Good educational game's for the classroom - where the hell are they?

Hey hey hey,

So the other night I was trying to find educational games to use for students in my class (I'm a trainee teacher), and I could hardly find any that can actually be used to engage kids and make their learning enjoyable.

On all of the major app stores there seems to be a pattern of 10-20 really good apps, followed by a plethora of games that are listed as educational but just not engaging at all.

Have any of you guys developed educational games, what do you think?

I mean, surely developers must aim to actually engage kids, rather then JUST help them to learn?

Also, where can I find developers that create educational games/apps, there must be so many that just haven't published them around, perhaps due to the lack of opportunities to monetize their games.

Anyway thanks in advance for any contribution!

 

We make E-Learning games here, however it's very rare that kids are a target market, there are many more clients that are businesses wanting digital training.
We have done some minor fluff pieces with kids as a target, such as a power distribution app that explained how power is generated and sent to homes, but not too many. I think the lowest down the education chain we've gone for our main E-Learning programs is College level (so age 16+). We did focus on engagement for the previously mentioned power program, mostly by using bright colours and mini-games for them to play while learning.

The issue is that though there are many developers that will do these programs (us included), they won't do it for free, and especially for anything game based the costs can be quite high in relation to most educators budgets.

We've previously solved this by building consortiums (collections of educators that all want the programs, that each contribute part of the costs) and having a collaboratively built program for them. Most of the trouble comes from agreeing to a consistent syllabus to get the learning objectives from, when there's a group acting as clients, it can get noisy.

 

As someone that has bought educational SW for a diagnosed autistic I can tell you that market is controlled by knowing the right people to enable getting lucrative government contracts for usually sub-standard quality software. I can tell you I paid over $2000 for autistic software that was completely amateurish in design, and SW engineering UI quality. As this was more than 15 years ago the touch screen interface was cutting edge but that was a separate expense and a separate engineering effort developed for businesses using sales kiosks and everything else about the SW program was sub-standard. Also very little course content for so much money.

So in summary - there is no educational or any other sort of market for indies. Indies make a game or app and it is successful or it isn't. That's what being indy is.

 

I made one as a class assignment to teach my 7yr old his times table & his friends liked playing it on the electronic whiteboard with the rest of the class yelling answers but individually it didn't hold their attention. It also only had programmer art. I dug it out about a fortnight ago & put it onto gamejolt so a friend interstate could get a copy for her kids.

As to why there aren't more, I think it is largely what 3agle said. It is really hard to get consensus on what the syllabus is so anyone making a game ends up going for something generic. Also I think it is parents that get the games but often the kids only spend a short time on it because as soon as the parents & teachers are gone they are playing more 'fun' games.

 

You better believe there are consensus about syllabi and course work and it's only a tiny fraction that keeps being argued about and changed for whatever politically hip faddish reason is in vogue nowadays. There are consensus about what the syllabi is for each educational jurisdiction in the USA and it is at the federal and state levels and very rarely small portions are allowed to be tailored at the local jurisdiction level. That syllabi information is free and one need only ask for it. However, you must create your own original course work in many cases based on the requirements of those syllabi as that has been turned into a business by the various levels of government in the USA and often you must pay for access to that course material and it is copyrighted so you can't copy it and repurpose it to your game or app or any other publication.

Your alternative to paying for that is to use sources of information that are public domain now like the Gutenburg Archives and/or to know the intended subject matter for your game or app such that you can create your own material based on those syllabi.

 

Over here the syllabus agreed to between states is so general that it is close to useless, & each state can organise their school year groups differently to add some complexity to the mix. They tend to spend more time on, as you say, the hippest learning method than on actual content.

 

Well I think we both can agree if we try to make games based on what they think is hip we'll get nowhere fast.

I am using educational subject matter as a means of making game play more interesting and understandable to game players not as an attempt to break into these politically manipulated education markets and try to try and win a contract from them. Completely different mindsets but they don't have to be mutually exclusive in using educational material - it's just that I don't have to answer to them and their syllabi.

 

How old are the students you are targeting?

I am 14 and still in school so I have tried a few educational games in my life and I found most of them boring and unengaging. Probably because these games were designed to be educational instead of fun which is something a game should always be. Personally I think indirect learning is the way to go, games like KSP, Civ, Universe Sandbox etc.

Check out Extra Credits on Youtube or their steam curator page here for a list of games that might help.

 

Well the educational market is much bigger than K - 12 and app/game developers really shouldn't explicitly target students in those closed educational markets without contacts and contracts. Otherwise they are likely to waste much time and money for something they are not politically connected enough to sell.

