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Education...with games!
SilverEternity
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Registered User regular
There was a panel at PAX this year called "Education Through Play" moderated/presented primarily by James Portnow (who I did not know of prior to the panel). The panel was completely full and then there were discussions with a large group of people outside of the panel for at least an hour afterwards. I thought that D & D would be a great place to continue a discussion about education and games.
Do you think games (existing games like Portal, Minecraft, etc. or games developed specifically for the purpose) should be introduced into schools? If so, how do you think games can be incorporated into education in order for kids to become more engaged, become more interested in the STEM subjects, and be better problem solvers/ citizens?
I'm a high school teacher certified in math/physics who has taught Algebra I, Geometry, Algebra II, Pre-Calculus, Physics, and Environmental Science. Currently I work as the coordinator of a credit-recovery program for kids at risk of dropping out and about 90% of my students are regular gamers (i.e. they play everyday or almost everyday for > 1 hr). I often fantasize about the idea of bringing games into the curriculum, but I find the resources to do so severely lacking. I also thought it would be awesome to start a video game club at my school, but have found the support for kids playing games as enrichment is nearly non-existent.
Do you think games (existing games like Portal, Minecraft, etc. or games developed specifically for the purpose) should be introduced into schools? If so, how do you think games can be incorporated into education in order for kids to become more engaged, become more interested in the STEM subjects, and be better problem solvers/ citizens?
I'm a high school teacher certified in math/physics who has taught Algebra I, Geometry, Algebra II, Pre-Calculus, Physics, and Environmental Science. Currently I work as the coordinator of a credit-recovery program for kids at risk of dropping out and about 90% of my students are regular gamers (i.e. they play everyday or almost everyday for > 1 hr). I often fantasize about the idea of bringing games into the curriculum, but I find the resources to do so severely lacking. I also thought it would be awesome to start a video game club at my school, but have found the support for kids playing games as enrichment is nearly non-existent.
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Edit: Ooh, and I was a total hunt-and-peck typist before I got Mario Teaches Typing, too.
I actually think the best place for video games might be literature or film classes, just because games can communicate the "show, don't tell" advice in such a visceral way.
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
When I was two, my family was playing an old TSR board game called Dungeon! which had dice without pips on them but actual numbers. My parents said I could play if I could tell what the results of my rolls were. That was my first step towards a B.A. in math. When I was four, I saw my dad playing Ultima 6 and really wanted to play too. But neither of my parents wanted to sit there and read the text for me. So I learned to do it myself. A family joke is that "telekinesis" was one of the first words I recognized. That is probably not entirely true, but it's funny. I still have a better than usual understanding of geography from playing Railroad Tycoon and Civilization.
I think in terms of modern stuff, Portal for physics (in particular when you get to momentum) is the best example. If you were a clever history teacher, something like Tropico (4 now?) could work fairly well. I think games designed to educate are less likely to also be designed to be fun, so I think going with a gamer's game is probably the best idea.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I don't know if you know this already, but James Portnow helps create 'Extra Credits', which does a weekly show discussing topics like this. Here is there video 'Gamifying Education'.
Proper education involves covering the same material in several different ways. Games are a GREAT way to educate, encourage, and excite, but the stuff you use needs to have "Educate" as a core concept.
I'm no expert, but something like that I would imagine is a bit easier to design and implement than something like a game for children.
I mean, did "Where in the World is Carmen Sandiago?" really teach kids about geography? For me, it certainly didn't. I also don't know any of my friends that really did either.
I think a better question, perhaps for you Skoal Cat, is that is it a matter of going "Mass Effect is popular. Let's make it educational" or do you have to create a whole new thing from the ground up, copying parts of the popular games? I honestly don't know, which is why I'm asking.
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Learning's much faaasteer with Blaaaster Pals!
Oh, there was this great "make your own story book" mac game I forget the name of.
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
Wanted to second Reader Rabbit and Number Munchers. We had an old apple computer when I was a kid and Reader Rabbit was a staple of my early childhood education. My elementary school's computer lab had Number Munchers, and that helped loads with math.
