Tablet applications have the potential to so engage school kids that the time it takes to teach a subject could be cut from four years to six months.
That's what Nolan Bushnell, the "father of modern video gaming", founder of Atari and technology entrepreneur told the audience during his keynote speech at Campus Party Europe, the week-long technology festival at London's O2 Arena.
Bushnell's latest project is BrainRush, an educational tool designed to teach school subjects faster by breaking them into smaller, more engaging chunks through the process of gamification.
"We have software right now that is teaching subjects 10 times faster than classrooms and we think once we're finished we'll be able to do four years of high school in about six months," Bushnell said, arguing that this will allow students to use the time to learn other skills.
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"That's going to leave an awful lot of extra time for you to play games! Or learn engineering stuff, or learn entrepreneurship, or learn how to cook or learn how to do all kinds of things, because you get the academic work out of the way," he said.
Bushnell argued that traditional education is often boring and the Socratic discussions of the classroom are unengaging, for students for all abilities.
However, he believes with the use of what he calls "Education 3.0" this can change, deploying technology such as tablets and software, which, he claims, engage the brain far better than traditional learning methods, in a way that's similar to the way it reacts during challenging video games.
"Now we have Education 3.0. It's software-driven, individual and adaptive," he said. "We're in the middle of the perfect storm. You guys are probably the last generation that is going to be bored at school.
"What's happening very quickly, all over the world, is there is a sea change in the way schools are being operated. This was sort of happening in some schools with the computer lab, but this is really the way it's happening - tablets, tablets, tablets everywhere," he said.
"It's cheap hardware - you can actually buy a tablet for 35 bucks," Bushnell continued, adding: "The brain science is becoming very, very clear - adaptive is very important as is software."
