The scientist behind Google Glass wearable technology has criticised the use of restrictive and "fear-based" testing regimes in education, describing a lack of innovation in the system as a crisis.

Sebastian Thrun, who led the Google research lab responsible for self-driving cars and Google Glass, made the comments ahead of a meeting with education minister Michael Gove.

Thrun, who is one of the world's most influential computer scientists, is exploring online collaborative education – known as Moocs, which stands for "massively open online courses". He has developed a project called Udacity, which is working with two colleges and workplace learning schemes.

"The education system is based on a framework from the 17th and 18th century that says we should play for the first five years of life, then learn, then work, then rest and then die. I believe we should be able to do all those things all the time," said Thrun. "The UK has been extremely active in rethinking education, and has been through a crisis like the US and Germany, but they mustn't stop innovating."

Thrun believes the term-based structure of education is limiting, and that users could be better motivated by more creative formats. He also says education is too focused on certain age groups, failing to reflect the needs of adults who have to change career or shift industries.

"I don't understand why I get a cable company for life, but not my education company," he said.

"The biggest principle is to go at your own speed – eliminate this very strong synchronicity. It is the main obstacle for technology, to overcome the belief that a teacher and group of students have to go through the same thing at the same time," he said. Education should learn from the positive side of gaming – reward, accomplishment and fun. An online environment would be able to use data about students' performance to more scientifically assess their progress, and how successfully a certain course is engaging students."

He also believes that different specialists should provide different functions in an online learning environment, so some could produce interactive learning tools, others present lessons, others assess work and others write the textbooks.

"The teachers I know are extremely dedicated people," he said. He added: "The way the system administers tests is fundamentally wrong. [It is done] more in a summative way, and we ask the question 'has the student done the correct thing' and we do it more in a fear inspiring way, forcing a student to submit to a date irrespective of how long it takes them to learn. It should be more like a feedback mechanism to help them understand how much progress they have made, with pervasive challenges repeated privately and as often as they want until they feel confident."

Thrun is a vice president and fellow at Google where he founded its secretive Google X experimentation lab. A specialist in artificial intelligence and robotics, Google X was set up to explore "moonshot" projects – ambitious, and possibly sometimes unattainable technological experiments which have so far led to 300,000 hours of cars driving themselves in California, and several thousand internet-connected glasses being tested. Thrun has said that after a friend died in a road traffic accident at 18, he decided to dedicate his life to saving one million people by developing self-driving cars. The US had the world's fourth highest number of road accident deaths in 2010, according to the World Health Organisation's global road safety report this year, accounting for 33,808 of the 1.24m global deaths.

Thrun, who is also a research professor at Stanford University in the US, said car accidents are a big killer of young people, and largely caused by human error.

In 2005 as part of a team from Stanford and Volkswagen, he joined a driverless car competition by Darpa, the US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency which develops new technology for the US military. The team produced "Stanley", a driverless car which successfully navigated 175 miles through California's Mojave desert in 10 hours with no human intervention to win a $2m prize.

Self driving cars, accompanied by human engineers, are a regular sight on Californian roads after state authorities introduced an autonomous vehicles bill in 2012. Nevada and Florida had already passed similar legislation, but all three states require a human assistant to be in the vehicle. The engineers claim self-driving cars will make more space on roads by being able to drive on narrower lanes using robotic judgment to drive closer together, cutting down the average 52 minutes that US commuters spend in traffic jams every day and saving 2.4bn gallons of fuel.

Thrun has said that future generations will think it ridiculous that humans ever drove cars. "Humans always find uncertainty unnerving, but in the context of Silicon Valley people embrace change. I like diving into something with no clue how to get out of it."

• This article was amended on 6 September 2013 to correct a quote from Sebastian Thrun.