in discussion Hidden / Games, Professions, and How the Mind Works » Gaming, Training, Thinking 2 (Shaffer)
I must say that my experience with history my junior and senior years of high school in IB classes wasn't this rote, fact memorizing method Shaffer talks about. We learned to look for sources, to compare events and leaders, to look at situations from different perspectives. At the same time, though, even though it wasn't just memorization, there were definite rules to the game of IB History. It seems incredibly difficult to teach someone how to be innovative. Anything you try to teach them will have some rules because every system has rules. Perhaps working WITH simulations, as opposed to memorizing information, which isn't working with anything so much as it is having something imposed on you, can help move a child in the direction of innovation, but it seems like there will still be more rules in a gaming simulation than in the real world.