No, that’s not somebody cosplaying the World’s Most Interesting Man in a hot tub, that’s Nolan Bushnell, the founder of Atari and Chuck E. Cheese. He’s also the guy who funded the groundwork for Google Maps back in the 1980s, just in case you thought he was strictly for ’70s and ’80s nostalgia types. And apparently, he wants to speed up high school. Like, really speed it up.
Amid the pizza delivering robots and creepy mumbling toy bears, he’s also been working on a cloud computing edugame project for a decade that aims to improve education. And he’s claiming it’s teaching the 40,000 participating students ten times faster, and that if the project scales, it could accelerate high school to just one year.
We’re a little skeptical: Bushnell has made huge claims before, and they’ve never quite panned out. Also, “edutainment” is a blight on the land as any ’80s kid can tell you. On the other hand, the idea of getting the hell out of high school after a single year is immensely appealing to anybody who hated all four years. Meaning, well, everybody who went to high school.