So yeah, education with games (in the vein of Reader Rabbit, etc.,) seem to work pretty well, at least from my experience. However the education games were balanced out with regular classroom style teaching, and the lab time only happened like two or three times a week for an hour, I believe.
I quite enjoyed playing the edutainment games I had when I was younger, and they can be a great supplement. But sometimes there is only so much time in the day, and while getting kids interested is a good step, in the end I just don't see games taking up much of that time.
I've never played Mass Effect, so I can't comment on any intricacies. So consider the following an opinion based on any very popular video game.
Yes, it can be used to teach, but only in the same way that any novel can be used to teach the elements that its made up of. Use Popular Video Game X to generate a discussion of classism, sure. Totally doable. There has probably already been a D&D thread like that within the last year.
Then we get into the differences between learning abstract concepts and learning facts, while also being able to recall them for use and application later. Learning about the Zoot Suit Riots is fine, but learning how to extrapolate information from that for use later on is tricky shit.
Pokemon could have used a battle system rooted in some fundamental physics (F=ma, etc), but would that have taught children that force=massxacceleration? Maybe more than it does now, but my guess would be that most children would understand it as "bigger and/or faster=more damage". Which, while technically true, doesn't give them them a reference point that lets them take that into the real world. Actually, now that I type it out, that could be really interesting.
I think a lot of us played this.
Did anyone learn kinematics from it beyond 45 degrees went the farthest? Probably not, because even though the game was actually rooted in very real world science, teaching their dynamics was never a goal.
In short, video games can be supplemental. But to use a game to teach, which is totally possible, it needs to be designed to do such (and even still, it needs to be supplemental to other approaches to the content). Games are an amazing way to learn.
/opinion
Fucking awesome game which would have really been a great addition to a teaching curriculum had it actually been used beyond "okay kids, computer time!"
Good idea
Bad idea
What about paying an independent developer to mock up a tech demo minus the pretty graphics that does the same thing, that the teacher can run on an old laptop and pipe through a projector onto a screen in front of the class for five minutes?
I think that in most cases, video games as exist in popular entertainment aren't much more useful in education than film or TV shows. There are educational aspects to them, but they are principally about having fun, and most of the educational aspects are incidental. If we're talking about specifically edutainment titles, then sure, some of those are pretty great. Though a lot of them - Carmen Sandiego, as was mentioned - really aren't that useful. Playing Carmen Sandiego for an hour is more fun than staring at a map and memorizing countries for an hour. But at the end of that hour, the latter will probably have taught you a lot more.
If we're going to replace conventional teaching methods with something new and shiny, we need to make sure the new and shiny thing actually teaches the concepts with the same effectiveness. (Note: I am well aware that not all of the things we currently teach children are actually useful, and perhaps staring at a map for an hour isn't really teaching a valuable skill to begin with.)
Mostly, I would like to see video games included in discussions of culture. We've started to recognize film as a viable artistic medium, and increasingly kids are shown movies as a means of illustrating aspects of culture. I think discussing the influence of games would be useful, too.
Our culture needs to realize that games can be instructive, can build reasoning and problem-solving skills, and a host of other things. They can expand language, just like reading books. There are certainly games that are better or worse at this, just like there's a big difference between To Kill a Mockingbird and Captain Underpants. My 3 year old son is learning to read and sound out words because we let him play Mario Party and Angry Birds and the like. And we read books to him, as well, but it was Mario Party that taught him to recognize "Yes" and "No" and "Play" and sound out all the letters therein.
Most children's television programming, on the other hand, is brain poison and should be banned.
I think reading is different than playing games though. At least, as far my experiences are concerned. You read a book, and like it, or the style, or genre, or whatever, and you read through it. And if something about it is interesting, you want to read more about it, or in the same style, or genre or what have you. It kind of makes a feedback loop, where you just keep going with it. Kinda like reading TV Tropes or Wikipedia, except slightly slower.
