In a recent speech to a group of students at TechBoston in Dorchestor, Massachusetts. President Obama had this to say about video games:
I'm calling for investments in educational technology that will help create ... educational software that is as compelling as the best video game. I want you guys to be stuck on a video game that's teaching you something other just blowing something up.
When I started my career in video games in the early 1990s, the idea of a sitting President saying anything positive about video games was pretty much unthinkable. Back then, the medium was routinely vilified by politicians and generally dismissed as a frivolous waste of time by everyone else.
Perceptions of video games are definitely changing.
Today, hardly a week passes without a new study highlighting how video games can be good for learning. There is a steady stream of books, blogs, TED talks and conferences making a wide variety of claims about the positive potential of games. These claims range from rigorous academic studies highlighting the efficacy of a single game to broad claims about games saving the planet.
So, is game-based learning hype or reality? Right now it is both.
I believe that computer and video games absolutely have the potential to make significant learning (and social) impact. But I also believe that this potential is currently not being realized -- at least not at a meaningful scale.
To understand why games have so much potential (as well as why realizing this potential is so difficult) let's look at some of the thorniest education challenges the President outlined in his speech.
While game-based-learning is certainly not a silver bullet for solving these complex challenges, games -- when effectively harnessed -- can be a powerful tool for addressing them. This is because there is a unique and, for many, surprising alignment between the core elements that make video games so deeply engaging and the best practices that many of the most effective teachers are employing in the classroom.
Here are just a few examples of this alignment:
Project-based learning: Games are interactive, "lean-forward," and participatory. They enable players to step into different roles (e.g. scientist, explorer, inventor, political leader), confront a problem, make meaningful choices and explore the consequences of these choices. Games can help make learning more engaging, relevant and give students real agency in ways that static textbooks simply cannot.
Personalized learning: Games are designed to enable players to advance at their own pace, fail in a safe and supportive environment, acquire critical knowledge just-in-time (vs. just-in-case), iterate based on feedback and use this knowledge to develop mastery. Games can help teachers manage large classes with widely divergent student capabilities and learning styles through embedded assessment and individualized, adaptive feedback.
24/7 learning: Games offer a delicate mix of challenges, rewards and goals that drive motivation, time-on-task and a level of engagement that can seamlessly cross from formal to informal learning environments. Given that kids spend more time engaged with digital media than any other activity (other than sleep), games can enable an increasing portion of this out-of-school digital media time to effectively reinforce in-school learning (and vice-versa).
Peer-to-peer learning: Games are increasingly social. Whether they involve guilds or teams jointly accomplishing missions, asynchronous collaboration over social networks or sourcing advice from interest-driven communities to help solve tricky challenges, games naturally drive peer-to-peer and peer-to-mentor social interactions.
21st Century skill development: Games are complex. Whether it is a 5-year-old parsing a Pokemon card or a 15-year-old optimizing a city in SimCity, games can foster critical skills such as problem solving, critical thinking, systems thinking, digital media literacy, creativity and collaboration. Given that many of the jobs that will emerge in 21st century have not yet been invented, these 'portable' skills are particularly important.
Games are also capital efficient. Games, especially game-based services, can be deployed, scaled, updated and optimized at a fraction of the per student cost of most textbooks.
That's the good news.
The bad news is that designing, developing, distributing, implementing and scaling effective game-based-learning products that leverage all of these capabilities is extremely difficult -- especially if the goal is widespread adoption in the classroom.
As a result, there is a significant gap between the potential of game-based-learning and the current reality. The next series of posts will explore this gap further as well as methodologies for closing it.
Game-Based Learning: How to Delight and Instruct in the 21st ...
Two to Three Years: Game-Based Learning « 2010 Horizon Report: The ...
Jane McGonigal’s, Reality is Broken, brought this home to me.
Jane explains a good game as one you can’t possibly play on your own and it’s a necessarily volunteer. She suggests taking the parts of a good game, any kind, and bringing them into our everyday lives. Like detox for those of us who have forgotten how to imagine, play, be mindful.
She points out that we have many 21 year olds, who have played 10,000 hrs of good video games, expert collaboraters. What better lifelong skill, since many things we face can’t be done alone.
The problem I see with our focus on whether video games would be helpful in ed is twofold:
1) We’re trying to use games to entertain kids into learning things that quite honestly, they may or may not need. I’m wondering if Khan academies recent addition of badges isn’t great evidence of that. The motivation needs to be intrinsic or after the excitement of something new is gone, so will the player be.
2) If we focus on #1, we’re missing the potential altogether. I’m thinking we need to realize the power of volunteer play and trust. Unleash that. I’m thinking we cheapen or even miss possibility when we use play to accomplish an agenda.
