More Videogames, Fewer Books at Some Schools?

A News.com article highlights a plan that may please word-weary students: more games, fewer books in some educational settings. That's one plan put forth by some educators who feel that current learning plans don't fully engage today's classes. By offering real-world dilemmas in a virtual setting ('discover why fish are dying in a park'), teachers hope that games will turn kids onto the idea of learning, and eventually lead them back to books. The article covers several of the projects geared towards exploring this idea, as well as research on the subject. "A game designer, Salen is working with a group called New Visions for Public Schools to establish a school in New York City for grades 6 through 12 that would integrate video games into the entire curriculum. 'There's a lot of moral panic about addiction to games. There's a negative public perception, and we know we have to deal with that. But teachers have been using games for years and years.'"

Comments

My take on this...

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a brilliant idea. Obviously there are many things to be concerned about... it's not necessarily a good thing to just get games so that the kids will be entertained, but to get them to learn something, to develop thinking skills, and to keep them interested in the subject being taught.

Obviously when talking about games, and school, many of us think of calculator games. For the most part, the use of graphing calculators to play games has just been a way for students to not be bored during class, or for the lonely students to not be bored between class. There are also many calculator games that serve educational purposes in some ways, and they can easily be implemented in the classroom, since the a lot, if not the majority of high school students already own a graphing calculator.

The purpose of going to school isn't necessarily to learn, but also to learn how to learn. And there are many puzzle games that help that cause - they develop the brain in ways that traditional school just can't do. Reading helps the memory, but playing puzzle games help the way the brain actually approaches certain problems and situations.

There is a certain level of interest that is absolutely necessary in order for a student to learn. The difference between the gifted students and the not so gifted students is generally their interest level.

Generally what I saw when I was in high school was that the teachers always fought against the use of graphing calculators (especially playing games on them), but if I ever become a teacher (which I probably won't, and this might be the reason for that), I will utilize the technology available to the greatest extent, and gaming will likely be a part of that.

And... a poll:
Do you think your education would have been better had the teachers utilized games in order to help the students understand?

Yes,
Maybe.
They DID! and that's why I turned out so great!
They DID! and that's why I turned out... the way I am...
No.

A good way to teach programming..

[SpaghettiCoder]

.. by introducing principles in games like ZZT, for instance. ZZT came with ZZT-OOP (ZZT Object Oriented Programming Language) so that you could create your own rooms with puzzles involving monsters that interact with the player and other monsters (or other objects). Each monster could be programmed with its own set of instructions (where it's told to start or react to specific events). ZZT is a great teaching and learning tool. I have 2 decades of programming experience (starting with BASIC on an 8-bit Amstrad), and the stuff I did as a child left the deepest impression (although it was, unfortunately, the BASIC language). So teach them when they're young.

Fewer books?

[Etherwalk]

"Fewer books" is not the right answer. Educational videogames can be a lot of fun--I'm reminded of Rocky's Boots (digital logic for kids) or Fraction Action (Okay, so graphics have improved over the years)--but "Fewer books" is almost always the wrong answer. There are so many incredible books out there--books that are written with beautiful language, books that can be enjoyed and explored.

(On a tangent, schools which assign BAD books to be read are pretty criminal--there's so much good stuff out there the last thing you need to do is assign a book that's going to turn someone off of reading before they've graduated grade school.)

I applaud the use of video games for education--and I have no problem with having video games to play, for children or adults. But how much would we gain by simply having a month each semester, or each year, when all the children at a school were told "No television and no video games." With more books assigned in that period--even if it's a question of asking each student to pick five or ten books out of a hundred choices. Television and video games are more immediately engaging, and maybe you need to starve someone of them for a little while to make them be more willing to try a book. If there's nothing else to do, even the most avid watcher of cartoons might eventually pick up a book and read for a while.

graphing calculators

[AdonaiElohim]

It's slightly off-topic, but my question is: Why are all students expected to buy graphing calculators starting in like 7th grade? I'm a teacher at a school where it's MANDATORY for all middle school students to purchase a graphing calculator. The most complex thing these students do with these arcane hunks of plastic is play some sort of tetris game and painstakingly spell out obscene messages to each other. It's been going on for like 15-20 years now and I don't get it. Maybe twice a year someone does the extra credit problems and graphs a couple of parabolas. They're utterly useless for almost everything that school students do. I did quite well on the AP Calc test without ever touching one. Why should every parent toss $100 in the toilet (or send it to Texas, which is worse) on a baffling, never-used brick of never-touched buttons?