Remember the Reading Rainbow thread? That was a goddamn tradgedy. Thanks to the Bush Administration, shows teaching kids to enjoy reading on their own took a backseat to shows teaching kits to read.
Gorilla (the first one) was an (optional) high school programming project for me.
The point wasn't to learn physics from playing it, the point was to learn BASIC and have a game to play after you were done.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
THAT was the other show I was thinking of. I, for the life of me, couldn't think of the other awesome show that was on when I was a kid, so I didn't mention it.
I definitely played it at a friends house as a game that neither of us programmed. I wasn't aware it was available only as a "here you program this" kit.
edit: You are also clearly older than I am
The entire biological purpose of gaming and playing is education.
Like, looking at it anthropologically or whatever, the entire reason our brains are wired to want to play, and to want to play games, is because that's how we learn important skills. That's why the things that kids so obsessively and innately want to play are 1) combat, and 2) child-rearing. That's why competition and teamwork are so integral to so many gaming experiences. They are integral to survival. What other point does it serve? This goes more primal than even just our species.
This is also self-evident if you're ever spent time doing something that was both a fun game and educational. You learn it like 10,000% better.
The first question we ought to ask is why we keep wasting time trying to educate kids in ways that aren't games. We've totally lost sight of this and gotten it backwards, acting as if fun and games are the anathema of education, or at best a "needed break" in between education.
But of course then the next question is the more practical one... how can we make games that are really fun and really do a good job educating? I think the possibility is out there, but it is not easy and most educational games are crap. That biology of ours still wants to tell us that the best games are the ones that involve the most basic survival skills, like fighting and killing, so it's not likely that anyone will put a ton of effort into making an awesome math game when they could get rich making an awesome murder/war simulator. As many sci-fi novels have noted, we are probably doing a marvelous job of educating our population to control virtual combat avatars, should the need arise.
I think that part of the success relates to how well the game and education are interwoven. A lot of the educational games I've tried out are ones that employ juxtaposition - you have to do some boring learning stuff, and then you get to do some fun non-educational game, and then you have to do more boring learning. For my oldest son, these fall into two categories: 1) the kinds he can figure out how to exploit easily, so that he can skip to the fun parts without learning much of anything, or 2) the kinds that you can't skip through or that are difficult to do so, which are effectively just more boring work for him and not worth it when he knows there are type 1 games he could play, or even just regular, fun, non-educational games.
Math Blaster is a simple example. Answering the math problems quickly is integral to the experience of the game. It is the game. Hell, I know all kinds of crap about mythology and fables and such from playing King's Quest, and I didn't even realize I was learning about that. Come to think of it, I learned to type because of the KQ games, too, which scored me some nice opportunities in elementary school. I learned CPR from Codename: Iceman... not to mention that they also worked that little minigame into a DRM mechanism, for a trifecta of development genius. Is it a quadfecta because it quickly turns into a dating sim?... nevermind.
Anyway, a lot of developers of some of the most successful gaming software back in the day purposefully worked education seamlessly into the experience, just because they wanted to. I think that's kind of what it takes - the best shops producing the best games are where gaming is at. And if they can work specific educational directives into the gameplay, without making a whole separate thing about it or just tacking it on or anything, and without making the game less fun or less of a game because of it, then they can potentially make some surprisingly powerful educational tools.
So... I 1000% disagree that games have to be designed to teach in order to teach. Games teach, period. "Game" and "learn" are cross-wired in our brains as nearly the same thing. If we're gaming, we're learning, and we'll learn whatever it is that is required to play and enjoy the game.
Edit: P.S.: Starfall. My second son taught himself to read basic words before he was two, and now he's just turned four and can read pretty much anything, much more than my second-grader (who's in the advanced reading group himself). And he can do multiplication and multiple-digit adding and subtracting and stuff, and we've never pushed him on any of it. It was mostly from Starfall. There is a ton of opportunity at very young ages, because at that age a "fun game" can just be anything that moves or that you can click on. The challenge is to keep that education train rolling as they get old enough to appreciate state-of-the-art video game production.
