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Accepting Games Into Education
Thanks to Ludology.org for pointing to a Chronicle Of Higher Education article discussing the emerging use of games as an academic subject and educational tool. Although there are sceptics, such as David Breneman from the University Of Virginia, who says: "Horsing around with these games might teach problem solving, but you don't learn anything about the world", it's suggested that educators could modify existing games: "An instructor who knows something about games or computers could customize The Sims or Civilization for a study of, say, Roman history", but that few game designers truly understand what makes a game educational: "People seem to think that anything you click on is a game... designers come out with products that have a shellac of quizzing on top of a game."
Is to let people have fun, to let us escape life, to let us release stress, etc...
Can you do all that and learn at the same time? Sure, but it won't be easy... one thing that comes to mind is the "Where in the World is Carmen Sandiago" series.. it was great, and you learn Geography at the same time..
But it will take some effort on the game designer's behalf.. and they really can't expect big payoffs (maybe.. but probably not..)
But computers are ubitquitious nowadays, so we'll see..
I'm not the devil.. just his advocate.
i remember learning how to tell the time and what materials were conductors or insulators in fun school 3 on my amiga 500 when i was 10. man, those programs were a great helping hand..
MilkMiruku
So when are we going to see the MathBlaster Quake mod? :-D
I wish my lawn was emo, so it would cut itself.
All I remember is the good ole StickyBear.
"I am a kernel in the linux army"
Didn't these people ever play Oregon Trail or the Carmen Sandiego games? I mean, come on! I'm 26 years old and I rememember playing these games in elementary school. And (I know, it's not a game--but it did have a cute turtle) who can forget LOGO programming? Tons of fun for everyone.
There's no place I can be, since I found Serenity.
The article mentioned something though that could be really cool and promote a better understanding of history, or culture, or what have you. A Sims Roman-Style game could let you play the part of an emperor, government official, gladiator, or peasant in the Roman world. From there, you could make the same types of decisions for your sim character based on historical data. And, of course, you aren't limited to just Roman history, any and all major cultures could be recreated. Sounds fascinating to me.
But, another poster did present one valid problem...you would have to convince the game company they could make money off this deal, or they wouldn't put the time and effort into it that it would really require in order to be fun and educational.
Mathville?
Anyone remember that?
You learned plenty about real-life and mathematics. You went grocery shopping, and would have to calculate the value of your order. You would have to figure out the amount of materials you needed for different construction projects. You could go to a fair and play games that involved math. It was fun and the only point to the game was to upgrade your method of transportation, I think it went: walking - bike - car - hot air balloon - jet - UFO. Something like that.
Then you had MathRace. Networked horse races controlled by how fast you could answer simple mathematical equations. It was great mental exercise!
Then you had "A day in the life" which was supposed to teach you about drugs, booze and safe sex... but it never really worked for me. Meh.
While real-world applications of the material are a good thing, not everything can be reduced to "real-world problem solving." Some material is best taught in a drill setting, as old-fashioned as that may be. Games can help make memorization of facts (like those annoying times tables) fun. I still credit games like Math Blaster with helping me learn to do arithmetic quickly.
That's it. I'm no longer part of Team Sanity.
Someone once asked me what I knew about the fall of the Roman Empire. I proceded to rattle off everything I remembered from Age Of Empires II. I turned to my friend, who was a Classics major at university, and asked if that was right. He said I had just summed up everything he learned for his degree.
Go video games! =)
Does anybody remember Gorilla? I think it was a rip off of some tank war game, but it was fun. Gorilla's standing on opposite sides of a cityscape, throwing explosive banana's at each other, all the while teaching you about physics and the real world.
Okay... maybe crazy, explosive-banana throwing gorillas don't exist in the real world.... yet.
It's like sex, except I'm having it!
Public schooled kids dont need the abc's and 123's. They need to know the basics of the railgun and the rocket launcher. There math skills can be taught in the addition of frags not calculators. What every kid needs is a warm childhood of killing other people over the internet!
DecafJedi
DecafJedi
my weblog: apropos of something
One of the things I remember was a "secret room" that had an Alligator that would consume the various wires and gates . . .
Now that was a great game!
What I feel is the most important concept for people designing edutainment games is the hierarchy fo learning. This hierarchy is also called "Bloom's Cognative Taxonomy." Rote memorization and drilling are good for immediate responses, but of very little value in the real world. If I remember correctly, its been theorized that knowledge is held longer as it is used in higher and higher level learning.
