A couple of weeks ago, at my state’s educational technology conference (NCETC), I tried out several new presentations. One that seemed to be a hit was Video Games and Education, a one-hour introduction to the basics of video games. I must confess that I felt a bit disingenuous in presenting this topic, as I am considerably older than the 34 years that Beck and Wade1 report to be the cutoff for people who have grown up playing video games.
Among the topics were video games’ rapid evolution (Pong to PlayStation-2 Pro Tennis), the various genre (Platformer, adventure, MMORPG, Simulations, etc.), how most games today are actually a hybrid of all of them, and various twenty-first century skills that seem ready-made for video games as a learning tool:
- Critical Thinking/Problem-Solving
- Teamwork/Collaboration
- Leadership
- Creativity/Innovation
- Ethics/Social Responsibility2
We also explored some of the Serious Games that are being developed (Food Force and Carnegie Melon’s PeaceMaker), virtual worlds (NICE3 and Second Life), and large-scale urban games, things you can do outdoors with mobile phones, such as lifesize PacMan in Manhattan — think about it.
What surprised me (or what I hadn’t taken time to really think about) was the people who attended and the reasons why they attended. There were a handful who are obviously younger than 34, who are gamers, and who get the idea that many video games are learning engines. There were also a large number of tech directors who are always looking for what’s new. They’ve already seen presentations about Inspiration, PowerPoint, using Word to teach writing, and even Blogging 101. There were also a number of people who said afterward that they had come in as skeptics, completely unconvinced as to any instructional value to video games. One man actually came up before the session asking how kids could possibly learn when they are in the Alpha state that video games have been proven to put them in — so 1990s.
What bothered me were the parents who came up afterward thanking me for helping them to realize that their children’s hours at playing video games was actually healthy. Wow! That is not what I’d meant to convey. “Just because there is some potent redeeming value to playing many video games, doesn’t mean that you can stop being a parent. You must continue to talk to your children about what they are doing, and send them outside every once in a while.”
 A LAN Party |
But I think that the best part of the presentation was the last slide, which lists some things that we can do today to start benefiting from our students’ video game activities today. This is an edited list that I got from Bill Sams4.
- Start a gaming club in your school. Set up some LAN parties in your library. Get students talking about video games within the context of their schooling.
- Students are great resource on video games. Allow them to talk about them and teach you.
- Connect with the serious game effort (http://seriousgames.org/).
- Recruit the Digital Natives in your faculty.
- Pay attention to the Key Players (Henry Jenkins, Jame Paul Gee, and others).
- Pay attention to your students. Ask them about their games. Ask them to write about their gaming experiences. Ask them to describe their avatars and their ambitions for their avatars.
Technorati Tags: warlick videogames education technology ncetc06
1 Beck, John, and Mitchell Wade. Got Game. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2004.
2 McLester, Susan. “The Workforce Readiness Crisis.” Technology & Learning 27(2006): 22 – 29.
3 Johnson, Andrew. “The NICE Project: Learning Together in a Virtual World.” Proceedings of VRAIS ’98. 28 Dec 1997. Electronic Visualization Project, University of Illinois. 11 Dec 2006 <http://www.evl.uic.edu/tile/NICE/NICE/PAPERS/VRAIS/vrais98.2.html>.
4 Sams, Bill. “Games, Multi-Player Environments, Immersive Reality: Virtual Worlds & Avatars: What does it mean for learning? .” TeachU. Jan 2006.
Image Citation:
Ronberg, NK. “DSC_1937.” Nkronberg’s Photostream. 16 Aug 2006. 11 Dec 2006 <http://flickr.com/photos/nkronberg/217337712/>.
Thanks for the mention of our game, PeaceMaker, Israeli-Palestine. The creators of PeaceMaker always had the educational component in mind during the design and development of the game.
In making the decision to create a company to commercialize the game the goal was even broader, to see the informational opoortunity of social games spread out of the schools and classrooms and into the living rooms of interested global citizens that desire to have a greater understanding of world issues than the media currently provides due to the “mass” approach in programming development.
With PeaceMaker, the events are real but the scenario’s are generated by the decisions that one makes as they play the game, the interactivity required results in a deeper understanding of the core issues vs. the story of the day’s events.
As someone who grew up spending countless hours on my Atari at home and spending hundreds of dollars (one quarter at a time) on video games, I am still a little skeptical about “gaming” as a learning tool. As an adult, I have purposefully sayed away from computer gaming, knowing that my productivity would most likely suffer. I do realize that gaming today is not even close to what I have experience with (space invaders, pole position, centipede) and I am willing to keep an open mind about things. So, I am willing to conduct a gaming experiment. My 10-yr-old daughter is starting to show some interest in gaming. She is very computer savvy, IM literate, regularly blogs, and is a geocaching pro. Which games or gaming systems can you or your readers recommend for us (her) to get started? I would like to see this succeed, and bring it to my elementary school campus as an after school club, if it looks like it really is productive and can produce some meaningful effects.
I don’t want to get her (us) started and then justify it by saying that she may be learning something. I want to approach buying the game as a learning opportunity. Tell me where to start, I’ll buy it, and report back in three months. I’m serious…I have no idea how to get started. I need specifics.
We had a chap speaking to our students on this topic a couple of weeks back. I wrote about it in my blog, “Derek Disgraces David!”, and there is a link there to a video of his presentation.
Derek makes a very compelling case for using games in education, you can read about his day job in an online article, Embracing gaming culture, and his blog, Hot Milky Drink, is worth a look.