“Benny’s Rules” Still Rule Part 4 of a series In designing a
video game to help students learn mathematics, it’s important
not to over-estimate the capabilities of the medium. Breathless
articles about the imminent arrival of HAL-like artificial
intelligence notwithstanding, the day is not yet here (and in my
view won’t be for a long time, if indeed at all) when we can
take the human teacher out of the loop. If you really want to
develop video games that contribute in a significant way to
mathematics education, you should view them as supplementary
educational materials or tools to be used by teachers. A major
problem with video games, or more generally any mechanized
educational delivery system, is that the system has no way of
knowing what the player, or student, is learning. That a player
who moves up a level in a video game has learned something is
clear. Video games are all about learning. But all you can
reliably conclude from a player’s leveling up is that she or he
has leveled up. It could have been h