By Larry Marsh, Kansas City Star Midwest Voices columnist

The U.S. Department of Education is looking to spend $650 million. The money is to go to innovative school districts and nonprofit organizations that can come up with new ideas to enhance our educational system. Now is the time to think in bigger, bolder terms.

Economics is all about motivation and incentives. Marxism failed because it didn't recognize the importance of incentives. Business is all about motivating the customer to buy a product or service. What is really needed in education is insight into what motivates today's students and how to direct all that energy toward education.

In teaching introductory statistics to undergraduate students at Notre Dame I used a homework system called "Adventures in Statistics." This electronic interactive homework system challenged students and tapped into their desire to be a winner.

In the Adventures game students can select a tutorial to learn how to play or try example games. Students are confronted with questions and sample data to work out the answers with pencil, paper and a hand calculator. Two students working next to one another on adjacent computers face slightly different questions and the random number
generator gives them different samples.

In certification mode if a student fails to answer correctly with at least two decimal places of accuracy, a new sample is drawn for the student to try again. Students must answer all questions correctly before they can get certified for that homework.

Adventures provides instant feedback and does not permit incomplete or sloppy homework. Homeworks that are not perfect don't get any credit. Students have to keep trying with reworded questions and new data samples until they get it right. Everyone's ultimately a winner. It's just that some are winners a lot sooner than others.

Before each class the teacher can monitor how much time each student is taking in solving each problem. Teachers can then adjust their lectures to address areas of general weakness, but also identify an individual student who is having difficulty with a particular concept to help after class.

From "Dancing with the Stars" to "American Idol" and all those game shows, it's all about being a winner. American children today are being bombarded with the message: "You've got to be a winner." No surprise that our kids spend endless hours playing video games.

The Japanese came up with the Sudoku puzzles and have an ongoing Internet competition coming up with more and more complicated games. Lots of people are already addicted to Sudoku just as some are to crossword puzzles.

We need to think in terms of "Adventures in Statistics", "Adventures in Mathematics", "Adventures in English Literature", "Adventures in Learning Spanish", etc.

The million dollar prize for the competition to enhance Netflix's movie recommendation system drew entries from 51,000 contestants from 186 countries. Surely a contest to create educational video games would also draw a large number of contestants, especially if the winners were allowed to earn royalties, which was not the case in the Netflix competition.

A lot of adults don't like this idea. After all the pain and effort they went through to pass math class, it doesn't seem fair that their children might actually have fun learning math. It's like those cereals that are good for you. They're not supposed to taste good. Somehow tasting good while being nutritious is cheating.

It is unfortunate that just being virtuous is not a sufficiently strong motivating force. If it was then the mantra "from those according to their abilities to those according to their needs" may have worked.

Instead we must face the reality of what drives student motivation and energy. Yes, we need to invest heavily into exciting video games that both "taste good" and provide lots of educational "nutrition" at the same time.

Once schools start purchasing such educational video game homework systems, software companies will bombard them with competing offerings just as they do with textbooks. With the right monetary incentives our private, free enterprise system will kick into full gear, and we will begin to see some very inventive and very exciting educational video games.

In our educational system, as in our economic system, if we get the incentives right, we will get the outcomes we want.

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Also see:

Google Books changes everything in student teacher education

New math can succeed with right attitude and priorities

H-1B visas, highly skilled immigrants, knowledge economy

Flynn Effect, IQ scores and SAT scores: Are our children smarter than we are?

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