With Schools Shut Down, Educators Turn To Video Games To Help Educate Students
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It's funny how fast things can change. With the exception of our recent stories on how esports has taken over the sporting world due to the COVID-19 shutdown, any other review of our stories on video games would leave you with the impression that gaming has tons of IP problems and is also the scapegoat for many of the world's problems. Blamed for real world violence, for teenager apathy, for falling school test scores, and even for men not being manly enough, there seems to have been very little for which some beep-boop games couldn't be blamed.And then came COVID-19 and its shutdown of schools across the world. And so many teachers naturally turned to the evil video games as a tool to continue to educate their students.Kevin Péloquin, a history teacher from Montreal, hoped to take his high school students of Collège Saint-Hilaire on a trip to Greece. His mixed class from grades 10 and 11 would visit historical sites like the Parthenon and record their observations for a project they would later share with their classmates. Then the covid-19 pandemic scrapped their educational itinerary. Instead of a physical trip to Greece, Péloquin proposed, what if his students could digitally tour Greece — or even better — explore it as it was thousands of years ago? He first weighed the potential of virtual reality, but soon pivoted toward a video game.Alongside its action-packed fictional story line, Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey includes a robust education mode and a research-based recreation of ancient Greece. Péloquin’s students will play individually in the coming weeks from their homes and use that as the foundation for their reports. Now, the Assassin's Creed example isn't alone. Teachers of students young and old are also using games like Minecraft, which also has an educator mode, and Roblox to keep students engaged, teach versions of planned lessons, and otherwise continue their education.This really shouldn't be all that surprising. Entertainment mediums have always been repurposed for educational use. Whether its film, music, or art, these things have always found their way into the classroom as teaching tools. If anything, video games are more natural allies of teachers, given that they are interactive and can be modded or altered for educational reasons, whereas film and books cannot. And apparently both students and game makers are getting on board with this.“My intention is to motivate my students to continue with the course,” Péloquin said, whose course is optional at Collège Saint-Hilaire. “When I spoke about it with my students, they seemed really, really pleased and surprised that we can work on our history course through a video game.”Ubisoft granted Péloquin and his 23 students free access to Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey for three months through Google Stadia, a cloud-based streaming service. This lets all the students play through the game via an Internet connection, no matter how powerful their home computers are. We're all somewhat in the business of finding silver linings these days, lest we go insane. The silver lining I propose is that it sure would be nice if coming out of this self-imposed isolation and shutdown of our daily lives also saw a shift in how video games are viewed.
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posted at: 12:00am on 24-Apr-2020
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Space X Starlink Beta Starts In 6 Months, Bringing A Glimmer Of Hope To Crappy US Broadband Market
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The US broadband market is a competitive mess. US telcos have routinely refused to upgrade their aging DSL lines, as the return on investment has never been fast enough for Wall Street. That has left cable giants like Comcast and Charter (Spectrum) with bigger broadband monopolies than ever before. While many see 5G wireless as some sort of competitive panacea waiting in the wings, there's a litany of problems (cost, reach, competition eroding M&As) that suggests folks should temper their enthusiasm.Then there's satellite broadband. Long despised by consumers for slow speeds, inconsistent performance, high prices, and usage caps, the sector is poised for disruption by a number of low-orbit satellite ventures. These new offerings offer significantly lower latency using a litany of smaller low-orbit satellites. One of the major players is of course Space X, whose Starlink satellite broadband service is slated for a public beta six months or so from now according to Elon Musk:The beta is poised to include both Europe and the United States, which the company previously stated should see a full commercial launch sometime later this year. After launching another 60 Starlink satellites yesterday, Musk indicated there were now "420 operational Starlink satellites" preparing to offer service. The service offers the promise of some significant disruption to a sector that very much could use a competitive kick in the ass.That said, Starlink may never truly challenge the domination of telecom monopolies like AT&T and Comcast. For one, it's still far too early to know what kind of speeds or prices users will be looking at, and it's quite possible that the price point, throttling restrictions, or usage caps could result in the service being a flimsy alternative to fixed-line broadband. Musk has also previously noted how while the service latency should be a LOT better than traditional satellite broadband (20ms versus 200ms or higher), the service isn't going to have the kind of bandwidth needed to seriously compete in denser urban or suburban markets:"The challenge for anything that is space-based is that the size of the cell is gigantic... it's not good for high-density situations," Musk said. "We'll have some small number of customers in LA. But we can't do a lot of customers in LA because the bandwidth per cell is simply not high enough." Keep in mind that the US broadband industry is routinely peppered by well hyped potential disruptors that consistently fail to deliver.Broadband over Powerline, for example, was widely hyped as a competitive panacea by folks looking to deregulate the telecom sector, only to fall flat on its face due to interference issues. The current FCC has similarly justified its pandering to existing monopolies with the promise that competition (be it 5G or satellite) is just around the corner. But there's no shortage of low-orbit satellite ventures thatn have fallen flat on their face, and there's no shortage of politically powerful companies (AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Comcast) busily lobbying to ensure another major competitor never upsets the apple cart.That said, there's still hope that Starlink offers a genuine, helpful option to users left out of reach of traditional options. With more than 42 million Americans still unable to get any broadband at all, and millions more unable to afford it due to limited competition and high prices, the US broadband sector can certainly use all the help it can get.
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posted at: 12:00am on 24-Apr-2020
path: /Policy | permalink | edit (requires password)
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