;)). MIT's games-to-teach project is such a group of people working on edutainment games. If my friend Kurt is reading this, I'm sure he'll post more about their success stories. I'd just like to mention Hephaestus, a game based on engineering robots (I'm guessing remote controlled rather than AI)from lego like parts, although it looks like they've jumped on the current trends marketing bandwagon and its now an MMORPG of some sort, with energy as currency.
In the current edutainment area, there are two fields of game design. The first is a quiz and reward system. The student is presented with a quizing system and the actual game. The learning is supposed to come from the quiz. Depending on how well the student does, permission is given to play the game part for a little while, rewarding the player for doing well. It's a basic operant conditioning design. Learning here is very basic rote; trial and error learning.
The second common design is basic skills drilling. Number munchers, math blaster and that little spelling game where words marched down the castle wall and you had to type them before they got to you are all included in this area. Basically the game is timed drilling. The computer is used to encourage and engage the student, as well as to time them. Again the learning here is by trial and error. These sorts of games serve best as a reinforcement/recollection activity. If you know how to multiply numbers then they can help you instantly recall facts.
What I'd like to see more of these days is problem solving game design. This type merges the learning with the gameplay. It encourages experimentation, and extrapolation. Most REAL games operate in this manner these days; edutainment games should focus on making sure the lessons learned reflect reality accurately (or at least as best we know
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
I see a lot of mentions of classical "Edutainment" titles, like Stickybear, Reader Rabbit, Mathblaster, etc. The problem is, no one, then or now, actively chooses to play those games when there are more enjoyable, non-educational alternatives (and face it, most of the alternatives, now and then, are more enjoyable).
The problem is that the designers ask themselves the question "How can we make learning this concept fun?" They should be asking "How can we teach something from this fun activity?"
I have a friend who is a middle-school level teacher. He makes the above question his philosophy in the classroom, and it works. He's taught fractions with Harry Potter, conjugation of verbs with Transformers, and any number of even odder examples. The trick is that the children don't realize that what they're doing is a lesson. This stuff has won him awards.
Another, more relevant example: A friend's nephew was having trouble with decimals, percents and fractions. Same nephew plays Warhammer 40k obsessively. "Jason, what's 25% of 44?" "I dunno." "Jason, if you have 44 troops in battle, when do you have to make a morale check?"
Take what the child already knows and enjoys and figure out how it is useful. Whether you approve of your child's habits and tastes or not, they are learning all the time from their hobbies, and it falls to parents and educators to direct that learning.
Happiness is relative, Based upon the way we live.
* Strafing and jumping is a good thing.
* Don't go head on against a rocket launcher.
* Your handgun is no good against a flak cannon
* If you've got 20 health...don't be a hero.
* If you hear a redeemer coming, RUN AWAY
Now tell me how this is irrelevant "Real World" knowledge in an American public school system?
One cheap ($20 new) game that tries to do something like this with the Roman Empire called Legion .
Mileage Warning: (Yours may differ) In my brief playing of it, it really sucked, despite the positive review I linked to above. To me, it looked like it overstressed the Civilization model to try to fit Roman history in ways that did were not conducive to good game design (ie, were not fun).
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
I'm interested in getting into game development, and I think there are plenty of possibilities for making games that motivate people to learn. The key, I think, is in the power of games to be able to abstract the worst, least interesting bits of reality and highlight the fun stuff.
:P ), and I think could be resolved. But focusing on any one part of math to study invites trouble.
The trick is in presenting the material the right way. I know it's quite doable for physics, history, geography, and related areas - adventure and strategy games make use of that stuff all the time. It's things like higher-level math that are tougher - say you were making a game for calculus students. What would you have them do? If you just present the typical problems to them so that they cover all the bases, no advance is being made over doing problems out of a book. There aren't many exciting game-professions that you can use to give context to the calculus problems, either. It's a problem that I really can't figure out - math in a general sense is better suited to games(see all adventure games using little mini-puzzles that have no relation to the plot
Neither are there any games that teach people to write well or read great literature for meaning. (You could say that the game itself has literary context, however)
I have thought of a cellular biology game in which you "build" parts of a cell and collect resources from the passing blood. Mitochondria for energy, Golgi apparatus as a warehouse, Lysosomes for digestion of foreign material/junk, etc. When you have enough resources your cell can divide...
I could imagine a strategy game (real time or turn based) where you fend off viruses and maybe zoom around a 3-d view of your cell (as an action part?).