Note: I'm not a technophobe. I'm fully in favor of every student having a laptop now or in the near future. But I've been really perplexed by the whole graphing calculator thing for years now. It just seems like a huge waste of money for a tool no one uses. Why not force all students to buy defibrillators and bone saws for health class while we're at it?

Re:Why are we doing this?

[thrawn_aj]

+1. Parent has the right insight into this. At what point in this charade are we going to expect the students to show some initiative for their own education? This disease is spreading right upto high school and even unto college now. If it takes such extreme measures to get students interested in their own education, perhaps we should rethink our goals here. Have a merit based education system (golly gee what a novel concept :P) and impress upon the students the reality of the outside world. Given a choice between "burger-flipping" and "professional career", I'm sure even the most ludicrous inhabitant of the "entitled generation" would get motivated =D. An education is simply an environment wherefrom the proactive student can extract the skills one needs to fulfil his/her goals in life.

The following is addressed to the disaffected student:

<rant>

Have trouble getting motivated in class? Feel the teacher is not doing his job? You have a brain, use it. Go to the library, hop on the internet (or into the tubes :P) and learn FFS. Demonstrations and compaints and whining are all GOOD things and they will make society a better place (no sarcasm there). However, none of those things will help YOU learn at this moment. So, you don't like the way a teacher teaches or feel he's incompetent? (This is quite possible and entirely plausible.) Do what we used to do - OWN the subject and then attempt to display that teacher's ignorance in open class, keep him on his toes. Ask the difficult questions, point out logical flaws. After all, that is the ultimate purpose of a course - to attempt go beyond what your teacher knows. If a subect fails to motivate you, there's always pleasure to be gained in treating it like a sport and showing your coach the time of his life *evil grin*. Heck, it works for sports, and no sport even has a meaningful goal to begin with :P. Academics could be a sport in itself, at least there's some things you can walk away with at the end. Does this make you a nerd? Possibly. Should you care? That's upto how much importance you attach to peer pressure. I think if you have the right attitude towards learning (for instance: I'm gonna learn this stuff with or without the teacher's help), no one can stop you from understanding ANYTHING. So, seriously, let's stop with the "decelerated pace learning". Video games! Humbug!

</rant>

Re:is this bad?

[PhrankW]

As she was being home-schooled, my daughter also first learned about the Western Expansion by playing Oregon Trail. She also learned that you do much better in the game if you always get as much information as you can from those who have gone before.
Actually, I suspect the best use for videogames in education is as bribes. Once a student shows he has learned the material
taught in a class, he doesn't have to sit still watching other students fail to learn, but can have a little fun while playing games, reading a book, shooting baskets etc. Never happen, but an interesting concept

Fundamental issues with gaming in education....

[davecrusoe]

Ok, so a caveat: I was a researcher of educational gaming... but I quit the field when I realized how poorly gaming could translate into the kind of learning that kids need to succeed in the world. Some questions to consider:

How do you transfer game learning to test contexts? After all, standardized tests matter to governments. If you teach in one context, it is very hard to utilize the skills in a different context. Moving from screen to paper is, for instance, tough.

A game requires simplification. What happens to history when it's all burnt into a 15 minute game? While simulations can be helpful for testing dangerous or invisible things (such as genetic combinations, hazmat training or airplane simulation), they're generally poor at proving background.

Some educational games are built on a research base. For instance, there is a math game that will build upon a learner's growing base of rote-memorized solutions (automaticity; measured in Sec. to answer) by scaffoling new and old together. These games are few and far between. MOST games are simply multiple choice, or weird adaptations of Doom-for-math-learning.

End point:

Does what we can teach through gaming actually matter in real life? What does, and what doesn't? Therefore: what should we continue to teach with books and discussion, and where can gaming be used positively?

Anyhow, that's some general food for thought... without raising issues of gender bias, stereotype threat, etc etc.

Re:Fundamental issues with gaming in education....

[Bat Country]

Any problem which can be defined as a conflict which requires learning a skill or collection of facts can be made into a game. The question isn't how good can a game be at teaching, but how fun can a good teaching game be made?