But anyway, I find these two comments to be contradictory.
Not everything, no. Gaming is. My point wasn't "hey, we're learning no matter what, so it's all good." My point was that the process of playing and enjoying a game necessarily fosters learning something. Whether or not games are teaching something is a moot point, they are all teaching something, it's inherent to our enjoyment of them as games. It's a matter of what we want to teach, what we consider valuable, and whether or not that's what the game is teaching.
We get a lot of pleasure from gaming, from solving games, winning games, progressing in games, etc. The pleasure reinforces whatever mental activities got us there. The whole point of gaming from a biological perspective is to create a simulated reinforcement (the otherwise irrational joy of playing a game) for a simulated behavior (play-fighting, dancing, care-giving to a doll, etc.) so that we'll be better at hunting and fighting and mating and raising offspring when we need to do those things for real.
I think the distinction I didn't make clear there is that in the first paragraph, I was referring to specific educational directives that were of arguably more value than the most primal ones that games can tend to reinforce. Games need to be designed to be games. And as such, they inherently can and will teach. "Desinging a game to teach" would, to me, more practically mean "putting some thought into what your game is going to teach, and opting for things you'd find in school curricula where it makes sense to do so." However, even if you don't consider that at all, games can often still inadvertently be highly effective teaching tools.
I didn't notice it at the time, but looking back I realize that the Williamses and others of their generation were purposefully working elements into their games that they considered to be valuable academics. Not because they were designing games to teach; they were designing games to be fun and to sell for profit. But because, perhaps, they inherently understood the relationship between gaming and learning, and thus felt an ethical or experimental impulse to weave certain more civilized and academic content into the game challenge. Or, in some cases, they were simply working in historical and literary content because that was how they envisioned their art, not considering educational value at all, and yet in doing so they imparted a lot of literary and historical teaching that stuck with me hard. And even failing all that, like I said, I sure learned how to type fast, simply because those old adventure games required a lot of typing, sometimes very quickly.
It's a gray area with a blurry line, of course. Somewhere between Gold Rush and Oregon Trail I'd say you've crossed the line into just "designing a game to teach" but IMO that's also about where you start designing games that aren't as fun as they could be.
I was sad when I was reading this threat earlier and I didn't see anyone mention it. It makes me feel like the only one who loved this game.
Storybook Weaver?
Good edutainment needs to make a comeback. Castle of Doctor Brain hasn't been mentioned, and it was also awesome.
I concur with you in many aspects in that I think gaming can be great for kids. About 20 of my kids game together on a regular basis and I know that it helped in building an organic feeling of class-unity. Also, I've seen kids who "hate math" draw whole schematics and calculate scale factors in Minecraft. There is obviously value in game play even if a game is not designed to be "educational" (although I agree that all games inherently teach something).
However, there does need to be a line. I have a kid who regularly plays from 3pm-3am on school days/nights. I think a few hours can be valuable (imho it's much more valuable than watching Jersey Shore), but there is an upper limit to how much time should be spent playing everyday. It's also a skill I think a lot of us have to use as adults, building a balance between gaming for pleasure and other responsibilities.
I think the ideal would be if students were gaming for pleasure (i.e. self-selecting to spend time on a game) and that game was also enriching in an academic way. I use physics applets in my class on a regular basis and it's one of the most awesome things when I see students "playing" with the applet after class in over and their assignment is done. Kids actually love science (i.e. finding out how things work & why they work that way), it's just that we typically teach science as more memorization than process.
edit: somehow, I forgot spacechem. Bad chemistry, but fairly good for teaching program design.
Like, I was kinda taken by Diamond Age, and I look at an i-pad and it kinda makes me smile for a second.
Within the next little while, technology is going to be at the point where a pretty damned effect system could be made around a tablet. If you want to teach reading, why not have a book that could read a story to a child, letters the lit up as the words are said, only while the kids eyes are focused on the right part of screen.