Anyhow, there is really a lot of background material to choose from and to my knowledge no one has done anything like it (famous last words). Not all of it would have to be rigerous but it would be ideal if these "grey areas" were colored differently or noted in the manual. Perhaps there could be various settings. There are lots of things I would love to know about cells like how much room is devoted to each kind of organelle and what happens if each one goes wrong, and what various viruii do to cause malfunctions. I don't strictly need to know all of this but as general background material it would be nice.
A more sophisticated idea would include a really simplifed DNA where you get to pick certain characteristics in the DNA to generate certain parts of the cell to help it survive in different environments. I was thinking about single celled life forms with flagellum to cause forward motion. You would devote "space" in the DNA chain for various parts of the cell for defence or offence (eating?) or motion, etc. Too long DNA chains would either take longer to replicate or have higher chances of mistranslation (perhaps DNA length is not the ideal "scarce resource" perhaps there could be an "energy cost" for each organelle?) Anyhow, I imagine tossing varients into an environment and then seeing how they survive (and compete against one another) and then see how robust they are to changes in pH or temperature or new viruses or perhaps scarcity of resources. It would almost be like those old "Ogre" like tank games where you program your tank and compete with other tanks to see who's algorithm is better. Perhaps an online competition/forum for various DNA combinations is possible.
Partly I am tossing ideas out here because the game industry devotes huge resources to yet anothe r FPS or MMORPG and someone should be writing new games.
a war on terrorism? How can we end a war on a method?
Initial results were quite positive. We found statistically significant differences between groups learning through games and those doing inquiry-based units. We found that most importantly, kids could tell you things like what field lines are and what they're used for in the experimental group -- whereas the controls could tell you the right answer but not really know why.
Still, the teacher played a really critical role in the environment, doing a lot of coaching and helping kids connect what they're seeing in the game back to the academic content. Interpreting game play is a tricky process, I'm finding.
I'd also admit though that Supercharged is a pretty mediocre game. It was our first shot at this -- and it came out ok but has a lot of issues. I'm excited about some of our other designs -- particularly revolution, which is designed to use the neverwinter nights modding tools. here's the initial design concept for revolution.
Our current plans are to begin working with a larger network of commercial game developers to really do this kind of thing right, now that we have some preliminary data to show that it's at least worth trying.
http://joystick101.org getting in depth, with games.
We publish King Arthur Pendragon and Pendragon Online, games about the myth, history and literature of Arthurian Britain.
Pendragon Online is under development right now.
Consider it a High School to Post-Graduate level historical, literary or scientific research project, Internet drama school, or what have you.
We're drawing from Sir Thomas Malory's "Le Morte D'Arthur," the French "Vulgate" Lancelot-Grail cycle, and dozens of works of medieval and sub-Roman history form archaeology to culinary delights to religion to zoology.
The game will be a virtual world -- King Arthur's Britain after he's drawn the Sword in the Stone, and married Guenever, yet before he's defeated the Saxons at Badon Hill or founded Camelot.
We'll likely contrast ourselves with "Dark Age of Camelot" in the fact that we have "genuine Arthurian content." The actual Arthurian heros and heroines will be cast -- played by real players who will control their actions and political factions. Morgan le Fay will be her wily self -- but not an enemy of Arthur's at this time.
The game will also cover issues like cultural clashes between Saxons and Britons. While this is a fantasy based on medieval romances, and not truly historical, it will still bring to the player's attention the issues of the historical 6th Century: Saxons, Angles, Jutes, Picts, Irish and Scots all closing in on the Romano-British kingdoms.
Pendragon Online as University
This was an article I wrote up to highlight the essence of the discussion.
We are already at a few dozen staff members -- all of whom pledge to help create this virtual world. That open door to creative control as a coder -- a StoryBuilder of a new world, and to learn again about this history and myth of our real world -- is what our players get for their monthly fee. Not just the ability to log in and camp monsters, which I find sadly Pavlovian and ultimately empty in experiential value.
We'll have our own visceral satisfactions -- knocking your opponent "over their cruppers" (as they call unhorsing an opponent head-over-heels in the joust) -- and we might even split a few skulls down to the teeth as they did in the legends. But the point of the world is not just to rack up body counts and steal everything you can get your hands on.
In Arthur's Britain, honor matters.
-Peter Corless.
Green Knight Publishing
gawaine@greenknight.com
http://www.greenknight.com