The Carmen Sandiego games for instance were exceptionally good at providing trivial geographic and historical knowledge, but poor at providing a comprehensive amount of information about any one problem. However, they encouraged initiative in problem solving, proper time management, attention to minute detail, and improved short term memory. These are things which many people are seriously lacking by the time they reach their senior year in High School.

There are some subjects which will probably never translate well into a pure video game context, but other subjects (such as chemistry, biology, ecology, and miscellaneous cognitive skills) do in fact translate quite well into a video game environment.

Is a child going to memorize his phosphates and salts because he has to in order to pass an exam? Or will he memorize them because they're important building blocks for more complicated chemicals which s/he can use for various uses in some cleverly designed sandbox-style game?

Say what one will about the historicity of what children brought from Oregon Trail, but it was useful for learning resource management, thrift, rationing, and learning a bit of how ridiculously hard it was to cross the USA before motor vehicles and a good interstate freeway system.

It's not useful to dismiss gaming as being worthless for education merely because some subjects don't translate well into a gaming-based lesson. Children have been participating in role playing games and board games as part of their school curriculum for decades, and learning social dynamics and leadership through playground games for centuries. Games are unquestionably useful for training - the only problem lies in identifying the proper way to implement learning games in order to maximize learning value without making the experience tedious.

Re:Fundamental issues with gaming in education....

[cgenman]

Caveat: I've always wanted to get into educational gaming, but never have.

Fundamentally, gaming can teach one thing: the game. Number munchers was very good at teaching how to quickly solve math problems while avoiding ghosts. Sim City taught resource management in a constrained system, as well as the civic arrangements that the city bothered to model.

In other words, gaming teaches you HOW to do something. And if how you do something requires knowing facts, ala Carmen San Diego, then those facts can be levereged in as a secondary learning effect. Or your implements that you use might require knowledge... what they do, why they're there, etc. But gaming is not about facts, largely. It's about optimizing for a viable solution when an optimal solution is not apparent. In other words, if you wanted to teach airflow to kids, you could show them diagrams and sheets and stuff, or you could have them build an airplane in software and see how far they all fly. In the former case, they might memorize the theory. In the latter, they'll gain an intuitive sense for the forces involved.

It doesn't make sense to offload some things onto gaming. The raw facts of history, for example, is generally poorly taught by gaming. Just look at all of the world war 2 games out there, and how little the players understand the intricacies of that political and physical conflict. But by the same token one only has to look as far as Sim City players to see people beginning to come to grips with the intricacies of local politics. And no matter how many training videos you show someone, they're really not going to become good drivers unless you put them in front of a simulator.

Really, the question should be "how applicable is this particular subject / piece of information to teaching this subject." If you wanted to teach how a nuclear power plant works, a videogame about a nuclear meltdown would be entirely appropriate. If you wanted to teach about immigration patterns in the US in the 1700's, videogaming would be less useful.

Gaming is the ability to poke at something and have that change the outcome. Again, this is perfect for finding out how something works. This is not so useful for learning what happened. If that's your goal, just make / use a video.

To those who say that the kids never remembered the extra historical facts from Oregon Trail: How much of the other junk you learned at that time do you remember?

Re:is this bad?

[thinsoldier]

Actually during the summer between 4th and 5th grade I met a family who every other year made their kids attend summer school so that when regular school started they would be well ahead of everyone else. The benefit the kids saw in this was the freedom to stay home from school sometimes 3 days a week if they felt like it. And even though the missed days had an adverse effect on their report cards due to school rules regarding perfect attendance, they were still the top students in their school up until the 6th grade. So really they worked longer and harder so they could take whole days off to stay at home and play.

From the article: "games will turn kids onto the idea of learning, and eventually lead them back to books."

I normally laugh at these silly suggestions to replace books with software and games but that line there made me realize something. My little brother is far from a good student, but the amount of time and effort and research and reading and not taking he puts into learning the latest video games is at least 5 times more work than he ever puts into book reports, essays, or coursework. Even I actually spent every free moment I could for 5 months mastering Killer Instinct back in the day. I've had jobs doing pc repair, graphic design, web design, and programming and I must honestly say that I would know NOTHING about computers or the jobs I've had that relied on computers if it weren't for:
Doom, Quake 1, Duke Nukem, Redneck Rampage, zsnes, mame, mugen, starcraft, sim city, quake 3, half life, descent, unreal, ut99, and others, and the countless mods and scripts and skins other extras related to many of them. PC Games taught me how to tinker, how to learn via trial and error, how to research, the basics of how to code, the power of simple text files, how to fix and upgrade a machine just to play a game, art and design, what makes a user interface useful, how to type, and probably lots of other stuff

