This from Clive Thompson, at WIRED, and by way of my friend, Smythe Richbourg: [Image ((Trapp, Charlene. “Playing Video Games – Passing Time.” Charchen’s Photostream. 29 Mar 2007. 9 Sep 2008 <http://flickr.com/photos/charchen/439072634/>. ))]
A few years ago, Constance Steinkuehler — a game academic at the University of Wisconsin — was spending 12 hours a day playing Lineage, the online world game. She was, as she puts it, a “siege princess,” running 150-person raids on hellishly difficult bosses. Most of her guild members were teenage boys.
But they were pretty good at figuring out how to defeat the bosses. One day she found out why. A group of them were building Excel spreadsheets into which they’d dump all the information they’d gathered about how each boss behaved: What potions affected it, what attacks it would use, with what damage, and when. Then they’d develop a mathematical model to explain how the boss worked — and to predict how to beat it.
Often, the first model wouldn’t work very well, so the group would argue about how to strengthen it. Some would offer up new data they’d collected, and suggest tweaks to the model. “They’d be sitting around arguing about what model was the best, which was most predictive,” Steinkuehler recalls.
That’s when it hit her: The kids were practicing science.
They were using the scientific method. They’d think of a hypothesis — This boss is really susceptible to fire spells — and then collect evidence to see if the hypothesis was correct. If it wasn’t, they’d improve it until it accounted for the observed data.
Could it be true, what Dr. Steinkuehler says, that
Videogames are becoming the new hotbed of scientific thinking for kids today. ((Thompson, Clive. “How Videogames Blind Us With Science.” WIRED 8 Sep 2008 9 Sep 2008 <http://www.wired.com/gaming/gamingreviews/commentary/games/2008/09/gamesfrontiers_0908>. ))
Remember how baseball cards were the new hotbed of scientific thinking for kids today?
Perhaps Pokemon is the new hotbed of scientific thinking for kids today.
Is reading the sports page the hotbed of scientific thinking for kids today?
I have some students who have demonstrated to me how they use the Auction House on World of Warcraft to learn about economics. They showed me how they can choose between gathering materials for buying them on the Auction House to make their products. This then determines how much they charge for the final product, but they also have to take into account the price that others’ have put on the same product.
Is this not behaving in the same way as the real world market?
I know it’s not science, but to me it clearly shows how kids are learning real life skills in these virtual worlds.
I agree with you Melanie. I’m a closet gamer and found myself making tables with computations to figure out how to most efficiently earn money. My avatar in World of Warcraft could hunt and make leather products from the skins. I ended up with a long table of the possible items to make, their costs, and the cost per kind of material. That is a skill kids can do every day in the supermarket. Real-life skills may be hard to practically and realistically apply in the classroom, so virtual worlds would be a motivating way to teach real-life skills in a sim-life environment.