by David Nuttle

Created on: August 02, 2008   Last Updated: August 05, 2008

During the Vietnam War, the U.S. Army discovered that initial training/educational programs failed to adequately prepare troops for the complex combat environment in Vietnam. After millions of dollars of research, and testing of many instruction methods, the Army developed a series of "gaming programs" that required soldiers in training to engage in detailed problem solving for conditions, situations, and combat conditions they would probably encounter in Vietnam. With the aid of computers, similar gaming programs could be created for K to 12 level instruction in the classroom. Each of the games would simulate real life situations, and require age appropriate solutions using math, words, problem solving, and other skills to find answers needed to win any one game. With the addition of competition and rewards for students, such gaming methods could create a new generation of eductional opportunities for developing nations where students have access to computers. There are a number of qualified individuals and computer gaming companies that could be used to help create the gaming programs suggested. (For the developing nations, where students do not typically have access to computers, I am suggesting that there are other educational needs and opportunities as explained below.)

If we hope to solve many of the world's problems, we must now begin to educate the 2.9 billion people, worldwide, who generally have little or no access to classrooms or computers. For the most part, these are the same 2.9 billion people who lack potable water, sanitation, and/or electricity, while living on less than US$2 per day (assuming they can find work). Without electricity, telephones, computers or classrooms, we must find another way to educate these populations so they can begin the urgently needed process of self-help. In the event we long fail to help provide for their education, we must expect that their anger, pain, and frustration will provide "seedbeds" for terrorism for many more years to come.

To provide education for populations that are impoverished, often isolated, and without services, we must use distance education means via Radio Schools with quality programming in all subjects needed. Such Radio Schools have long been used in Australia to educate children living on remote ranches far from any regular school. Radio Puno, in Puno, Peru, was used in the mid-1960s to teach self-help and development skills for remote Quechua Indian populations then being recruited by communist

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