Limits of Educational Gaming
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.
That having been said, it doesn't make sense to offload certain 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. They probably know that D-day was either the first or the hardest level out there, or that general Patton was an olden-day George Bush, but otherwise they remain uninformed about what actually happened.. 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 kids to play around with chemical reactions in a controlled environment, a digichemset game could be a lot of fun. 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. This is perfect for finding out how something works. What happens to a car when you pull out this bit? What happens to a robot when you cut out that routine? Sadly, this is not so useful for learning what has happened, except in the aforementioned incidental way. If that's your goal, consider making / using a video. But if you want to teach something that students should or might do, video games are a great medium.
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.
That having been said, it doesn't make sense to offload certain 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. They probably know that D-day was either the first or the hardest level out there, or that general Patton was an olden-day George Bush, but otherwise they remain uninformed about what actually happened.. 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 kids to play around with chemical reactions in a controlled environment, a digichemset game could be a lot of fun. 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. This is perfect for finding out how something works. What happens to a car when you pull out this bit? What happens to a robot when you cut out that routine? Sadly, this is not so useful for learning what has happened, except in the aforementioned incidental way. If that's your goal, consider making / using a video. But if you want to teach something that students should or might do, video games are a great medium.
posted by Chris at
3:00 AM
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