively learn. The frame of mind is also the best to remember the educational contents presented to the player. The author has developed various techniques for video game based learning, other e-learning modes, and most importantly to improve the creativity, IQ (Intelligence Quotient) and EQ (Emotional Quotient. The author's innovations encompass techniques that are age, demographics, language, profession and vocation target specific. His techniques also cover real time and offline analysis, real time and offline customization to the individual players. Dr. KRS Murthy is also an expert on big data techniques, particularly with special focus on real time, near real time and background analysis of video game players and teams performance tracking, performance improvement tracking, adaptive feedback for the video game to continuously keep the players and teams challenged. Metrics and measurement of the individual players and teams are vital to the game improvement for successive revisions, as well as new games and innovative breed of games development. Video games require a variety of capabilities to include 3D graphics, console level gaming, as well as more intuitive interfaces, including voice and gesture recognition, image-processing and augmented reality, that will characterize future gaming features. The ability of many current processor platforms, and those under development pipeline, to connect the CPU and GPU processors coherently and also off load much of graphics and image processing to GPU will enhance the capabilities of next-generation energy-efficient devices to deliver a user experience above and beyond what has been seen to date in the market. The programmable platforms that are essentially systems on a chip (SoC) are most suited and are already available in multiple devices like the smart phones, tablets and DTV solutions. The multi-core processor platforms have GPUs that provide 2D and 3D acceleration with performance scalable up to 1080p resolutions Scalable from 1 to 4 cores the platforms enable a wide range of different use cases, from mobile user interfaces up to smart books, HDTV & mobile gaming. One single driver stack for all multi-core configurations simplifies application porting, system integration and maintenance. Multi-core scheduling and performance scaling is fully handled within the graphics systems, with no special considerations required from the application developer. The author will also present ways to leverage on example platforms and its ecosystem off user and development partners in all aspects of the video game development and re-purposing of existing video games, so that a robust, cooperative and collaborative video game development is developed and nurtured for the benefit of the ecosystem partner companies and most importantly the learning community of all ages, professions and players of all demographics. In fact, the author's innovative proposal will make an integrated platform based video game player out of everyone from a little kid to the grand parents. The author's innovation is highly business focused, with ways to accelerate growth of platform companies, their ecosystem partners and create a new breed of companies at the intersection of computing, education and art.
Credits: My friend Prof. Paul Fullwood and I have partnered in some of the initial thoughts and a company leveraging on video games for education