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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."
Video games have had a bad rap recently but that's purely because of infamously violent video games stealing the attention from the innumerable other nonviolent and nonsexual computer games which are simply a lot less noticed by either the pro or anti video game camps.
/. story) was using the NWN engine and allowed you to choose a side in the American Revolution, and is supposed to give fairly realistic consequences to your actions, not to mention that a game about a war that doesn't include violence is simply masking the truth of the matter.
As the article pointed out, though, it's not violence or controversial storylines that make a game inappropriate. Another game they made (other than the one they mention in the
The point is to get people to learn and, at the same time, to see the consequences of bad choices without having to suffer the real-life consequences. It enhances the experience over simply telling people (or having them read out of a book) what happens if this is done, or what happened in the past. Additionally, they mention that the games are used as an enhancement of a more 'normal' education, not in place of normal student-teacher interaction (in other words, there would still be normal lessons to make sure, for instance, that if someone actually manages to win the American Revolution as the British in a simulation, that they understand where their actions deviated from those of the British to allow them to win).
-PainKilleR-[CE]
Carmen SanDiego? I haven't seen a version of that game since I was a kid, but I remember there were a few different verions - 'Where in the World', 'Where in Time' and so on...
It actually did test you on various things, forcing you to look things up (geography etc...). Before the Internet it made things slower (rushing to an Atlas for instance) but these days with Google it would be much faster to play.
They could even integrate an internet search into the game, allowing you to look things up as you go. Apart from the obvious knowledge that would sink in as you play, it would help improve your ability to locate accurate information quickly and easily online (many people have difficulty searching effectively).
Seems like the obvious example - although I know of others. My mother is a Primary School teacher, and these days there are a variety of games (primarily Math based) that they allow kids to play. It very to the point - solving simple equations (addition, subtraction, multiplication and division) but you would be suprised how eager the kids are to do on a computer what they don't like to do on paper. The added benefit is that they are being familiarised with computers from a very early age (please no Linux/Windows comments).
Assembling an orchestra and learning about how different timbres from different instruments color the overall sound might be neat in a computer game.
Additionally, it would probably be easier to do (once the program is written) than actually assembling an orchestra simply for the purpose of teaching a theory class.
Other things I could think of that may help for teaching would be the ability to hear changes made to a piece of music, which may help some students to associate the notes on the page to the notes they hear (this was one of my problems when I took theory, mostly because the majority of my experience was through self-teaching a particular instrument, and especially because tablature is so common with guitar/bass music).
Or you could teach some theory with basic puzzles. Of course, I've always felt that a lot of music theory is like trying to find organization in chaos. There are some strict rules that some things can follow, but you can usually find examples that throw all the rules out the window. This tends to lead the development of games for teaching purposes to have either a very limited application, or to be almost too broad to really be categorized as games.
-PainKilleR-[CE]