No reason not to use your own personal education to make your game more interesting though. There is only so far clicking a button to shoot an electronic weapon of some sort can take you before the customers start have enough of it.

 

I understand what you mean but the way I see it is that game developers should be focusing on building a great a fun game first and then it is up to the teachers and schools to find the educational value in those games and use them as an example alongside normal learning to engage the students. Its not gonna be easy but I believe its doable.

 

Well an independent developer may choose to try & do what you say and follow the requirements of the syllabus as it amounts to same thing whether you try to sell to a general audience or a political audience; unless you are given special treatment by the political audience to make that sale easier to obtain and well because politicians are known and famous for doing that won't stop the logic of a fun game that follows the syllabus only whether or not you get a contract from them to use the game as part of the course teaching materials.

At any rate taking a syllabus for a class and actually trying to make a fun game that you enjoy personally might be a worthwhile endeavor as a means to escape this design rut of zombie/war/race games.

Despite occasional claims to the contrary, creativity does have logic behind it and you can use that logic to your advantage creatively.

 

The teacher's job is to teach you the material, make sure that you know it and don't forget it, they not to find value in games with you.

Making games takes time, so just sticking to traditional methods might be much faster.

 

No, they are not talking about making games in class to teach but as a more engaging wage to study material as a supplement to existing methods.

They don't mean to replace the teacher but to use the game as study aid after class in addition to traditional study aids.

As a 6th grader I did take a class that was self taught, mostly - you read the teaching part of the subject matter's lesson for that day and proceeded to taking a computer graded #2 pencil bubble test. You did not move on to the next lesson until you passed the current lesson. Very boring and a waste of a good teacher's flexibility in explaining material to school children with the flexibility and repeatability to account for different life experiences and learning interest and learning aptitude.

 

Hey there,
this is a topic I have thought about for many years (since I've got in the 5th/6th grade 2000/2001) and it followed me until today. Coincidentally I am starting such a project now by myself for 3-4 month as my thesis for my bachelor degree. I thought about a lot of systems that could work and decided for myself in the end, that if I could choose any game genre to play and learn some stuff, it has to be somewhat RPG-stylish.

RPGs offer so many ways to teach and test nearly any topic you would get taught in school the same way as reading some old books or watching a documentary and then do a test, BUT you can give the learner some better immersion.
For example historical events or even biology (flora and fauna). With good ideas it should even be possible to teach maths in a RPG game.

Or even: When I see games like e.g. Battlefield I wonder why there is no really known game like this, with enough historical accurate topics in it. Sure, you shouldn't end up with a game like Wolfenstein where you kill Nazis or even the other way around, but those type of games would give many opportunities to teach at least some stuff while they are fun to play. The newly announced battlefield seems to end the same way. Almost accurate parts for characters and "teams" but in the end it's just... yeah kill each other.

Maybe I am allowed to start a thread about my project as soon as it starts in the WIP subforum (depending on if my university prof and examination office allow me this, before I had my examination).

 

As usual @neginfinity has cut to the heart of the issue. No one has yet demonstrated that games are a more effective method of teaching then traditional methods. Building an engaging game takes a lot of time and effort. And the payoff in terms of student learning might not be there. Until someone can demonstrate games working as a primary education tool, they will simply remain off to the side as cute little toys.

 

As much as I would like to see games in classrooms I do have to agree with this point. I find the way school subjects are thought incredibly boring though so maybe using them as "cute little toys" to get students interested or demonstrate an example would not be a bad idea.

 

I'm sure they're all right next to the 'Games made for toddlers that were actually tested by toddlers' and all the 'innovative titles that are not just clones with a small feature change". /s

I'd be surprised if there are all that many quality education game developers. They'd need to have knowledge in education, skills at gamedev, and insight into great usability, as well as age-specific testers (I wouldn't be surprised if adults tested most games for kids.)

And it's not like U.S. public schools, or even private ones, are dying to use games to teach. Or even to teach at all...

Huge demand for quality educational games. Low possibility of anyone actually producing quality.
Then again... that's true of all the game industry... and most of all industry, period.

Quality is hard to find. In fact, a lot of what is 'best' is not even what is quality. It's what is best at the current time, even if pretty crappy. It's just that 'best' is pretty much anything that exists that ISN'T utter S***. Just look at Facebook. Minimum quality, but 'not S***' enough to beat everyone else at the time. Another example is Steam, a god-awful, ugly, featureless app run by billionaires who cashed in because it was less shifty than everything else, at the right time.

