From: "Kotick, Bobby" ..tj To: " " <[email protected]> Subject: Re: Date: Fri, 03 May 2013 07:30:02 +0000 X prize is a good idea but key is real world rewards. Learn to read: earn cell phone minutes, iphone credits, virtual items in games. From: Jeffrey Epstein [[email protected]] Sent: Thursday, May 02, 2013 03:03 PM To: Kotick, Bobby Subject: critique ??? > Im meeting with Joel Klein on monday, any edutainment games that you like already out there Play "Medal of Honor" or "Call of Duty" and you will learn war history. Here's what I've been thinking. Video games are already great at teaching. If they don't assess your level and put an appropriate challenge right in front of you, the game fails. Challenge too hard and you get frustrated and quit playing. Too easy and the game is no fun. That is exactly what a good teacher or tutor would do. Fundamentally the thing that works is a 1 to 1 student teacher ratio. Even if you have a shitty teacher or tutor, you will learn a lot because that person gets to know you and challenges you at your level. That doesn't scale, but computers do. So we have to use computers to replace teachers - or at least augment them. Today's video games don't try to teach stuff we care about. Well, except for shooting bad guys. The best scheme I've come up with so far is to use X-Prize or something like it to co-opt the existing video game industry. Give out a prize to the game that comes up with the best way of teaching kids anything from a normal school curriculum. Let them pick whatever they want to teach, any grade level, and just incorporate it into their product. That's the way to get the most brains and the most users for the least money. You want to skip convincing educators and parents about this stuff and just go straight for the kids. Imagine you are looking at a door in a video game. It has some squiggly symbols printed on it. Little munchkins walk up to that door and say "Konichiwa." The door