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

If it helps kids to learn...

[James A. A. Joyce]

...then I'm all for it. Anything which makes teaching information to children easier can only be a good thing. If a child learns best through an immersive video game, then that's a very useful tool and there's nothing wrong with it as long as it's not used excessively. 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.

Re:If it helps kids to learn...

[PainKilleR-CE]

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.

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 /. 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.

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).

Glad to see...

[TuringTest]

...that VR technology is being used in civil security training, and not just for military training. If videogames end in saving lifes, it's a good thing.

Personal Experience

[kmak]

Mario Teaches Typing taught me typing! And Donkey Kong Math was fun too!

Whatever happened to...

[antin]

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).

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....

Re:Learning music with games

[PainKilleR-CE]

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.

Sex ed?

[Lord_Dweomer]

I can think of a couple of games they could use to teach sex ed......they might be hentai games, but hey, that'd just give a little added education by teaching kids about how tentacles are a part of japanese culture.