Although really, 'never' sounds like the 'right time' for public schools to want anything good. So poorly funded... So probably high demand, but without the 'right time' monetary success of the above examples.

 

Those are the main problems I see here. Creating motivating aspects to teach and test shouldn't be that hard for specific topics, but you will have a hard time to find someone who will fund you and your team for such a task. And even if you find some "publisher" who backs you up the risk then is, that it is not guaranteed that those people behind the educational system will think, that this solution is worth it when they could just throw in some hundreds of dollars/euro to get other stuff. They don't even give enough money to let the schools buy new books, so sometime you have to work with stuff that is more than 10 years old and even looks like that, because it went through so many hands.

Well for a lot of topics you only need on outsourced team-member who will give you all the accurate infomations and checks if you have implemented it without any wrong stuff. I have to admit, that history would be the easiest topic.

The main target audience I see here is the private sector, so the players can learn some stuff at home while they play a really good game. They don't even need to have the goal to learn something, you can design the whole game like a lot of other games, but they learn the topics by the way.

 

Personally I have always found it baffling that the teaching of things such as game development and programming are not more widespread. I remember when I was in Kindergarten and early grades playing the hack out of Freddi Fish, Reader Rabbit, and the like

 

I was referring to those educated in stuff like Educational Psychology, not the specific information being taught (which can be outsourced via a formal teacher, books, scientific census, or just lazily/inaccurately derived from wikipedia or the developer's own knowledge.)

It's one thing to try to teach someone. Even someone with a degree required to teach a specific subject can try. It's another thing entirely to actually be effective at it. To be a good teacher. Especially with children.

And to teach specifically using a game? I'm sure there is plenty to know about how humans learn through interaction, games, software, etc. Not just the knowledge about how we learn "in general".

 

The biggest problem I see is that most educational games are at best gamified homework. They really aren't teaching tools per se a lot of the time. Play itself isn't what is being learned from, which makes the idea of using a game kind of moot.

It's only in science where you can easily create systems that people can actually play with, like you would with any other game. I have yet to see it, but a realistic electrical model would be something that could practically replace a teacher as a teaching tool. Normally though, what is being learned is tangential to play. It's healthy icing on a cake that probably tastes terrible in the first place.

 

I agree with all of that.

That's why I would never try to create an educational game for children below secondary school grade. For those kids you need someone who knows what he does and who can react to each specific kind of learner. There are just too many "variables" and this can never be possible for a game and would be rather contra productive because I always see this with my cousins. They just have so many questions and need different teaching approaches to let the learn the answers.

Here in Germany we have/had a educational gaming series called "Addy". It tries to teach basic math/german/english as a point and click adventure and for someone who is below 10 yrs old it can be kinda fun, but have I learned something from it? I doubt it. It was more like: "Hey, this is fun to play. Oh look, there is a video, cool!"... and that's it.

If I had to choose my target audience it would be more like junior-/senior-highschool.

 

Does anyone know if kids these days still use Mario Teaches Typing or Typer Shark Deluxe? (The modern equivalent, obviously.)

Those were awesome. And actually helped me learn to type.

 

I would have to disagree with you on steam. If you want a better definition of what you are talking about EA Origin says hello

 

I remember playing Typer Shark a bit. I could never seem to get the hang of typing they way they often wanted you to I have always been more a hunt and peck guy

 

It's actually interesting that despite all of the advances in technology, the primary method of teaching hasn't changed much since Aristotle first shared his thoughts on rhetoric.

Despite having books, audio recordings, videos, the scientific method and computers, we still teach mainly by using a human teacher. This probably means there is something special about a human teacher that can't be duplicated in other ways.

 

You'll find a bunch of games recommended for educational value here. Many are not designed specifically for the classroom, so it may not be quite what you're looking for.

 

I like that idea. RPG type games that are engaging and have a good story can be extremely fun whilst beneficial for the learner if done effectively

 

I like the idea of games like Universe Sandbox or Kerbal Space Program or SpaceChem, that doesn't teach you directly, but rather irks your curiosity to learn more about how stuff works.

 

Plus one for KSP. I've spent so much time reading up about air plane physics as a result of that game.

So maybe the secret is not straight out educational games. But a game that awards a player for having the specific knowledge. Make the game the reward and application, rather then the teaching medium.

