Bushnell: Cloud computing will improve education

Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari, strongly believes that cloud gaming technology will massively improve education.
"I've been working on an education project for about 10 years now," said Bushnell, speaking at the Cloud Gaming Conference USA, "and it turns out that educating children and computers go together."
"If you go into a class of fifth graders - say there's 30 of them - and they all have computers, I guarantee you that 10-15 per cent of these computers do not work. They're virus infected nightmares. Every time you have a company that has 30-40 computers, the system's administration of all those computers is a nightmare."
Bushnell cites the reason for this being that children are naturally curious and will inadvertently break the computers. "Does that mean you're a bad kid? No. It means you're just messing with the system which is what we're genetically programmed to do."
This wouldn't be an issue on the cloud, Bushnell notes. "In cloud gaming you disconnect the system's administration from the computer to the cloud... It's going to be an important step for allowing technology into the classroom."
Bushnell added that he's been testing software for years to improve education. "We've been in hundreds of classroom with 40,000 kids. We are currently teaching subjects 10 times faster. We believe that when we roll this up to full curriculum we'll be able to teach a full career of high school in less than a year. And we think we'll be able to do that by the end of next year."
"That's a lot of time to chase girls and have fun," he joked.
Freeing up leisure time is only a small part of Bushnell's overall goal. He finds the real issue in America to be much graver.
"Our public school is a disaster," he said, adding "It's creating an underclass that will erode the foundation of our society. The kids who happen to have won the lottery and been born to rich parents can survive. The parents make sure the kids are either in private school or something. The kids who have lost the lottery are being put into schools with dysfunctional teachers."
His solution to use software in conjunction with teachers will benefit everyone, stating, "If we can have a kid learn twice as fast we can pay teachers twice as much."
"I believe education is the most important thing that we can do to fix the world."

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/article...rove-education