Slashdot Mirror
Learning By Playing
theodp writes "This week's NY Times Magazine — a special issue on education and technology — is tailor-made for the Slashdot crowd. For the cover story, Sarah Corbett explores the games-and-education movement, which she notes is alive and well at Quest to Learn, a NYC middle-school that aims to make school nothing less than 'a big, delicious video game.' Elsewhere in the issue, Paul Boutin writes about Microsoft's efforts to inspire The 8-Year-Old Programmer with its Kodu Project, and Nicholas Carlson reports on Columbia University's efforts to mix journalism and hard-core computer science with its unique dual-degree master's in journalism and CS. There's also an accompanying timeline that nicely illustrates how learning machines have progressed from the Horn-Book to the iPad."
Educational games tend to be pretty pathetic, but if you do any crafting in MMOs you'll find that some basic math skills are a big help. I'm sure that if you put higher forms of math, navigation, economics and social politics into an MMO, its players would quickly pick up on these concepts. As they are now, I don't think it's a very efficient way to learn. If you also added some tools and some tutorials for those things into the game, you might be able to make the learning process more efficient. Hell, they put protein folding into a game and made it fun, so I'm sure it could be done.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Why would you complicate things like that? And wouldn't the children without much ability to put themselves in another's shoes and ability to abstract be quite disadvantaged by a method of teaching like that? It's just the kind of "muddy" mixed-up way of teaching which I loathed in school - like mathbooks wich used such heavy layers of methaphor and allegory (to teach the kids to "use their skills in real life?") that getting a fix on the underlying system was 5x the normal work. This was fortunately absent from the physics books. When I got my college algebra textbook it was a godsend.
Emotions! In your brain!
I'm not so sure about Kudu and the ilk. The problem I have with it is that it isn't programming. The description of Kudu from the article (making a motorcycle racing game) sounds an awful lot like Racing Destruction Set or that Hypercard adventure game authoring tool I had for Macintosh that lead to some truly dreadful games. Also, I find the idea that you need some gimmicky, technicolor GUI for an 8-year-old to explore programming is a tad insulting to the 8-year-olds. I started learning Commodore-64 Basic when I was 6, and actually wrote a mildly sophisticated database program for my Little League Baseball team when I was 8 or 9. From the comments I've seen on Slashdot, my experience is certainly not unique. I think if I had started with Kudu I would have gotten bored and moved on. I'm an engineer now, largely I think from my childhood goofing about with computers.
I can't remember the name, but I saw a great book written by a Dad and his son about Python. I think that is a much better exploration into computers than Kudu.
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I have a three year old daughter and she was playing with an old educational toy when I realized that you could take it apart, see how it works and put it back together again. It wasn't designed for that but there were plenty of parts in it. You can't do that with most modern toys. They're just discrete pieces of silicon. Very little of interest or use is contained in them.
The problem with this type of "research" is that it's finding excuses to give kids sugar rather than discipline them so they eat real food.
Success is no longer defined by the amount of learning that is happening but by the lack of discipline problems that occur while the learning is occurring. Sugar shuts the kids up so that's success.
Schools need to stop encouraging the attitude that education begins and ends with a bell. If schools focused on reading, writing and math then students could find and learn about their own personalized interests outside of class.
Work Safe Porn
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But what I see in the video does not look like a game that integrates learning; it looks like a series of bribes between homework sessions.
That's interesting that you say that. That is the exact thing we are trying to avoid. :) I remember when I first heard about this company and I looked at the website and the videos and I thought some of the same things you have said. Then I started to play the game and more importantly I watched children play the game and then I saw the value in the game. Many of the youtube videos on the site are there to give a quick overview of the game and show the different levels. If you go to the teacher page and look up the setup video you will see how the game tries to be more than a bribe. We try to integrate playing and learning into the same thing. So, please try the free version, which has all the education of the upgraded version just not as many environments, and if you have any suggestions please send us an email. We love all the suggestions we can get.
Also, I haven't seen StarFall so I will have to take a look at that. Thanks for the suggestion.
Why must one side frame games as "The work of the devil, corrupting our youth!!!1" and the other as "The university of life, teaching useful skills!!!1"? Can't we all just be reasonable people and say "Games are games, they are only supposed to be fun. If some people are able to learn from them, that's good for them (I know I have done, but not everyone can, so don't abolish schools just yet). If some people are homicidal maniacs, it's because they are homicidal maniacs, it's not because of the games they play."? We don't need to pass games off as good or evil.
