Are Computer Games and Simulation Going to Revolutionize Our Educational Future - By Lance Winslow

By Lance Winslow


Is the video gaming entertainment industry evolving into a more serious version, or has it come to a fork in the road where one species splits off from another. I am speaking of where entertainment becomes "entercation" or "edutainment" and the technology is being used for training, fun, entertainment, and educational simulation. We all know that pilots train in simulators much of the time, and have seen computer games that are entertaining but the user is actually learning something; like SimCity for instance.

The question is where does entertainment end and training or education start? After all, a young adult playing a video game that is much like future robotic warfare could end up in the military flying UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) like the Predators over in Afghanistan. A teen learning how to design cities and infrastructure could very well become an architect or perhaps a city planner or civil engineer.

Interestingly enough, the jobs of the future will be operator working with machine for a couple of decades or less until the machines can do it themselves based on the data recording of decades of human input training them. During this time the human employee will be getting paid for basically playing a video game or working with what is very similar to a training simulator only it will be doing all the work, while the human puts in the commands.

We can already see that Gaming and Education are uniting and getting closer together each day, while Computer Games and Simulation are clearing going to revolutionize our Future. Question for you is are you ready for that future? Please consider all this.


By Lance Winslow