The use of gaming in the classroom

This week I wanted to discuss briefly the use of gaming in the classroom. This was sparked both by the article "Gaming the Future" by Jonah Kokodyniak and Barry Joseph and the fact that there is a long history of using computer games in the classroom, especially the elementary classroom (see The Oregon Trail, Number Munchers and many other games from the MECC legacy).

"Gaming the Future" does a great job of demonstrating why the idea of scalability isn't all it's cracked up to be (see "Lessons Learned from Studying How Innovations Can Achieve Scale" by Christopher Dede and Saul Rockman) in the educational context. Indeed, even in this article which tries desperately to show that gaming is a scalable educational innovation they end up admitting that their particular implementation doesn't scale well and significant compromises would have to be made for it to be a scalable project.

The tactic they used to capitalize on students' interest in gaming was to have the students help design a game which would bring global issues to light. Their is no doubt that this can be a successful project -- in small and localized cases. The problem is that game design (at least for the sort of interesting games that students are thinking about and would want to play) takes a significant amount of computer programming skill -- much more than the average, or even exceptional, high schooler would have. In the case examined the school was able to partner with a game design company which supplied most of the labor to put the students' ideas into a workable game but obviously this is not scalable as it would be impossible to find companies willing to dedicate entire teams of game developers to work gratis on a project with high schoolers year after year at every school around the country or even more than a handful.

The idea of having students develop a game is a good one, but perhaps the barriers to entry in computer games (at least as students envision them) is simply too high. The authors suggest alternative solutions such as developing a game inside of "Second Life" but I still feel the result will not achieve the goal of retaining student interest because what they want to do is either too complicated for the medium or still too difficult for them to program on their own. Thus we are left to fall back on what the authors suggest as something which is scalable, the playing of educational games.

The idea of using computer games for educational purposes is no new idea. From the early 1970s through the late 1990s the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC) led the way in developing computer games for classroom use including such classics as The Oregon Trail, Number Munchers, Word Munchers and lesser known titles such as Museum Madness. While theses games were (and are) both popular and educational MECC is no more having been sold to commercial vendor The Learning Company in the late 1990s (which in turn was sold to Riverdeep which also holds Broderbund meaning it has a monopoly on almost all classic educational software titles).

My experience with educational software titles is that they do hold student interest and the can teach important concepts. That said they are not very efficient teachers of concepts. Most educational software titles focus on a fairly specific skill or skill set and level yet students must often play the game for many hours to learn all of these concepts thoroughly. It ends up taking much longer than other teaching methods leading me to conclude that educational games are a welcome and educational distraction, may teach some technology skills, reinforce critical thinking skills and so are potentially useful on a limited basis but are not "the future of education" or any of the other things they are occasionally claimed to be. Expecting that students will learn everything (or even large amounts) taught in a classroom setting through games is either naive or wishful but not realistic.