I might not be the only one, but I grew up playing games in English and I believe most of my learning experience in this language was based on the challenges those games brought on me. I mean, I was 10 or so when I finished Crystalis and Zelda on the NES and I remember finding myself thinking/playing in English when my school friends were learning "my name is...". I think there are fields (like idioms) which can greatly benefit from games, like history, geography. But in the case of mathematics, which requires a great deal of practice not so much.
The problem with injecting math, social politics, etc, into games like MMOs is that the problems to be solved are "constructed"—that is, the lesson to be learned has to be presented as a specific obstacle to be overcome. The criteria to get the reward behind that obstacle has to be defined; essentially, there's right and wrong answers and the reward is not generally connected to the problem in an organic way.
I'll use a simple example for illustrative purposes...remember Math Blaster? If you've ever played it, you get a math problem across the top of the screen and different answers to it fall down. You sit at the bottom in a little Space Invaders-like spaceship blasting away. Shoot the right answer, get points.
Why does this game suck? Because the problem-solving element of solving the math problems is not connected to game play; in fact, game play exists only as an artifice to get you to solve the math problems. One doesn't advance in the game because the result of the equation was useful (other than adding to your score, of course).
Contrast this with an organically presented problem, where your character is standing in a train station, confronted with having to make a decision about how to get somewhere in the game world by a certain time. The player has to run around and get the info from the train schedules, maybe it makes sense to wait for the bullet train that skips stops, maybe it makes sense to wait for a cab to come even if it costs a little extra money. In this way, game play is actually advanced by working out the problem.
Of course, this kind of game play has drawbacks. You can't usually present a binary right/wrong answer—problems that arise organically usually have solutions that present in degrees. One consequence of this is that most of the time you can't force every player to deal with the problem at all, some will find a way to avoid it entirely. The other issue is that it's hard to differentiate between solving a problem based on understanding and solving a problem by finding the answer. You could, for example, find a way for a complex calculus problem to arise naturally in your game, but you have to make sure the player's success is based on deep understanding of the solution, not the player's ability to pull up Wolfram|Alpha and get an answer.
but have you considered the following argument: shut up.
toward the medium of games as an educational tool. I'm in the field, and many people who are taken seriously talk about games used properly as a tool by educators and caregivers. This is a relatively new medium that needs to be researched and experimented with so we can establish how it is most effective for different subjects and in different situations.
Here are some of the challenges in this field as I see it:
- Most educational games are made in silos. Games made by publishers are mostly reused engines or game designs with an educational goal slapped on (many edu games for young kids on Nintendo DS are like this). Games made by researchers and educators are generally some sort of mix of whatever subject they're interested in and whatever game that is big at the time. The truly effective and fun educational games are often made when good game designers, researchers and educators collaborate from the beginning of a project.
- Due to the fact that people are working in silos, researchers working the edu game field are often working to figure out game design issues that the non-edu game field covered long ago.
- My work is in the preschool - grade school edu game field and I work with top publishers and content owners. Most of the people I work with, especially decision makers and content people, do not and have not ever played games. I think this will even out over time as younger people who are more likely to play games come into the field, but it will take decades.
- Games are just a tool. We need the pedagogy established to help teachers understand how to use the medium. Until we have this available to all educators, game use will be all over the place.
- We need an established body of good examples in different subject areas and for different ages for future game makers to refer to when making edu games. This will take decades to create in my opinion.
To reiterate my main point, games are just a tool like books, video, hands on activities, etc. They are only as good as the educator or caregiver who is working with the student makes them.
Some healthy skepticism is in order. Too often games or game design is just used as a form of entertainment to spice up seemingly dull topics such as math and science. It does not have to be this way. We find that when providing students with the right support they can do amazing things. For instance, we have all these middle school students build sophisticated games including AI base on diffusion equations. That is certainly not sugar. Moreover, we can now begin to measure transfer of game design skills to making science simulations. Pretty exciting stuff. You can see some girls using AgentSheets to build BP oil spill simulations. They started by making 1980 style arcade games. http://www.news8austin.com/content/headlines/272429/congressman-visits-girlstart-summer-camp
No technology involved at all, but students are forced to learn the material in unusual ways- rather than lecture and ask them to regurgitate on a test, I've got students who will have to defend intellectual positions against attacks from other students. (And they will attack- they get bonus points for meeting their objectives, and the games are designed with winners and losers)
The short game (around the decision to de-planetize Pluto) worked pretty well and they're set to start Tuesday on the long form game about the decision to award Darwin a medal from the Royal Society. Crossing my fingers on this one- there's some stuff that's tough to understand, and I've got 16 first-years teaching it all to each other (with a little coaching outside the class :^)
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"