Will Atari Save Education?

GamePro thinks so. Atari Founder Nolan Bushnell managed to make blinking dots on a screen popular. Why not Spanish class?

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His new startup Speed to Learn aims to get children learning quicker and better by integrating video game concepts and metrics into educational plans. He claims that his free online Spanish vocabulary learning system Wordplay.com works five or six times faster than the popular Rosetta Stone software, and that his games feature adaptive challenges to tailor curricula for individual users.

Crazy as it sounds, video games have a long and storied history in education.  Talk to any 20-something and just see if they didn’t play Oregon Trail in elementary school.