The Shrine

I'm curious if this is actually true

http://www.gamespot.com/news/6146447.html

I've always said that I play games to exercise my mind in place of studying and watching TV, but this may actually lend some psychological evidence to it.

I am pretty sure playing games is at least marginally "better for you" than watching TV, at least as far as developing thinking abilities goes. It's still an interactive exercise.

Studying I don't know if I agree with. Games are sort of this hybrid between passive and active learning - some information in some games must be actively sought out and learned (which is usually good and longer-lasting than passively learned information), while some of it is displayed regardless of player interaction and is passively absorbed. Studying, on the other hand, is purely an "active learning" trait, as far as I can imagine at least. Dialogue can be passively absorbed, and most people's brains will automatically read small amounts of text that a person sees, but with any quantity of text which would constitute "studying", the text is not going to read itself. The person has to make an active attempt to try to learn the information.

I do think games are ridiculously effective at making information fun to learn, and if a game were set up so as to present the infomation in both an entertaining and an active-learning way, it may be one of the most effective teaching aids out there for the purpose of learning the information in question. I don't think games primarily produced to entertain are going to do much for real-world information, though.

Even "historical" movies usually take anywhere from slight to massive liberties with their source material. Anyone who thought he/she knew about the historical Mozart's life after seeing Amadeus should disabuse him/herself of the notion, for instance...

Studying, as it is right now in university, is more memorizing than anything. I have gotten through the vast majority of my university courses without actually knowing the subject. The difference is that with studying, you don't actually have to learn to get a good mark (or "win"), you simply have to figure out how it works and memorize some stuff for a short period of time.

How is that any different from games?

Zeus wrote:Studying, as it is right now in university, is more memorizing than anything. I have gotten through the vast majority of my university courses without actually knowing the subject. The difference is that with studying, you don't actually have to learn to get a good mark (or "win"), you simply have to figure out how it works and memorize some stuff for a short period of time.

Then you took easy classes. I took almost nothing but Math, Computer Science and Physics. If you just tried to "memorize" stuff without understanding it, you would fail.

I probably shouldn't be getting involved in this, but Kup, can you leave the intellectual judgement out of the conversation? I often feel like I detect this judgement from you if someone talks about not taking learning seriously (as well as in certain other areas).

We know you're bright. *I* know you're bright - I consider myself a pretty adept programmer by now, and usually am pretty well-regarded as such by friends and co-workers, but I know that you know far more than I do about a great number of things in the area. You don't go to grad school for computer science without a certain amount of intelligence, and I'm guessing you're probably considered a highly adept graduate student where computer science is considered.

That being said, if Zeus took easy classes, that was his business, and you have no call to down-talk him for his schedule choices. Did he learn less than you did in college (at least, regarding classes and study)? I have no idea, though I know I certainly didn't learn as much as you did. However, if he didn't learn as much as you, does that mean that he "should" have challenged himself more or that he wasted his time there? Not necessarily at all. There are a lot of reasons to go to college, and many people who don't kill themselves studying have profound and meaningful - or wonderful and fun - or sobering and life-changing - or any one of a thousand other adjective combinations - life experiences which almost certainly have enriched their lives. A number of people waste their time in college, too, but simply not taking strenuous classes is not a qualifier for that, in my opinion.

If your intent was solely to point out that studying needs to be active learning and that "cramming" really isn't the best example of such (though it is still a kind of "active learning"), then I apologize for scolding you. I just think "book snobbery" is a very damaging thing to inflict on people.

I'm not trying to judge you, but I do feel a need to stand up for a point of view that says book-learning isn't the only important thing in life.

Zeus said "university classes" not "the classes I took in university." His statement applied to all classes in a university, which is something I know from first and second-hand experience to be untrue.

Everything else is, I think, you reading too much into my reply.

Kupek wrote:

Zeus wrote:Studying, as it is right now in university, is more memorizing than anything. I have gotten through the vast majority of my university courses without actually knowing the subject. The difference is that with studying, you don't actually have to learn to get a good mark (or "win"), you simply have to figure out how it works and memorize some stuff for a short period of time.

Then you took easy classes. I took almost nothing but Math, Computer Science and Physics. If you just tried to "memorize" stuff without understanding it, you would fail.

Even when I was studying for my CA (CPA equivalent) exam up here, which is reknown for being a very difficult exam, it was all drudge and memorization after a while. Every test in every subject I've ever taken (I was in Math my first year at uni) is all about figuring out what they want and giving it to them. It's a game, plain and simple. You rarely have to actually try to figure things out.

Kupek wrote:Zeus said "university classes" not "the classes I took in university." His statement applied to all classes in a university, which is something I know from first and second-hand experience to be untrue.

Everything else is, I think, you reading too much into my reply.

Zeus wrote:Studying, as it is right now in university, is more memorizing than anything. I have gotten through the vast majority of my university courses without actually knowing the subject. The difference is that with studying, you don't actually have to learn to get a good mark (or "win"), you simply have to figure out how it works and memorize some stuff for a short period of time.

I'm not seeing it here, Kup. "My university classes" usually means "the classes that I took in university"... He did generalize that cramming is an effective form of studying in all cases, which I'd agree is just not true in a lot of more advanced areas...

Anyway, this isn't really all that important, so maybe we ought to just drop it.