Re:Reality Check Time

[mctk]

I'll agree to this "holding teachers accountable" business if I get to hold my school district accountable. You can "hold me accountable" if:

• I get to charge the district for all my overtime. I'm contracted for 37.5 hours a week. I work an average of 52 hours a week. The longest break I get is 20 minutes, if I lock my door shut during lunch period. I get time-and-a-half for the three to hours I put in every Sunday.
• I get to charge the district for all of my personal money I spend on supplies. This includes tissues, pens, pencils, notebooks, markers, batteries for calculators, cleaner, and pies (for pi day!)
  
• My school gets a full time counselor.
  
• I have an administrator who does more than stop by for 13 minutes, then leave a two page report, highlighting mostly, the lack of student work on my walls.
• I have time to sit and talk with my colleagues about students, school issues, and curriculum planning. "Time" is defined as contiguous periods longer than 7 minutes in length.
• The school district agrees that art is an integral part of the curriculum and begins bringing back art offerings to every school.

Whew. Sorry. Rant. Yes, hold teachers accountable. Honestly, I don't mind. I'm proud of my work. However, teachers are not the problem. A good 85% of us are working to the threshold of exhaustion all year.

We should think about the university system. Why don't we yell about holding professors accountable? Cause if they suck, you go to a different school. I think we need to look into bringing that model to public schools.

Re:Why are we doing this?

[blacklint]

Science sure is interesting when shown to be. And, in case you wanted to know, i'm a current high school student (at a Catholic school).
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In my middle school, a retired teacher came back to teach an extra science course before regular classes started. He taught us all kinds of things, all hands on. We soldered together electronic kits, dissected animals (including a shark one of his friends caught... who needs preservatives), fermented wine from raisins, distilled it into alcohol, then burned it, made a barometer by pouring mercury into tubing, showed that there is a limit to how high you can lift water through suction by running a really long straw to the roof and having us try, exploding hydrogen balloons, and more...

Much of this wasn't exactly "safe", but that's what made it exciting. We all missed a bit of sleep in the morning, but loved it. Mr Zucca, you will always have a place in my heart.
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In either 7th or 8th grade (or both, I can't remember if one was outside of class time or not), one entire trimester of science was dedicated to doing a science fair project. Both of mine were on coilguns. Although I got a lot (and I do mean a lot) of assistance from my father that most kids wouldn't get, I can say that I learned a lot about electricity and magnetism. Winning 1st at county and 3ed at the regional science fairs wasn't bad either.
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Skip forward a few grades to my current junior year, in which my school entered the FIRST Robotics Competition for the first time. In this competition I learned way more about the disciplines involved in building a robot than I could have otherwise. Mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, building a drivetrain, pneumatics, sensors, control systems, just everything. Teamwork, planning, meeting deadlines, working with your allies, strategising, and emergency last minute repairs are all part of this competition. And as the team's programmer, I got my introduction to writing code for embedded systems, a field I may end up pursuing.

We all had a blast designing and building our robot during the six weeks from the kickoff to the ship date. Not much else would keep us at school until eight or nine at night while learning the whole time. Seeing this thread has made me realize what FIRST is really about; Dean Kamen's (the founder's) speeches now make sense. It's about getting us interested in science and technology, and that's exactly what it does. If you happen to be in a position where you could support this organization, whether you work in a high school (or even middle school... look into the FIRST Lego or VEX challenges), a company that can provide parts or sponsor a team with the support of engineers, or hold a public office, I would strongly advise you to look into this great organization.

And in case you are wondering, I'm on the FIRST Robotics Competition team 2144 from Sacred Heart in Atherton, CA. Our RadBot ended up being the highest seeded robot built by a rookie team in the Silicion Valley Regional, coming in at 11th out of 48 attending teams. We even got to be one of the 8 teams to pick our alliance members going into the finals. Victory in our first quarter final against the number one seeded alliance, when Woodside (team 100) fell over, was one of the greatest rushes in our lives. They came back strong and won the next two matches (moving on to the semifinals), but this competition was easily the most exciting thing I've ever done.
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So back on topic, student involvement is the only way to way to keep kids interested in subjects. Simply having books just doesn't cut it. And as much as I loved the Oregon Trail in elementary school, more games isn't the way to go. Hands on activities and larger projects are. In some subjects (sciences especially), this is relatively easy. In others (such as history or math) it's harder, but still doable. Small things like trying to make a hypercube out of pasta and marshmallows can make all the difference.