 

IMO, the problem with educational games is that informational density is too low compared to a lesson or an experiment during a lesson. RPG is 40..120 hours, cramming enough information into it, making sure that the information is used by the player, there's constant influx of a new information AND the player retains the information and has fun... it is going to be incredibly hard, would require army of scientist and 10 years of research.

If the goal is efficient education, then games are probably not a good idea. If a goal is creating entertainment with a tiny bit of educational value, then sure.

 

In my honest opinion having a game created as a game that intends to additionally have some learning points embedded into it is a pipe dream of people who want to learn things while gaming. I do not think this idea has enough behind it to actually teach any more effectively than a well-taught lesson or a piece of interactive E-Learning.
It's the thought that CSGO teaches maths because you incidentally end up adding or subtracting player HP. It's not that simple and at the end of the day does nothing useful. neginfinity puts it well in that the information density is too low. You would spend more time getting the user to enjoy the experience than they would spend actually learning anything.

It is absolutely possible to create E-Learning (even in 3D simulation environments), that is as engaging and immersive as a game. However doing this for basic concepts like English language or Maths is very difficult because there is not much you can do to naturally fit that into a simulated environment. At least not without introducing lots of content that is not learning content, which dilutes the experience.

It's much easier to make an immersive simulation to teach crane operation than it is to do the same for speaking French.

That said, I'm not suggesting it's an impossible endeavor, I'm not an expert and there are many creative things to be explored in digital learning, I'm sure someone will find a way to do it, but I don't think there is anything that successfully proves the concept currently (I would really like to be proven wrong on that point Edit: Having thought about it, Rocksmith gets some of the way there, though I can't say it's a model that applies to much else unfortunately. And even then only goes part of the way towards the goal).

 

Yes I made one called ULearn ABC and got about 9 downloads and not a single in app purchase to the full version. So you could say I became disheartened creating an educational game, although it did actually teach my boy his ABC's. Check it out and tell me what I did wrong, bear in mind it only got 9 downloads so no one even downloaded it to know if it was good or bad.

 

This.

Most games have a core loop which involves doing the same thing over and over, and getting rewarded for it each time. To make an effective educational game you need to be constantly presenting new rules and information. Which kind of breaks the core loop of the game.

 

It's not just the teacher either. Each student is different, learns at a different pace, has different experiences to draw from, different difficulties with different parts of the material, and so on. Until someone develops a solution to identify and deal with these variances you simply can't replace a human teacher.

 

Gameplay loops don't mean squat when it comes to learning. Learning in games (across the board) is usually some combination of mechanical exploration and problem solving. The hard part is making the mechanics be the thing you want people to learn, otherwise the game is separate to what is being taught.

That'll happen sometime after everyone realizes this factory method of raising children does more harm than good.

 

Engagement is an issue at some ages, though not all. The main caveat really is money. Funding for these types of experiences is very very limited. To do the example you describe, immerse students in the world of 1865, is not a small amount of work, and the costs of creating such a thing are quite high. If you can't justify that cost with genuine learning content, there's no way institutions will be able to fund it.

I don't think it's a case of if it's technically possible, it's more of a question of do the economics of the situation support that? To which I think the answer is very rarely.

 

(UK based here)
Yes I see the same trends you describe, I think the interest in STEM fields gives leverage though the way our specific business model works it's unlikely to be able to take advantage. We typically run client focused operations now, educational institutions just aren't worth pursuing in comparison to the budgets of big companies (unfortunate situation).

Though if someone with enough experience were to make it their goal to pitch to educational institutes, with the right subject matter experts and potentially government funding you could probably do good work. The problem for most is that when you get to that ability level as an organisation, there are more profitable options that aren't aimed at kids or STEM. I don't see that ever not being the case, so it would take someone very dedicated to stay that course I feel. It's the unfortunate problem of money talks.

 

At least EA's Origin had a good looking GUI. Way better than the throwback archaic GUI & messenger that we STILL have today with Steam. So hideous. So featureless. So crappy. So many lockups, freezes, forced updates, spam advertisements...ugh...not to mention Steam feels like it always takes longer to start and shut down than anything else- even slower than Bethesda's loading screens.

EA's Origin probably sucked compared to Steam (monetarily) because it's EA. Anything they touch, they somehow poison. While Valve has so much mindless fanatical support, it's like a religion to many people. They can't do any wrong, even when they screw their consumers up the ass, lol. At least EA gets called on it when they try the same.

