It’s hard to believe that it was only two years ago that SITE started the IT Council committee on Games & Simulations. While mainstream acceptance of games as an educational medium is still a ways off; certainly, the role of games as a social phenomenon is now better understood. Just consider the past holiday season that saw an epic struggle among three boxes—PS 2, X-Box and Wii. The loser in that battle sold billions of dollars, while the winner sold billions more.
Did you know that 1/3 of today’s parents are gamers? (Makes sense when we consider that gamers are often classified as those 36 or younger. Weren’t 36 year olds classified as middle aged just a few years ago; now they’re gamers?) And, increasingly, games have migrated away from game “boxes” (such as those described above) to cell phones, iPods, and PDA’s.
As they have done for millennia, people continue find ways to play games and engage in simulations using devices that were designed for other purposes. For example, one of the seminal moments in our recent iStory Tour: Costa Rica trip was our discovery of geocache. Geocaching is a type of simulated treasure hunt using GPS devices. (Actually, it’s not all that simulated!) We simply learned what many others had already found out: with the proper imagination, you can turn almost anything into a game, and learn something along the way.
The phenomenon of online social gaming, where tens of thousands of people are at play at any given time 24/7 is close to mind boggling. Would tens of thousands of students spontaneously gather together to do homework? In fact, today’s youth are much more likely to play a game than they are to watch TV.
As a number of presenters have shared with us at SITE and similar conferences over the years, the cognitive processing involved in gaming is quite complex, and could (and often does) lead to rich learning. In the end, we’d make schools much more effective learning environments if we could harness the power of games as rich classroom tools.
While it does appear that SITE’s recognition of games and simulations as rich learning tools was percipient, it seems that almost every week we read some story about another educator discovering the power of games as educational tools. However, at the 2007 conference, we should maintain our vigilance to continue to find rich and meaningful ways to connect with today’s learners.
What do you think?
Mike Searson
P.S. Please take a look at Wes Freyer’s blog where he’s recently posted some great discussions on gaming. (Wes, of course, has been instrumental in maintaining this SITE blog.)
I found that games and simulations,were so effective while in the classroom that I started early thinking about this topic.
The educational landscape has changed so we have a deficit in funding to purchase games, but some states are using open source to create applications for teachers and then, teaching
the teachers about newer ways to teach children.
There is a problem.
I lurk on a lot of games listservs. I don’t say much because I am learning.
I don’t attend the conferences because they are a bit pricy, and at this time in education though the US DOE does have some games in education, we have the elephant in the room. It is called NCLB. I wish the games developers had
scholarships for the education community.
I actually enter the discussions from time to time, but
the gamers listservs are pretty hard core and they are not necessarily in love with educators or any comments from educators.
When I talk to educators about exciting ideas, programs, projects, in the
field of education they say, oh yeah.. but you are not teaching and you don’t have to teach to the test. Can you say NCLB they say?
I watched educators walk out of a speech by a noted futurist. He was talking about constructivism, creativity, spacial learning and that kind of stuff. I don’t think they understood him. I saw the same speaker at the SuperComputer conference a month later, and people were excited and engaged while he was talking.
Who was this thinker?
Ray Kurzwell
Ray Kurzweil was the principal developer of the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition. Ray has successfully founded and developed nine businesses in OCR, music synthesis, speech recognition, reading technology, virtual reality, financial investment, cybernetic art, and other areas of artificial intelligence . All of these technologies continue today as market leaders. Ray’s Web site, KurzweilAI.net, is a leading resource on artificial intelligence.
Maybe in a no child left behind world. Creativity, inventioneering and thinking about things don’t work. Teachers may be too tired teaching to the test to hear his message.
At FETC there was another way in which resources that were visualization and modeling were introduced but games were only the bubble gum kind, that is on CD’s that were practice for basic skills.
Perhaps someday in the future, someone will create a game that takes the metadata that we want children to learn, and we can use the games to let children step through learning using various learning styles, embedded assessment, and
engaging ways of educational involvement.
Bonnie Bracey Sutton
Bonnie,
I find it interesting that you say that you found games “so effective while in the classroom.” When I was a classroom teacher, I, too, used games, and found them to be wonderful learning tools. In fact, there were ways you could connect games to some basic skills. For example, since I taught young children, skills such as color recognition, number and letter identification were deemed important by many people. I could easily have students play games like Candy Land, Chutes & Ladders, and various Bingo games (dating myself here!), and they would readily pick up these skills without formal instruction. (There’s a tremendous amount of scaffolding in such environments; for example, in Candy Land, one student may say to another “No silly, that’s ‘purple,’ not ‘blue.’”) And, it goes without saying how rich games and simulations are in extending higher order learning.