You could build that sort of thing into an RPGish thing for youngins. Have them do other stuff while they learn to read. You could even sort of work in a system to scale the vocabulary based on how much trouble the tot is having reading them(determined by tracking how much time their eyes are spending on it) and of intelligently they respond to situations where it is used. A little better eye tracking stuff, a little better text to speech and you might be even make it into a drop in system.
Of course, that's a pretty obvious idea, that isn't really anything more than taking 3 existing technologies and sticking them together, so making such a program is going to involve digging through 5 levels of patent hell.
Physics it's really about math. Yeah, Portal might give you some idea about inertia and problem solving skills, but it's not really teaching anything about physics particularly useful. How's about a turret defense game where you actually get to program the turrets based on data from sensors. Let it sort of get more complicated as you progress and sort of give pointers about the math. A sort of practice mode, with a lot of numerical feed back about distance traveled by the projectile and whatnot...
So I guess educational games should be focused on what they do best- memorization assistance- and not try to go too far past that.
I think there is value to be had in using video games for lessons. Hand eye coordination, faster thinking and evaluation skills, situational panic. I'm not a gamer that grew up playing games like most of you guys. Those games I named up there? Add to that the old Jeopardy on DOS (it was in color though) and that's the extent of my video games as a child. Plus the occasional Oregon Trail while at school.
It can be done, should be done. Kids should learn in anyway that you can reach them, and right now that's through video games. but i've been so long out of the education system and having any contact with anybody that has kids, that I have no idea exactly what that all looks like now.
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Open ended and noticing specific problems requires attention from an instructor. That is a limited commodity. If we can spend a few hundred dollars on a platform and tens of dollars per student on a technological solution to noticing specific problems and many degrees of open ended, isn't it kind of a worth while thing? It would give better education to lots of students.
Now, are open-ended(within reason) and noticing problems technological problems? I don't actually see why the can't be.
I've been doing this a while, so it's become very easy for me to customise the games that I have in my repertoire or to make up a game from scratch to teach 'A is more <adjective> than B'.
The trouble with video games is how difficult customisation is, compared to making a board out of flashcards and playing a board-game on it, or writing a word-game on the board. Matching the activity to a lesson point or the needs of a student is one of the fundamentals of a good lesson, and I just can't see video games being able to do that.
They can be great for general practise of a skill or study area, e.g. reading skills, geography general knowledge. But they're never going to be able to be the core of a curriculum. Other kinds of games can be, if the teacher is enough of a games-dork to customise them appropriately. But after 4 years of being a teacher-trainer, I've learned that very few people get gameplay and game-design to the same level that I do.
Video games are a supplementary tool, basically.
But the games also have to be engaging, and not screw up the aim of teaching. Oregon Trail was supposed to help convey how tough the Oregon Trail was, but how many students actually got that message? I doubt very many. They went 'HA HA I KILL ALL THE BUFFALO' and putting 'cheese and pepperoni' on their tombstone. Number Munchers worked much better; you had to actually know the numbers they asked for to advance in the game.
Video games are good with factoids, and thankfully, that's what they usually do (Carmen Sandiego, Typing of the Dead, Brain Training, all those random Name X In Y Minutes games). They're not good at explaining (Oregon Trail, Mario's Time Machine, that weird-ass daisy scenario in SimEarth). The teacher needs to do the explaining.
For more involved explanation games, though, you can make it work. They just can't be VIDEO games. They use this, for example, in a gifted class:
fucking
THE (even more) INCREDIBLE MACHINE.
I owe just about everything in my awesome career to it.
Let 'em eat fucking pineapples!
Video games are far, far better at teaching some subjects than others (at least as far as grade school). They're generally fantastic for science, where interactivity and animation can help teach verbally confusing concepts. They're very, very good at reinforcing math skills but less so at teaching new ones, in part because of the large number of ways you can teach different math skills and the importance of connecting different concepts and operations. And they're a poor substitute for being read to by an actual human being, where things like inflection, facial expression, and exploring a students response to a text are very important. Video games generally can't address specific nuances students have as well as a human being.
I do think textbooks are going the way of the dodo, however.