 

In all the time I have used steam rarely has it locked up and froze on me and it doesnt take that long to boot up for me. Also in recent years they have added plenty of features including VR support, family sharing, support for TVs, cloud saves, and even the ability to download movies

 

I dunno about you, but I've been playing Overwatch a bunch and I find myself missing Steam's features in Battle.net all the dang time. Also, I prefer a simple and straightforward design like Steam's over flashy or overly polished looking stuff, but that's just a matter of taste, really.

 

Yea.... not at all impressive. Especially from a multi-billion dollar company. Some of the most useless features that are not without their own problems.

Nice to see you neglected to mention all the negatives:

• The Paid Mod Scandal
• Draconian refund policy that was only reversed recently, after tons of lawsuits & litigation (and very high probability of declining profits)
• Perpetuating one of the biggest scams in PC gaming history: WAR Z (helping them achieve tens of millions of dollars in profits by constantly featuring their game despite the criticism, low rating, scandal journalism, and continuing to feature it on their front page during their obvious deceptive name change)
• The horrible F Rating with the BBB & consistent horrible support
• A complete lack of quality control & product/customer care
• The absolute clutter of Green Light, a.k.a. the shift towards "Steam Brown Light" (Which seems to have hit its journalistic peak with the big article: Good Isn't Good Enough) and thus...
• A solidification of that big loss for indies that was once a gold mine for quality indie gamedevs to get exposure. Is now a graveyard filled with some of the worst "games" imaginable. Resulting in Indie Gamedevs having to return to the normal life of obscurism.
• The ridiculous hype over the "Steam Box" & the steam controller (which turned out to be just-another-controller (3/5 rating - Do not Recommend)
• The total failure of the "Steam Box" & disastrous 'promise' to basically revive Linux gaming (a huge disappointment to Linux gamers, I'm sure)
• The persistence year after year: a complete lack of anything of real value from one of the greediest companies in the gaming industry, despite their absolutely ridiculous profit margin.

But yea, they totally make it easy for Game Developers to upload their product! You get the wonderful benefit of giving them 30% to do the same thing other companies do for much, much less. Well according to that article, other businesses provide better services in some areas. For so much less. "....FastSpring, which has the best data backend for tracking this kind of stuff that I've ever seen." All in a cluttered market where indies are now, just like throughout history, are dying from lack of exposure.

EA Origin really doesn't seem so bad by comparison.
At least everyone KNOWS they're an enormously wealthy company that cares nothing more than profit.
Valve has many convinced otherwise, despite their history showing they do nothing more than what generates them more money.
Although that has certainly faded quite significantly in the last few years as people began to wake up because of the above. It hit a point where the company began to be called "Evil" by a large portion of users.

Some time before 2012, there was nothing but high praise for the company & everything it did. It could sell turd-sandwiches for $120, and everyone would open their mouths wide open. 5/5 stars. Then one after another, they just kept failing, screwing over consumers, getting into lawsuits because they're incredibly greedy. The numbers (irrefutable math) began showing up how much they were making & how much everyone else was not.

I'm sure they still have some of the more positive image among giant companies. Still doesn't change the fact they're a monolith. One that does very, very, VERY little in relation to how much they take in.

Just look at the Steam Messenger. It's worse than Instant Messengers from the early 90's. But ohhhh, look! They just added Emoticons! And Trading Cards! And more Team Fortress 2 Hats that generate them millions. Which is fine by itself, but not fine when they suffer from the same problems they've had in the beginning (like horrible customer support & draconian refund policies). If they fixed it themselves, that would be fine. But they don't even announce they're trying until they see those profits dipping, lawsuits coming at them, or consumers enraged as a mob.

Finally, your anecdote is absolutely ridiculous. YOU don't have problems loading up Steam? Does that somehow mean thousands of others don't? No. It means absolutely nothing other than YOU think it doesn't load slow. And that's all in the context of your system, what you believe is fast (merely an opinion), etc. I've had many computers - all of them high end. Now, one of the fastest you can buy. Steam is still a PITA every time it boots up. Plus you ignored all my other points about how crappy Steam is. But it's less crappy than everything else. Valve is less evil, less bad for gaming, than companies like EA. At least, they used to be better. The hate on EA has seemed to have softened up around the same time the hate for Valve has risen.

 

Steam isn't bad. That's why it's successful.
It's just disappointing that a company that makes billions every year doesn't return any real amount of that money to the community, to its products, to its services, or even to what it originally was about (game development.)

Instead, they just keep it all in their personal banks, or spend it on pet projects that the employees (who apparently live in a bubble) think is a good idea. Like the "WTF?" idea of the Steam Box. (As if no one could see that failure coming.) Gabe alone, in 2012, was worth 1.5 billion. Even if he tried to give away his money at every opportunity, he couldn't do it fast enough. Yet we don't even see any real improvements to Steam. Not until consumers force Valve into doing what was obviously right from the beginning.

