[IKE]

The current public education system reminds me quite a bit of an educational assembly line. The rate of the line in general is matched in order to maximize the time to educate vs. quality of education curve. For many the work is too slow. For many a comfortable pace, and for some likely a bit too quick. There is little ability to get ahead.

What if the education system was more like a video game? The specific type of video game would be the types of games that are essentially a series of challenges/problems/puzzles that challenge the user. The user has the ability to pass the problem usually with a variety of ratings. Guitar hero has 1-5 stars. Angry Birds is 1-3... In general the general levels might equate to "Grade Levels", and the stars = letter grades on the different problems.

Could this work? Would it only work for certain subjects? Personally I could see a system like this work pretty well for subjects like Math.

When I was in the 4th grade, we had "Electronic Book-shelf" which was essentially a reading competition that used tests on books as the competitive element, and the number of completed tests as teh metric by which prizes were given out. I was a slow reader and worked really hard to get to 25 books, where as most of the good students hit around 40-60, and a few exceptional readers made it between 125-150. This was good for getting students to read a lot of books, but you would get in trouble for sharing information about the tests and thus it discouraged general discussion about the very same books.

I would be curious as to what others think on this topic.