US kids want games for learning
April 30, 2008 — Daniel LivingstoneAlexandra Matthews has been busy collecting and collating stories related to games based learning from around the blogosphere, and from her ‘Heated debate on Game-Based Learning‘ post, I followed the link through to the article on NetworkWorld: ‘Most kids want educational video games in school, survey shows. … So?’
The original article by Paul McNamara is a fairly balanced report on the Project Tommorow finding, but the comments contain a fair bit of heated debate - some heavily biased against games, some comments going a little far the other way:
education shouldn’t be seperated from entertainment
I respectfully disagreed. Not that education can’t be entertaining or fun at least some of the time, but education shouldn’t focus overmuch on entertaining. My full reply:
Re: Misunderstanding
There is a LOT more to education than facts found on Wikipedia. Skills, experience, and understanding are not to be found by skimming Wikipedia for 5 minutes after a couple of hours bloody gameplay on God of War.
I definately agree that games are educational but not always in the ways intended, nor is the education necessarily valuable.
What lessons the younger cousin is picking up from playing God of War about ancient Greek society and myths from the game I don’t know - he may also have picked up a number of deep misconceptions from the game. How would you assess this?
And of course, God of War is rated Mature (17+) in the US and 18 in the UK - for its combination of extremely violent gameplay and sexual content. What is your young (10 year old) cousin learning from this? What is he learning from you encouraging him that this is a suitable activity for him?
“That’s the key - education shouldn’t be seperated from entertainment” - I soooo disagree with you here. I’d recommend Neil Postman’s book “Amusing ourselves to Death”, but the game of it hasn’t come out yet…
There is a lot of good work being done round the work at finding ways to effectively support education using games - but this does not make every game educationally valuable, not does it mean that all education should be (or can be) delivered through the medium of playing computer games.
May 10, 2008 at 10:20 am
I whole-heartedly agree with you. Computer games have shown their ability to effectively engage their players and teach certain skills but commercial games still have the main goal of entertaining, not of pedagogy. For games to be used within education they need to focus on the learning outcomes but apply game design to create the same engaging/fun experience that commercial games do. If they are to be used within the classroom it is vital that information is provided for the teacher about the game highlighting the learning objectives, and also the games need to have quite short periods of gameplay so teachers are able to slot in games within their busy lesson plans.
I have been working on a research and development project looking at this area and at how relatively dry learning content (such as Mathematics) can be made engaging by incorporating game design. Development of the game (OceanQuest) is currently at prototype and evaluation stage. For more information see http://www.gamingandlearning.co.uk. Please feel free to provide feedback.
Alex