I just found this article on Kotaku which lightly discusses the use of the Nintendo DS as an education tool — having the students play Brain Age or write stories about their Nintendogs and stupid shit like that.

Don’t get me wrong — I think using a Nintendo DS (or other handheld technology) as an educative device is fucking great. I think trying to hack a curriculum around existing games is fucking stupid.

The technology should incorporate into the existing curriculum. I remember learning multiplication tables — every day we’d have a 10-question quiz where you had 30 seconds to complete a bunch of simple multiplication problems. The teacher would then go through them and mark each sheet and record all the results.

It’s a really dead-simple use-case: write an NDS application which allows the student to authenticate and take the test on the hardware during the test period instead of taking notes on a piece of paper. This has a shitload of advantages over the low-tech version –

• Math questions can be randomly generated based on a set of rules to prevent cheating (everyone has a slightly different set of questions).
• Tests can be immediately and automatically scored to save time and improve turnaround and accuracy.
• Questions, answers and results can be stored in a centralized database for statistics and analysis on a large-scale.

Maybe it’s just because I’m a programmer and something like this would be dead-easy to do (but incredibly costly for an educational institution), but my god. Seriously.