Our current education system is engineered during the industrial revolution and have not seen radical changes ever since. With the emerging mobile technologies I do believe that the learning experience could dramatically change. The main problem is having a batch of students receiving the same educational curriculum.
1- Unfortunately the speed and the interest level of all students vary dramatically and without technological help it is not possible to engineer unique learning experience for the individual students.
2- In today’s learning environment we must understand why we all like playing games and hate having boring lessons. We need to engineer and make use of the 47 game mechanics during a lesson. It is possible to embed learning experience to lessons and embed learning objects to games. Both are possible.
Since we are all clear about the roadmap we need to establish a technical landscape that would enable the vision. But how? Very simple all we need to do is to mimic what all those mega game exchanges are doing. We should benchmark our education system against iTunes, BlackBerry Apps market, Sony PlayStation Network etc. I am sure we can engineer a better environment.
On the otherside of the equation we will have the games itself. We also need to re-engineer the games. Garry Kasparov (the most powerful chess grand master that we know) is designing a learning experience for students between 6-9 years of age. It is important to know that stating chess at the age of 6-9 can improve our kids IQ, but after 9 years old the marginal benefit from learning or playing chess decreases. You should also keep this in mind. On 9th of December 2011 we have presented this idea to Minister of Education Omer Dincer and his team responsible for Fatih project.
