dynamic elf

This school in the NYC public system has built a curriculum around game style learning. Their website isn't great but that's pretty much what they're doing.

Quest to Learn (http://www.q2l.org/mission/)

One could argue that the typical structure of big villain fights or a significant challenge at the end of a given level or adventure before you can advance is a test by another name. But it's a test that you're almost guaranteed to fail the first time or the first 10 times mostly. I think that's a pretty good lesson right there, though. Take a beating. Learn. Return.

Yes, but only in the context of ADHD kids. It's a long long thought much better communicated in person.

Yes. All process, all the time. Hurdles are an intrinsic part of the process, they ARE the process, instead of being taken out of context (like tests are).

I could see periodic tests being used in a game-ified education system as additional markers of what students are and aren't learning. The scores (if any) wouldn't affect the final grade, but would only inform subsequent lesson plans.

There's tons of interesting stuff on the gamification of education over here (http://www.gamifyingeducation.org/).

It's been a long time since I played video games. I've taught classes much more recently than that, so let's see if my thoughts on this are at all relevant.

My understanding, and I recognize it might be wrong, is that video games have a Goal, and there's a Way to Get To It. You can fail/die/whatever over and over again, and each time what you're learning is how the game is designed. So next time you get back to the place in the game you shoot the blue guy first then the red guy because whenever you shoot the red guy first the blue guy shoots you... or whatever. It's narrowing in on the correct approach.

To me, this sounds pretty much the opposite of what I want education to be, and not really very far from "teaching to the test." In some ways, by making the test part of the teaching it sounds worse because there's no point in which doing something completely new and unexpected is really valuable, either for the student or the teacher. Playing an adventure or quest or simulation game sounds to me like teaching students to narrow down the way they examine possibilities over and over until they way they consider the world is as similar as possible to the way the game-writers/test-writers did.

Again, I may be way out of date with video games. And maybe this is pretty much what much of secondary school education looks like these days? Obviously I'm also way out of touch with that! But it seems to me like this mentality toward teaching would, if it worked, over time produce a set of final papers, projects, presentations, etc. that looked more and more similar to each other as students learned quickly what was expected of them, and how to pass a level with the minimal effort. How to play the game "right." Which to me is what I would want education to get away from, not entrench further into.

What am I missing here? Is there a way this is way better than it sounds to me?

One thing this doesn't get at is the reason for standardization: comparison of students and schools. Unless all schools are using identical pedagogy and identical assignments, this sort of comparison is very difficult to do without a common test at the end. If anything, I'd think completely uniform curricula would be more worrisome than completely uniform testing.