Gaming in Education

Posted on: 8/20/2010

Gaming in Education

For decades, educators have been scrambling to find better ways to prepare students for the real world. Social video games are a recent and developing solution as described in a recent article in Mashable.com, a prominent news site about Internet developments. Some call them immersive environments that simulate real-world problems. Today, technologically eager schools are replacing textbook learning with social video games. Many have found they have improved learning outcomes in the process. 

Real-life problems such as building a Web site, requires individuals to orchestrate the expertise of communications, business, and economics, in addition to computer science. At the high tech Quest2Learn school in New York City, small groups of 6th graders marshall a range of social technologies, from video games to social networking, to solve hypothetical problems.

For example, 6th graders learn geography from Google Earth, collaborate through an internal social networking platform, and present ideas through a podcast. Administrators hope that wrestling with the question of “How can a system function within a larger system?” will bolster critical thinking skills and enhance motivation. 

The Federation of American Scientists has developed a first-person shooter-inspired cellular biology curriculum. Gamers explore the fully-interactive 3D world of an ill patient and assist the immune system in fighting back a bacterial infection. Dr. Melanie Ann Stegman has been evaluating the educational impacts of the game and is optimistic about her preliminary findings. “The amount of detail about proteins, chemical signals and gene regulation that these 15-year-olds were devouring was amazing. I felt like I was having a discussion with scientist colleagues.”

More importantly, the video game excites students about science. Motivating more youngsters to adopt a science-related career track has become a major education initiative of the Obama administration. For Stegman, the appeal of the video game is intuitive: The actual phenomona of science are fascinating, unlike their 2D textbook drawings.

“Explaining how proteins interact takes lots of new words and new vocabulary that can put you to sleep even when you’re a 5th year graduate student, but watching two proteins interact and bump into each other and using them in a video game is fun and exciting.”

Experts say science is especially well suited for gaming because the subject stems from curiosity, inquiry, and investigation - fundamental qualities also shared by successful computer games.

"[Games are] kind of a model for what the scientific method is," says Ken Eklund, a freelance game designer in San Jose, Calif.

"The thing that's happening more and more is that teachers are looking at their students and realizing that games are just a great way to communicate with them," he adds. "It's really a part of student culture."

Eklund has created a series of online games that fuse scientific inquiry with a mystery storyline on his Web site ScienceMystery.com. He says his main goal in devising the series of educational games was to "bring in people who weren't necessarily in love with science - who might love science if they were interested in it in the right way."

So far, the results have been largely positive.
 
"I've had teachers tell me,” says Eklund, “that after they introduced the game to their students, the classroom went completely silent because all of the kids were just reading."

"You just don't get that kind of engagement and involvement with the story" with a textbook, he says.

Eklund’s observations are supported by education and gaming research. 

At the Center for Technology in Teaching and Learning, based at Rice University in Houston, researchers have developed a number of online games, or missions, called Medical Mysteries. The games, designed for middle school science students, aim to present information about infectious diseases in an engaging way. 

In addition to talks with panels of teachers and scientists before the games are created, researchers at the university also conduct tests on students, who play the games to find out how much of the information they retain. 

"In fact, a week later, [students] still remember a majority of the content," says Leslie Miller, the principal investigator for Medical Mysteries and a senior research scholar for Rice University. 

"I think teachers are realizing that our students are much different than we were, and they learn in different ways than we did," she says, "and games are certainly an example of that."

According to a recent paper by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), games, when developed correctly and used appropriately, can engage players in learning that is specifically applicable to school curriculum—and teachers can leverage the learning in these games without disrupting the worlds of either "play" or school.

"Moving Learning Games Forward: Obstacles, Opportunities, and Openness," by Eric Klopfer, Scot Osterweil, and Katie Salen of the Education Arcade, an MIT research division that explores games that promote learning through play, explains why educational games have seen an increase in popularity: mainly owing to the advances in consumer games.

"Consumer games are also changing the perception of the nature of video games, making them more accepted in a greater diversity of places. For example, gaming is becoming part of … the activities in senior centers, libraries, museums," and the workplace, says the report. "They are also providing cheaper and easier ways to reach everyone, making open access to games a reality."

Thanks to advances in technology, cheaper prices, and a growing market for video games, children and young adults are playing video games more than ever.

A report from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, "Game Changer: Investing in digital play to advance children’s learning and health," claims that on an average day, children as young as eight spend as many hours engaged in media activity as they spend in school. Seventy-five percent of American children play computer and video games, it says.

The report, said Michael Levine, executive director of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, aims to help answer the question: "Can digital games, especially well-designed education games, help reshape our nation’s approach to learning and growing?"

The center, which supports research, innovation, and investment in digital media technologies to advance children's learning, interviewed experts in learning, health, and civic participation games–as well as scholarly skeptics, says Levine – who are directly involved in research, design, and policy development in the field of gaming.

The report analyzed issues raised by the interviewees through a review of current literature and news sources.

"We conclude that current approaches to solving key education and child-health challenges insufficiently leverage the ubiquitous digital media that currently pervade children’s lives," said Levine. "[We] believe that the demonstrated potential of digital media wisely guided by caring adults could become a ‘game changer’ in advancing children’s prospects in the decade ahead."

The report says that children can learn content and 21st-century skills, create media, and think of systems as a whole through successful digital games.

Higher education is incorporating gaming too. An extreme example was described in an article on the Fast Company blog. "Welcome to Video Game University," describes a real life Video Game University. This institution was created because of one company's perception of "the talent shortage that now grips the whole industry."
 
Some statistics will reveal a little bit about the economics and perceived value of this university:

•    20,000 prospective students requested applications
•    800 applied
•    60 were accepted

Since games are never produced by one person, the entire learning structure is based on teams, another example of digital media teaching 21st Century skills.

Sources: Mashable, EDUCAUSE, Fast Company, Education Week, eSchoolNews.com

Click here to view comments and rate this article