"By breaking up topics into age-appropriate subjects
as schools do, learning is divorced from real life,
and therefore limited."
-Sara McGrath

Humans have this drive to "organize" things, including knowledge. While that may be good for storing information (such as the Dewey Decimal system in the library) it sucks for learning. How many kids fail to learn math -- or learn to HATE it -- because they fail to grasp how it is useful to them? Rather than teaching "math" or "science" or "art" or "english" all as seperate things, kids should learn how these things already exist inside things they WANT to learn.

I've often said that making a video game is an example of a complete learning experience. Sure, as a game designer I'm biased, but hear me out. Others have shown how playing video games provides more learning than most realize, but I think making games involves even more.

Video games have to be programmed. Programming involves reading and writing - albeit on a screen and keyboard rather than the traditional paper and pencil. But look at all the companies out there strving to become "paperless". Making any game worth playing involves math. Very quickly, the programmer learns that you need to manipulate variables -- right away algebra comes into play. Most games are visual, and whether they are 2D or 3D, they use geometry. The images are projected on a screen using red, green and blue light. Not only does this require understanding light wavelengths (why does mixing red and green paint make brown, but mixing red and green light make bright yellow?) but writing the code for yellow (FFFF00) leads into understanding hexadecimal numbers - sort of like how true and false leads into binary numbers. Games have sound, and there is a lot of science involved with that.

What about making a character jump? It seems so common and easy, but making a character jump requires them to learn about acceleration, gravity, air friction, time, computer cycles, more geometry, and collision detection. I taught myself trigonometry because I wanted an object to circle around another object.

For budding artists, there's no end of opportunities in video games, from character design, animation, textures, logos and backgrounds. Many of the best-selling games have lots of good writing, too - equal to Hollywood hits.

Where did chess, checkers, go and other pre-video games come from? History and geography! Are games too violent? Do people spend too much time and money on them? Sounds like social studies to me. Should certain games be censored or banned? What laws exist concerning how games can be sold to minors? You've got a lesson on politics, government and legislation! Want to market your game? Business, economics, and entrepeneurism all come into play.

For those of you who do the traditional "school at home" method, try helping them find academic subjects inside the activities they already enjoy (such as comic books, video games, pokemon cards and so on) rather that forcing artificial lessons on them. Sure, a kid in the 21st century needs to know how to read and do math, but you'll soon see that there's no need to force such things on learners, as they already exists inside the activities of daily life!