It's hard to convince people though. Their emotional attachment to Valve/Steam often transcends hard evidence, obvious greed, or even outright scams. If a human doesn't have something bad happen to themselves, it is difficult to convince them something is bad for others. (There is a serious issue with empathy in society today.) It usually takes a majority of users to experience some kind of dysfunction in their own lives to convince everyone that maybe there really is a problem. Otherwise, a minority of users who suffer dysfunction are ignored or minimized. (Many of these things have happened before, in less potent form. It's just that not enough people cared enough to make a fuss about it.)

It wouldn't be a big issue, except that they used to have a monopoly on PC gaming that is only recently beginning to lose its grip as competition arises & consumers wake up. (It used to be "Steam or Die" for indies. Now it's just "Die", like it's always been.)

Anyway, time for me to unwatch this thread. This is too much of a derail.

 

I mean, you're not wrong about a lot of the valid criticism about Steam, but you are the one who made this a big deal with several long and detailed posts. No need to be so standoffish so quickly, by far not everyone is some fanatic Steam lover or something. I mean, I don't know where you usually post, but uh, chill maybe?

 

It's just one reply to someone, in the hopes they'll become more informed. Not a big deal.

Well, like I said...this isn't the right thread. I don't want to derail. One reply to each of you is enough.

Heh, that's funny. A few years ago, everyone pretty much was.
And today in the gamedev environment? There's a lot of highly emotional, highly defensive Steam fanatics.
Just try to go over to /r/gamedev & point out that maybe Steam isn't always the best form of monetization for a company to profit. See what happens.

What are you talking about? I'm entirely "chill".
Perhaps you would be wise to not assume that the depth of someone's posts is not indicative of their emotional state.

Most of my posts have a lot of thought in them. That's true of everything I do.
Most of my posts have a lot of detail in them. I don't see any point in posting if what I'm saying is useless/meaningless/vague, a.k.a. "White Noise Content".
Most of my posts are long too. That is because there's a lot of information in them.

And no, this isn't a big deal. I understand that on the internet, my "normal" is some people's "articles". That's just because I type 150wpm & don't stop typing from start to finish. Almost all of my posts are a single line of thought, later edited to add/remove a sentence or two for clarity. Of course, if I have to add hyperlinks I do a quick google or goto my bookmarks to grab some links. That can take a few minutes. Overall, no more time consumed than the average forum user. Just more content.

edit: Doesn't matter how trivial subject seems. I read & think a lot, so if something interests me enough to post, then it's something I am at least somewhat contemplative about. I don't do "white noise".

 

@CarterG81

Again, I'm not even unappreciative of your info or effort. It just seems very misdirected. I'm not /r/gamedev. I'm just someone who said "I like some of the features that Steam has and Battle.net does not". It simply comes across as "unchill" when someone makes a very simple statement and gets a very long, detailed response. You're shooting over the goal by quite a long mile. I'm not asking you to stop thinking what you think or post "white noise", this is just the equivalent of telling someone you like the color blue and they respond by giving a long history about the color blue and adding citiations for controversies it was involved in.

You should make a new thread about this subject. That would solve both the derail issue and give you the opportunity to get your detailed thoughts out easily.

 

While I understand your vision, the first thing I remembered is movie making.

There was a movie called "League of Extraordinary gentlemen" (and that wasn't a very good movie), and it had a fight scene between two cg characters. The scene runs for a few minutes (2..5 minutes), and it took half a year to create.

That's the problem with virtual worlds and their practical application.

There's ridiculous amount of work required to create this kind of experience you're described, and it'll cost more than GTA5 for just one lesson.

In my opinion the kind of vitual experience you describe would require couple of significant improvements in game development technologies, a full-blown AI capable of understanding humans and couple of super-computers to power that thing. The purpose of AI would be to do the research and build the world.
With current technologies it'll be probably cheaper to just build 1865 version of Gettysburg in real life.

---------

Money, unfortunately, is very important, otherwise making this kind of lesson wouldn't be a problem - just throw few billions at it, you'll have enough actors, voice talents, actual scientist/historians overseeing the thing and making sure it is accurate, and best brains in software industry optimizing it. Heck, assuming that infinite money cheat somehow doesn't break economy (it should), it would be possible to just acquire major chip manufacturers, and speed up rate of technological improvement.