EIF: Guitar Hero, Nintendogs Better Educational Tools Than 'Serious Games'
August 14, 2008 4:00 PM | Simon Carless
[Another write-up from Scotland via Mathew Kumar and Leigh Alexander, and this one was described as genuinely inspirational from our on the spot reporter - yes, folks, 'regular' games can make an educational difference.]
Instead of making serious games for education, why not embrace traditional gaming to enhance kids' lives?
Much is made of the potential for games to enhance education for today's kids living in a so-called "digital world," but traditional approaches seek to make gaming conform to education. At the Edinburgh Interactive Festival, two innovative teachers suggested that teachers ought to embrace -- and employ -- all the ways in which kids are already playing.
Dr. Graham Brown-Martin is the founder of the Handheld Learning UK organization for research and education, and at the Edinburgh Interactive Festival, he was joined by Learning and Teaching Scotland's Derek Robertson to present a new way to look at games and education that embraces the way kids already play, as an alternative to traditional "edugaming" approaches.
Most students in primary school, Brown-Martin says, own phones, and at least one console, including portables.
The "Digital Divide"
"The PC industry is bending over backwards to be seen as inclusive, but yet mobile and entertainment devices are outselling PCs and laptops by three to one," says Brown-Martin.
"They are more inclusive than any other, and as a result there are powerful devices in the hands of many learners. Good teachers can use off the shelf software as ‘powerful contextual hubs for learning’ in and out of the school."
The education industry, Brown-Martin asserts, expects that "technology happens after you're born." In other words, he says, students live in a tech and media-rich environment -- but find there is a "digital divide" between their experience of learning inside versus outside of school.
"As a consequence, many kids are bored of school," he says -- but adds that this is not about "serious games."
"I have great respect for that industry," says Brown-Martin, "but I think they're still looking for the door marked entry. Serious games are seriously boring.”
Not Learning Games
He explains that bringing off-the-shelf games into the classroom is like bringing a skateboard into a school – it’s not just a toy, you can use it to teach physics, explain the mechanics, and take them apart for rebuilding.
"We're not talking about serious games -- we're talking about game-based learning."
He cites obvious examples like Brain Training, as well as less-obvious ones like Nintendogs, Guitar Hero and Endless Ocean that "offer big improvements in learning without needing to be didactic or boring."
Fellow educator Derek Robertson also agrees. "The domain of the school is presented to kids, but we have to pay more attention to children’s own domains -- in this case merging the games domain and school domain," Robertson says.
Kids pleasantly surprised by the discovery of Guitar Hero, he says, are open to the excitement of writing about and learning more on the musical experience. The impact is particularly significant on at-risk youth, he says, who challenge educators in conventional channels.
"This is to have an understanding that children don't come to school from a vacuum -- they come from homes, a society, a culture, and we have to take this on board," he says. "Children come to school from a world where everything involves technology. Schools dismiss this, and will become irrelevant if they don't pay attention.”
The Nintendogs Budget
As a result, Learning and Teaching Scotland have created The Consolarium, a Scottish center for games and learning. Robertson brings educational managers from regional councils and encourages them to try hands-on with current games to think about how they can be used for learning.
"They come in with their power suits on and go, ‘what is this pish?’ -- and walk out raving," says the ebullient Robertson.
And it’s not all anecdotal – Learning and Teaching Scotland is measuring the impact of these games on learning. After measuring the impact of Brain Training on children’s arithmetic across a 10-week study - 20-25 minutes in the morning with one brain age check per week compared with a class not using Nintendo, the pre versus post scores "rocketed up" from 20 percent scores to over 65 percent in tests.
Kids also worked on their math skills by using their budgets in Nintendogs to calculate how much they'd need to get the pet accessories they wanted, and honed writing skills as they blogged about their experiences raising the virtual dogs.
The message to educators is to embrace, not dismiss off-the-shelf games, says Robertson. "Be wary of the development of 'worthy' education games," he warns. "Kids can spot the phony."
