Would you give this 13 year-old entrepreneur 100k? He’s developed a chemistry card game where you control an army of elements, compounds, and nuclear reactions to create, combat and conquer.

definitely reinforces what Fraser says is the importance for an educational shift from learning to remember to learning to use and understand.

[thanks, Michael]

Tomorrow, 8 undergraduate teams from four Chicago area colleges will be competing for fame and fortune in an entrepreneurial quest in downtown Chicago. The teams will follow clues to various organizations, including Motorola, and the Chicago Chamber of Commerce, where the students will complete tasks a la The Apprentice. By the end of the day, the students will have completed an elevator pitch, a rapid prototyping activity, a media interview, and a written opportunity assessment report. Video clips and photographs will be posted in real time on this website and youtube.

I think Fraser is dead on about the changing role of education, as a result of technology, from learning to remember to learning to understand. What percentage of all the details of your middle and high-school history or science or math classes do you remember? 2-3% maybe? I day dreamed through most of school, and believe I’m not the only person out there to do so, and much of my best learning was achieved via independent studies.

The future of education is experiential learning, and George Lucas is doing some really innovative things in this space. Different people learn differently, but I would wager a hypothesis that teaching is generally more effective via interactivity and engagement vs. passive listening. Teachers who have charisma and truly engage students are so rare.

It has been many years since I’ve played Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego, and maybe I should go find and play it so I’m better informed, but I think there’s a lot of potential for exponential improvement of the Carmen concept.

Imagine a website, in the vein of Second Life or The Sims, where students are avatars and have to travel around the world to discover clews and achieve goals. The game would not only incorporate Google maps and National Geographic videos (as I’ve already mentioned is happening in Google Earth), but also 3D simulated spaces, where students can meet and interact with historically significant characters and students from different places and even time. There could be a time machine, for example, where you scroll along a time line and the civilizations of the earth change, depending on where you locate the cursor on the time line , so you can explore the Mayan cities, or the pyramids in Egypt, or the great civilization of China, and learn about the technological and social advancements of the human race. Time and place can be manipulated, but does exist, so your avatar has to travel to the airport, board and travel on an airplane, and find taxis to move around foreign cities, which heightens the realism of the experience. Thoughts?

Stanford has launched a Wiki, which is viewable by the public, but only editable by students.

UC Berkeley has also just announced a partnership with Google Video to offer lectures free-of-charge to the public.

Google Earth featured content, which launched last week, allows you to explore localities in a very compelling way. If you zoom in on the Great Pyramid of Egypt, for example, a screen pops up with information from Discovery Networks. There are also Turn Here videos, an Emeryville-based startup that plans to produce 25,000 short videos this year about neighborhoods and local attractions, so you can check out restaurants and other places before visiting. This is a great new platform for local businesses to relatively inexpensively advertise, and also an interesting educational tool.

The featured content in Google Earth has interesting potential implications for Google search results of the future. For example, if you search for “New York,” the search results could be segmented in such a way that you can easily explore the City via Google Earth, watch relevant videos, listen to local music, as well as discover traditional information-based and keyword relevant websites.

The University of North Carolina at Greensboro is offering a microeconomics course this fall through its iCampus, which will be taught via an online video game!

The principles of microeconomics are taught by “following an alien species that must learn how to survive after crash-landing on a futuristic, post-apocalyptic earth.” This is an awesome glimpse into the future of interactive learning.

[thanks, Mark Wallace!]