> But this kind of knowledge acquisition only ever teaches the lowest hanging fruits, it's no substitute for drilling in the basics. Even lifetimes spent passing KSP won't bring you to a point were you could design your own rocket.

Yes. Though it can probably teach you enough that you have enough scaffolding already in your brain that you can get through a textbook without getting lost?

I think the real value of KSP is orthogonal to textbooks. Like it says in that one xkcd strip, it gives you an intuitive understanding of orbital mechanics by letting you interact directly (and with a goal) with orbital trajectories. I think you'd have a hard time getting the same visual intuition about how the ellipse stretches and rotates depending on whether you burn retrograde or radially out from a textbook.

The great value, here, I think, is that you can have a process completely alien to humans and get an intuition of it about as good as what we can get from playing around with a ball. In high school physics, ballistics (and therefore gravity) is taught using a ball being thrown in the air for a reason- most people have this sort of intuition for that process, and find it easier to get from there to the mathematical model.

Before games/simulators like KSP, the only way to get an intuition of orbital mechanics like that would be to simulate it in your head a bunch, arduously.

I think this is a potential great source of value: games/simulator can give you otherwise-very-hard-to-get intuitive knowledge of (models of) subjects. Not a replacement for the maths and the crunch, but would probably make it easier in a revolutionary way.

I wonder if this is already happening? There must be a generation of aerospace engineering students now who have sent rockets to the Mun.

Again, the scaffolding effect. Greatly illustrated by how the civ games teach about history: they teach absolutely nothing, all their models are fantastically wrong and a core element is the counterfactual nature of how a game plays out (culminating in Gandhi's bomb threats). But they give mental scaffolding that is valuable in those topics where you'd otherwise start from an empty slate. When for example you know nothing about west African history and read a text about it for the first time, just having that image of the Mansa Musa avatar in your mind will give you a retention advantage over someone who doesn't have it. It works much like a condensation seed then, a mental bookmark to which new information can be attached before getting lost as essentially noise.

But I wonder if that might also come as a disadvantage in the classroom, where the remaining facts and methods grind has to be enforced: if, for some reason, you felt the need to make pupils knowledgeable in the sequence of popes, that incredibly boring class would naturally be spiced up with anecdotes of dual antipopes, the cadaver synod and so on. Would that last hope of making that class somewhat bearable be lost on someone who already knew those rare fun parts in between all the numbers, e.g. because of playing CK2?

When you are making pupils memorize sequence of popes and are spicing it up with anecdotes taken out of their historical context just to be interesting, imo, the solution is not to have them play game.

The solution is to work on curriculum and textbook some more.

Or not bother memorizing a sequence of popes, which itself is just a bunch of names without the historical context.