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!