In fact, we just announced the winners of the National STEM Youth Video Game Challenge - a national middle school video game design competition. Here is a link to a short video of the winners where the kids themselves articulate nicely the educational value of making games: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SA3EPf9tsI8
There are actually a number of good tools (and curriculums) for teaching both video game design and programming - many of them free or offering free tiers of service. I am actually planning to do a future blog post covering youth video game design which will cover the ecosystem of tools.
My company recently published (in collaboration with the Institute of Play and the MacArthur Foundation) a game and curriculum designed to teach middle schools students game design called Gamestar Mechanic (http://gamestarmechanic.com/). There is a very robust free version and free curriculum. Other youth-friendly game creation tools include Scratch, Kodu, Game Maker, Game Salad, RPG Maker, StageCast Creator. More in a future post...
The entire focus of education has been turned from learning for the sake of knowledge to attending school to get a high paying job. Of course it is brutally obvious that the latter is just creating a bunch of people with huge student loans working 2 to 3 jobs to just survive.
When I think back to my HS years in the 80's, our valedictorian was not the kid who you can always find hanging out at the arcade beating everyones' high scores on Ms. Pac Man or Space Invaders...that kid did not even go to college.
There is a time and place for video games, but I am not sure that during the school day is the answer. Video games do not teach social skills and though they may be able to use teaching video games in elementary school, I am not so sure about the high school level, and how they will keep that age groups interest.
Where I disagree with you is the social skills aspect. I am referring to MMORPG's played online with other people. As an example when I play, I am often with a group of 17 other people. Most of whom I have never communicated with before, none of them whom I have met before, and we have to get organized and coordinated to complete a task or objective. That level of working together and organization takes a good deal of social skills. If the leader can't juggle the 17 personalities, the group falls apart. If the members can't get along to get it done, the group falls apart. If they cannot read the text fast and well enough to know what is going on the group will fall apart.
Also if a game has story/text content that can just be skipped over in my opinion is using the text wrong and needs to create a better story. If kids are interested in what is going on then they will read it.
A common fallacy by the game deluded. You are not with anyone. You are in your basement. If you're on the phone you're not "with" anyone why do you believe you on online? It's an absurd statment that denies reality which is the biggest problem with games as education.
Give me two kids. One plays any game in the world you select for 10 hours over say five days. The other reads quality subject oriented books for 10 hours over five days.
My money is on the reader.
Now, I'm not sure the gaming industry would make that argument. They'd like as broad of adoption as they can get, and if they can wean readers off books in favor of their products, great. But I expect some people would make that argument.
Then of course, there's the counter to that. Maybe we should expect those kids to learn how to read even if it's not their first choice. Maybe we're better off not raising a generation of kids who expect flashing lights and immediate rewards every time they learn something. Perhaps their parents should force them to buckle down and build the sorts of skills they're going to need to learn things outside of a video game.
But really, how likely is that?
In this case it would be a difference of reading about knowledge versus actually applying knowledge. (There are certainly ways that the game can be "gamed" or "cheated" but isn't finding flaws in your opponent part of strategy?)
If your goal is to teach chemistry, then the book will win out.
You need to identify your goals and what you are trying to accomplish and find the best tool for the job.
There is still a place for being able to read about Science, especially when they can read text from some of the scientists that many of the Science books summarize.
Gimme another.
Personally, I see the problem as more of the homogenization and watering down of video game culture in general now that it has become a viable yet exploitable medium, too much emphasis on what sells (graphics and explosions) and not enough focus on creativity. There used to be such great innovation -- first the days of roguelikes, and text based adventures, followed by final fantasy zelda, myst, age of empires, etc - games where you needed to read a whole lot, and use critical thought/imagination. Sure, there have been mindless (enjoyable) platformers since the days of the arcade, but I feel like gamers just used to be smarter kids in general, perhaps because many were introverted, yet extremely creative. Maybe I'm just nostalgic since most of my friends used to be gamers, but now that gaming has hit the mainstream it seems like all I see is the same first person shooter rehashed over and over again, complete with linear levels and voice acting. Innovation today means motion detection or making your game graphically superior. I know there's more out there than the new hit title for Xbox, that there are independent companies dedicated to making challenging, thought-provoking games, but they're not what sells or gets attention. What really needs to happen is a shift in the general gaming culture; until that day, I'll encourage the kids I meet to compliment their game play with a healthy dose of reading.
when you say: "U.S. students are falling further behind other industrialized countries in everything".
How about some context? The truth is, the USA outperforms every other nation handily when students are compared across socio-economic categories. http://goo.gl/nEV8V
We measure all students, not select groups.
Games are cool, and i build games, and raised standardized reading comprehension scores with game study, but the take home message was that the technology was in the design of the learning activity and how transfer was designed for other contexts -- it was not the digitized interface.
I am all in favor of kids playing games, and agree with you on your last point wholeheartedly.