Education police is truly amazing.

[SmallFurryCreature]

There was once a system that worked, they changed it, it no longer worked. So you then reverse the change to undo the damage and kill of the people who suggested the change and anyone who in future suggests doing similar changes right?

Offcourse not, that would be sensible, instead you chase the dream, you ask the same people who made the bad changes to come up with yet more changes.

Games in the classroom. Real world problems. Right.

The biggest problem in education right now is the believe that all kids are equal. They are not. Some kids are smart, some are stupid. Some kids like to study, some do not. Some kids are favor the soft subjects, some the hard sciences. Trying to create a one size fits all system is NOT going to work.

In the netherlands there used to be a simple system, you had the LTS/MTS/HTS wich stand for Lower/Middle/Higher Technical School and LEAO/MAVO/HAVO/University were the A stand for administrative. Basically the plumber and the engineer go to the technical schools, the shop assistent and manager go to the administrative school.

ADD and all that crap? Simple go to the T school and 24 hours of shop class a week will take care of it enough that the remaining hours can be spend on theory. Within each school there is still a system of grades so that the brightest students get more theory. A top LTS student was of higher caliber then a top MAVO student. Both got roughly the same level of theory BUT the LTS student did that on top of the practical lessons.

But in the idea that all kids should be molded in to the same standard shape these two system were merged, it had wonderfull results. Drop out rates sored, scores dropped and companies complain that school leavers have no skills. Wonderfull!

EVERYONE in the teaching proffesion itself has warned that this would happen, and now when it is examined why the change happened you get a nasty story off backroom deals and the idea that just a handfull of people decided to experiment with an entire generation of kids.

It don't work, BUT to admit that now would mean that you would have to go against the whole system, any party that suggests going to back to the old system would be forced to say that they got it badly wrong and offcourse that just isn't done.

So we muddle through applying bandaid after bandaid and hope for a miracle.

Might childeren learn from a computer game. Well, early learning is a game so the idea has some appeal BUT real life is NOT a game. So sooner or later kids are going to have to learn an important lesson, that they are now at work and no, there is no recess, no school holidays, that getting suspended means being fired and that basically playtime is over and get your ass to work and nobody gives a shit about your ADD or emotional needs.

I don't think many employers think that this learning experience should come on the workfloor.

One recent example I come across of how badly schools prepare kids for real life is this. A class is 50 minutes yet the schedule is based on a full hour, leaving 10 minutes time between classes, wich are needed to move between classrooms. Sensible, to a point. Shopclass for instance is several hours in the same classroom so the 10 minutes are then for some reason used as a break. This is very nice, and in previous decades was all right, since on the workfloor this is also the custom, every hour there used to be a coffee break. However the laws on the working times have changed with the goverment not laying down the law as hard anymore with the idea that workers and employers could figure it out themselves. Yeah right. If they could there woudn't have been a need for the laws in the first place.

Nowadays typical hours in simple jobs are 2.5 hours of work followed by a break. If you stand on your stripes and demand it. Kids used to a 10 minute break every hour and the light workload of a school shopclass are in for a rude suprise.

Learning in a video game why the fish in the park are dying? Yeah, there is a real

About time already !

[unity100]

Now see, in 15th century printing press and the paper were the big thing - new technological stuff that made it possible for knowledge to be more easily transferred. This has resulted in the world we know today.

Today, we have graphics, sound, internet, computer. These are the big thing now.

We need to use them just as people used printing press back then - as the primary source of spreading information, and education.

There is a forced inclination to think that 'people should read books'. We have to give that up. The book concept is being conferred much more importance than the value it provides as a medium. It can easily be said that the importance conferred comes more from traditional conditioning of 'books are good' (correct at any date pre-1997) than the actual value books carry in disseminating information and education today.

Visual aids are ALWAYS better. This is why we had illustrations on any printed material during the course of history whenever it was possible. Today we have virtualization, games, sound, graphics, anything you can imagine to make the utopic futuristik education themes in sci-fi movies come true.

And we should do as such, for faster, better and less stress-inducing teaching of children.