Educators Turn To Games For Help

Thanks to Wired News for their article discussing the increasing use of games to educate and simulate in the learning field. The article discusses the fact that "...video games have come under tremendous political pressure in recent years because of an increase in violent and sexual content. But schools soon may be using the technology that powers those games to help teach America's children." It goes on to mention a number of academic initiatives, including MIT's Games-To-Teach project, currently developing titles such as Biohazard, which uses the Unreal Tournament 2003 engine, and "...helps train emergency workers to deal with a cataclysmic attack. To succeed, teams must forge new communication lines while fighting a toxic accident."

Comments

Learning music with games

[jtheory]

I'm just getting a website off the ground that builds on this idea, with online games that students can use to practice basic music theory skills.

Right now the games aren't very exciting... (yeah, yeah; I'm working on it) but they're definitely highly effective. I've had a previous generation of the site running at the college I went to for the past 6 years, and I've gotten a lot of very positive feedback from students and teachers.

Practicing this kind of thing (music theory skills) on paper is *deadly* boring, and most students need a *lot* of practice before they are natural and quick enough to understand written music effectively.

NOTE... I'm talking about drills here, not real FPL (First Person Learner?) games, which are the real focus of this article. I think drills tend to be more effective for just raw practice of very basic skills, but more immersive interactivity would be better than simple drills for helping students understand "big picture" kinds of issues. Assembling an orchestra and learning about how different timbres from different instruments color the overall sound might be neat in a computer game.

Or... maybe almost anything could be taught via a game wherein a mathemetician/ composer/ architect/ accountant/ software engineer/ whatever was murdered, and to understand the clues the student needs to learn these basics....