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4 Comments
There are quite a few things wrong with Robertson's stated conclusions. Learning has many different modes and methodologies, as does teaching. The examples he gives are for teaching simple concepts, nothing more -- not content. They are teaching learning methods, but not actual learning. You can't apply that approach to substantive knowledge acquisition such as learning a language, mathematics, history or science. I might learn the concept of war from playing Civilization, but no one is going to learn the facts, dates, personal histories or politics of an actual war by battling an AI opponent. Games are greatly simplified environments designed to SHORTCUT the learning process, not to extend it. He's being glib and disingenuous by suggesting that learning budgeting with Nintendogs is the end of serious games, and that learning the concept is equal to learning actual facts. Learning does not always have to be fun, and will never be entirely fun -- you DO need to learn lists of facts, and you can't escape the need to know and memorize large amounts of information in order to be able to APPLY the concepts you are taught.
Michael Eilers | August 14, 2008 8:13 PM
As someone working on (both) "serious games" and games for learning, I have to say Robertson and Brown-Martin have a point.
The problem is that learning content is not really "learning" per se. For anyone who claims it is, well, I have a wonderful "learning machine" on which I am typing this comment (and so do you). Content learning is like fat in food - it's good to have, but too much (and not enough of the other stuff) will seriously mess you up. Unfortunately, schools since time immemorial have been feeding their kids the intellectual equivalent of deep-fried Twinkies, with the caveat that they aren't even particularly tasty.
Rather than teaching kids to repeat some facts about science (for instance), or even to act like a scientist, what schools need to do is to teach them to *think* like scientists. For those readers who happen to be programmers, tell me: which of the following people would you call a programmer?
1. a person who has to read a book to look up every reserved word and function call, but can program on his own once he's looked it up, or
2. a person who knows every function header in every library by heart, but doesn't understand how to put them together to solve problems?
Now, content learning has its place, but it's not nearly as important as people assume it to be. To add to that, studies have shown that kids in games-for-learning programmes tend to develop an interest in the content (see Kurt Squire's work). It's entirely possible that using games will allow us, as educators, to have our cake and eat it too - which is why it's worth studying, to see whether we can do it, and how we should go about doing it.
n.n | August 14, 2008 10:35 PM
In order to be considered competent (not even fluent) in the Chinese language, I have to memorize and understand 10,000 to 20,000 characters. I cannot accomplish this by learning how to "think like a Chinese person." I still have to do the actual grunt work of knowledge acquisition. I think your argument above is well-reasoned, but ultimately just as bogus. No amount of conceptual knowledge is a substitute for the underpinning content, and you cannot derive the content just by understanding the concept.
Let's say I know the scientific method, and have been taught how to "think like a scientist." Great. Now I want to work on genetics, but cracking that big dusty book by Crick and Watson is just too much work, so I am going to throw some pea plants in a test tube and see what happens. OR, I could spend a few years familiarizing myself with the actual fact and content underpinnings of the field, and then avoid reinventing the wheel and pick up where they left off.
The idea that learning too much content can mess you up is ludicrous -- let's hope your future cardiologist or neurosurgeon wasn't too "messed up" by their decades of studying the gigantic lists of facts and content that make up the body of knowledge about the human body, and and instead they learned how to save your life by waving a Wiimote in "Trauma Center 2."
Michael Eilers | August 15, 2008 7:45 AM
I'm afraid your genetics argument holds no water. If you know the scientific method, and have been taught to "think like a scientist", you would know where to look for the content (Crick and Watson), since part of thinking like a scientist is to study prior work - BUT studying prior work does not subsume the concept of "thinking like a scientist". You would know how to interpret it, as well as how to use that content to perform meaningful experiments. But if you have been taught to memorize Crick and Watson, without any understanding of how a scientist would use that knowledge, you would not know where or how to attain the *understanding* of a scientist. You would not be able to interpret the information except in the most literal sense, you would not be able to perform a single meaningful genetics experiment if your life depended on it - at the most, if you were very lucky, you would be able to replicate the experiments described in the book, without any understanding of what your results meant.
Enough said. I don't have the time or energy to pick apart your other examples, except to point out that the surgeon example is quite wonderfully facile, and that in the same paragraph you grossly misquote me. End of argument.
n.n | August 17, 2008 9:39 PM