Video Game School

It's not a school where kids learn to play video games, but rather a school where kids learn by playing video games.

Popular Science profiles Quest to Learn:

Ever since Pong, videogames have outperformed teachers in one key way: They command attention for hours. “Games are exceptionally good at engaging kids,” says Quest’s main designer Katie Salen, a game designer and technology professor at the New School university. “They drop kids into complex problems where they fail and fail, but they try again and again.” She knew, though, that when kids face tough problems in school, they sometimes just give up, which is partly why only a third of eighth-graders earn “proficient” math scores on national assessment tests.

For now, the school is 6th grade only, but it hopes to add a class each year until it is a full 6th-12th grade facility. Is this the future of education?

[via Neatorama]

Things I Didn't Know, December '07 Edition

Here are some of the things I've learned over the last couple of months:

— Phil Knight, founder of Nike, has been taking writing classes at Stanford, and is a good classmate.

— Nintendo has some excuses for its (mind-boggling, IMO) inability to meet the demand for Wii systems, as elaborated in Wired and in the WSJ.

— Bill Bellamy is Shaq's cousin (link to FHM, so maybe NSFW).

— There's a documentary about CalTech basketball called Quantum Hoops.

— PCs with some Award/Unicore BIOSes will, seemingly at random, play classical music to signal problems with CPU fans and power supply voltages!

— Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer, was created as an advertising gimmick for Montgomery Ward. His creator's brother-in-law wrote the now iconic song about Rudolph, sung by Gene Auntry, for a Max Fleischer cartoon.

— Speaking of Christmas music, there are tons of cover versions of "Last Christmas", Wham's gift to the world.

— The Ten Mafia Commandments.

— An expert Scrabble player would not have set the highest Scrabble score ever, given the same circumstances in which it was achieved.

— The first three-way tie in Jeopardy history (where everyone came back) was a true act of generosity, and the guy who made it happen planned it that way.