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Old School Cool

I have on more than one occasion made a fool of myself by recommending the long out-of-publication game Pit Droids. I went so far as to ask around, essentially to no avail. 

The story behind Lucas Learning is that George Lucas wasn't a very good student and wanted to create edutainment materials for kids like him. So it turns out he kind of lacks something as an educator too and Pit Droids and Droid Works are out of print, probably because they don't tell you what they are teaching you.

The Fandom description of Pit Droids suggests to me this is the one that teaches Set Theory, something I learned in my college level math classes in high school, though the Fandom description seems to say nothing about what it teaches. And both games may teach Set Theory. I didn't play the games, so I don't recall.

My math challenged oldest son LOVED these games. I encouraged him to play and counted it as math in his homeschool portfolio because while it doesn't cover the mathematical annotation nor state anywhere "This is Set Theory, which is college level math, made accessible to children.", if you complete all the puzzles, you have, in fact, learned important high level math concepts, no number crunching required. 

At some point, I sat my son down ONCE for maybe ten to thirty minutes, told him it's Set Theory and showed him how that's mathematically annotated because the game says not one word about it.

It's old enough that even if you found a copy, you probably couldn't play it on modern hardware. I desperately wish someone would republish it or do a similar game with a brief Read Me section explaining the mathematical annotation and explicitly stating this teaches Set Theory. 

It was an incredible resource but probably most homeschool parents don't have the math background to appreciate it and fill in that small but critical gap. I think if you added that and did it well as a small separate section without cluttering up the game with mathematical annotations, it could become wildly popular as an educational resource. 

I think you could use a few screenshots or short video clips from the game and provide the mathematical annotation and a brief explanation that "This is the set of these droids and when you get to this barrier, only this subset can pass it and this being a subset of that larger group is mathematically annotated this way." Maybe do standard mathematical annotation and also do parentheses with small images of the droids to represent the set and subset.

Not all old school cool educational materials are dead. Some are still available and still just as good or nearly as good as the day they were originally published. 

I'm guessing Lucas has studied Latin because Yoda talks like someone who speaks Latin as his first language and English as his second. Latin is a dead language, so any materials ever published that were any good are still perfectly fine. 

The comic Asterix has little snippets of Latin and is popular with children interested in Latin. Please don't dismiss small snippets of exposure to Latin or Classical Greek because European languages are generally a mix of Latin, Greek and some old local tribal language. 

The Franks gave French its local flavor distinguishing it from Latin, Spanish and Italian. Off the top of my head, I think those local tribal languages fall under the umbrella term Germanic Languages and I can't readily recall which Germanic Language is a root of modern German.

Why are French, Spanish and Italian called Romance languages instead of Germanic? Because they are predominantly based on the Roman language aka Latin with some influence by a local language. Germanic languages have that ratio reversed and are more heavily influenced by local tribal languages with some Latin. 

Latin was the scientific Lingua Franca -- "universal language" -- at one time. Learned men all spoke Latin, so people from various places with myriad native tongues could communicate with each other via Latin long after it was deemed "dead" and this is part of why scientific terms are typically Latin or Greek words.

I took two quarters of Classical Greek, so when I took Environmental Biology, I just translated the scientific terms -- "Oh, that means bony fish." -- and my classmates marveled at how easily I learned complex scientific terms that were breaking their brains.

Knowing even a little Latin or Greek is generally useful for myriad reasons, whether you love language or are interested in science. If you wish to pursue medicine or science, I highly recommend you get some exposure to one or both of these languages. 

Schoolhouse Rock videos were created to promote basic literacy for American school children before the internet became popular. At the time, most American children were glued to their TV for three hours every Saturday morning for Saturday Morning Cartoons.

These are short videos covering things like basics of grammar, math (particularly multiplication) and important details of American history, government and law. They were aired as part of the commercial advertisements.

I bought videotapes of them for my children and usually misremember it as Grammar Rock because my writing-challenged children watched the grammar tape repeatedly as part of their homeschooling curriculum.  They are still available on YouTube and it is evergreen content.

If you are Native American, you may have criticisms of the American history bits, but if you are Native American you probably have criticisms of any and all history written by your conquerors. 

My recollection is that some of the greatest artists of the time were involved in developing these educational shorts, which helps explain the uncommonly high quality that still stands the test of time and is in some cases extremely catchy, which serves as a mnemonic to help you remember important details usually set to music.

I have never watched the lectures by Richard Feynman, a Nobel Prize winning physicist, but people interested in physics sometimes still recommend them and they can be found on YouTube.  I found two playlists:



Some classics never go out of style or only become moderately dated and remain worth consuming years or decades later. "Classic" is a word that means it has stood the test of time and such works are frequently the cornerstone of very rigorous educational programs, such as liberal arts programs based on a Great Books curriculum. 

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