As you point out, while classroom teachers may find intrinsic value in the use of games and simulations, such an approach to learning receives little formal attention, especially in an NCLB environment. There’s not much to disagree about your point. It is frustrating. Ironically, a couple of years ago at a National Technology Leadership Summit, while Susan Patrick (then head honcho for ed tech) was addressing us in DC, she mentioned the value of games as an educational tool. Of course, nothing ever came of that. We never saw a call by NCLB to include games and simulations as powerful learning tools.
Yet, in my original posting on this topic, I attempt to make the point that K-12 schools are one of the few institutions yet to welcome games and simulations. Certainly, in the home and entertainment industries, they’re omnipresent. And in the business world, science, and mathematics, they are widely used as modeling tools. I remember a couple of years ago, at SITE, Joel Forman did a wonderful presentation where he indicated that the Department of Defense had invested $6 million in a single simulation that was used to training soldiers in contemporary warfare. Joel ended by asking if there would ever be a time that the US DOE (not the US DOD) would put out a $6 million RFP asking for someone to develop an effective game to be used in contemporary education.
Until that happens, we must continue to fight for such learning experiences that resonate so well with 21st learners. Consider the slide that I’ve posted, indicating how disconnected today’s students are with formal education. We must work together to remedy that. And one approach is for educators to catch up with the 21st century tools that students are using to learn in every environment but the classroom.
Mike
Two different thoughts about gaming for you folks…
1.) I’m on a Star Schools QA board and a few weeks ago spent the day looking at their new (federally funded) products. They were doing shoot-um-up games with space aliens! It was shocking to me that these folks were building (with my tax dollars) simple games that were the same design I’d seen back when Apple II was the educational norm. These were suppose to help middle grade students in SES programs improve their math skills. Clearly I dinged them in my review. But, if that is what some developers think the K-12 market needs we’re in trouble. BTW these developers were higher ed folks with a track record in education.
2.) Totally different thing. Here’s an interesting approach to the use of gaming. http://www.afmpgame.com/game_info.shtml I think once you look at it, however, you’ll see why it won’t be used in K-12 schools. At least not any public schools I know of. On the other hand, it should be an interesting project for anyone interested in studying the use of games for learning.
Great points!
Your final sentence in point #1 explains an awful lot: educators trying to make games. Perhaps, we need game makers trying to create classrooms! I have no doubt that there’s a tremendous amount of learning in games and simulations–it’s just not the type of learning most people are comfortable with—which is captured by your second point.
Two years ago at SITE, Ann DeMarle, who was recently made endowed chair and director of the Emergent Media Center at Champlain College in Vermont (way to go, Ann!), made a presentation at SITE. Ann would immediately tell you that she is a game designer, not an educator. That’s what she told me when I asked her to join our panel (at the time Ann was Director of the Multimedia and Graphic Design). Yet, DeMarle’s presentation “What Educators Can Learn from Game Developers?” was illuminating. In fact, if for every time she used the phrase, the “development of a game,” we substituted “the development of curriculum,” we’d have quite a pedagogical model. Ann spoke about how game makers attempt to make their environments engaging, interactive, fun for participants, clear-cut goals with feedback loops (assessment), and so on.
I am, of course simplifying your points, but imagine if we were in a forced-choice situation: Would it be better for educators to create games or for game-makers to create classrooms? It’s not simply that games and simulations are fun, entertaining, and engaging to students; they are also powerful pedagogical models.
Mike
I am involved in a vle called ‘Secondlife’(R). I have started a group in the world for gaming and learning initiatives. Please visit and contact me with your thoughts either in world (im Jeremy Braver) or email me at jeremykoester@gmail.com. Make sure that you put on your dreamer’s goggles and ask lots of questions. I would also encourage anyone interested to check out a hub for educational uses of Secondlife at http://www.simteach.com/
Jeremy,
What a great resource! I particularly like the forum on “Second Life Educators.” Thanks to the efforts of one of the Games & Simulations ITC members Sean McKay, we plan to launch a Second Life presence this year’s conference. You may be interested in participating in that. Stay tuned for more details.
Thanks,
Mike
Hi Jeremy, It’s good to hear from you. I’ve enjoyed reading about your work on the SLED listserv. I’ll be announcing a group in-world for the Site Gaming and Simulation ITC soon. I’m looking forward to collaborating together with colleagues from Site on how we can leverage SL as a learning platform.
–Sean (SL: EdTek Xeno)