Gaming in Education with EdGamer

EdGamer

            EdGamer is a podcast by two teachers who talk about how games – board, video, and otherwise – are used in schools.  In episode 101, they had the pleasure of having James Gee (the Gee-nius) talk with them about his latest book and about how we need to find ways to make smarter students.  Gee brought up the importance of intelligence in our uncertain future.  With big problems like global warming, alternative fuels, and a dropping economy, the world of our students will require them to be creative and capable of intelligently responding to information and their surroundings.

            There was a really cool segment about how we can engage problems with out students.  Since many teachers are not up on the latest technology and troubleshooting, there will always be issues that will take time and expertise to solve.  They brought up an issue with students trying to play minecraft on the school server.  They had to find a way for the kids to build their stuff without having kids from outside the servers coming in and destroying their work.  Rather than banning people, the kids found a way around the problem and solved it on their own.  This is the kind of intelligence and ingenuity that we’re hoping to enable in our students.  This kind of thing isn’t done by having us always solve the problems either.  I know I’ve learned more than a few things about computers after having to figure out a few workarounds on my own.  And it’s so much more rewarding.

            If you want to hear about some opinions about how games work with school, give it a listen.  It’s more of a news format, but the discussions with the interviewees are really engaging.

Learning How to Play

(Concerning class #4)

How Can Video Games Model Learning for Us?

            Video games do an amazing thing.  They can take us from our rooms or a busy arcade into a different world.  Like a storybook, they can engage our imagination and let us interact with a world of hypotheticals.  What if you were one of the teenage mutant ninja turtles and had to fight off bad guys?  What if you were in control of how a military base was controlled and strategy was enacted?  What if animals could manipulate the elements and animal fighting rings existed all over the country legally?  They can get us to imagine complex things, and they can do that by teaching us as we go.

            Video games model so many parts of effective learning – tutorials to introduce you to the basic mechanics, the benefit of repetition to get better or pass some tricky assessment, gradually developing/scaffolding knowledge for you as you need it, and drawing you in to identify as the character.

            Tutorials – Tutorials allow you to either refresh your skills or get your basic knowledge to a minimum level depending on your prior-knowledge of how the games work.  Whether it’s a refresher or extra help, our students need a way to bring their knowledge up to a certain mark or into working memory.  Even with just a warm-up at the beginning of class, we can get our students engaged and aware of the immediate skills that they will need to develop in the class.

            Repetition – One thing that video games have in spades is a way to make people invest so much time in straight repetition.  One way that they do it is by incremental rewards whether it’s gold, experience, or, for more strategy based games, better ability.  There comes a certain point where training is its own reward.  If you have ever seen a child replaying the same difficult level just to beat the boss, get the badge, or just grinding experience, you know how video games can generate the player’s own motivation.  Though it may be really difficult to implement some kind of achievement board in your classroom for the first time a student read Hamlet or got 100% on a test, simply playing practice review games like facts on the brain can get students having fun doing school in a more relaxed setting.

            Scaffolding – Games normally have different difficulty levels.  Beyond that, unless you are playing at game that shows that some folks can hate humanity like TMNT for the NES, games tend to begin simple to more complex as you go.  Whether it’s starting with minimal variety of enemies, ala tall grass in pokemon, or playing Starcraft where the possible units and enemies gradually become more complex as the game progresses, games give the players the chance and time to start running to catch up with the necessary skills needed in the near future.  Much like this, when we teach math, we ensure kids can recognize and draw letters before we get them to put them in words before we get them to put them in sentences and more complex thought.  A big difference between lesson plans and games is that games are given a thorough beta play-through before they are released to the paying public.  Sadly that requires more funding and time than most teachers get.

            Identity – Whether it’s becoming Cloud in FF7, a green frog in Battletoads, or being whoever you want to be in KOTOR, video games allow the player to put themselves in the shoes of their character.  Now, we can’t all pull a Ralph Phillips and violently subtract life and value from numbers, but it seems the aspect of playful identity is hard to capture.  Schools have been trying to make students see themselves as the protagonist (biologists, mathematicians, authors, etc), but it does make you wonder what more they could do.  Anecdotally at least, when students are required to post blogs or publicly publish, they are more careful and thorough, and this may be because they are aware that their audience could be more than just a teacher but anyone that visits the medium.  For writing, publicly showing yourself as an author seems to engender the identity and thus the attending joys and responsibilities.  I’m not saying that we should fear of social shame as student motivation, but maybe what students need is to know that their school work can matter outside of the building.

Can there be compromise?

            While we can’t make every part of class an eye-popping fun-fest, we should at least take note of what other media are doing well and borrow as applicable.  Much like how you can disagree with someone about Marmite toast, you can still agree that toast is brilliant and use it elsewhere.  Likewise, it’s important to recognize the purpose behind a medium like video games as different from education though there are commonalities.  Because the goals of education and gaming are different, their means will require at least some tweaking though they can still be cousins.

Doubt Even This

(Concerning class #3)

Dropping the Box

            Today, we presented different potential tools for use in and out of the classroom.  I personally would recommend DropBox as a way to sync your computers together and minimize the time spent loading flashdrives with particular files every morning.  It’s a handy way to make sure that you have access to the important files you use on a daily basis even if you have to borrow a friends laptop.  If you’re working at school, you could sync your account with the computer at work and have access to your lesson plans, notes, and printable handouts at a convenient requirement of internet access.  The downside is that if you’re out of internet access at work or home, you’re pretty much up a fecal crick in a rudderless toboggan.  Overall though, I’ve got to give it props.

Don’t Believe Half of What You Read But I’m Not Saying Which Half

            One of our major discussions was about how we can encourage critical thought when it comes to sources.  How can students know to trust an article in Nature over The Daily Mail?  Is that even a good example?  Because kids are told that they can trust their text books unless the teacher has to correct answers in the back or go on a diatribe about how George Washington and a cherry tree was apocryphal, students tend to start with complete trust of their written media.  This seems good until we need them to use outside sources for projects which results in the credulity that make stories like the tree octopus or the Swiss Spaghetti Harvest a riot.

            It seems like learning to look at something critically requires a phase of frustration.  You could look at it like moving from global credulity to global cynicism to a more skeptical approach.  That’s a little to simplified, but you get the point.  Students need to learn to evaluate evidence and determine how independently replicated the information is.  If everyone is releasing the same verbatim press release, they should recognize that something sounds fishy.  Part of that feeling comes from learning about how media works and what to expect.  This comes from exposure and guidance during or after that exposure.  As teachers, we can facilitate these kinds of mentalities by requiring multiple, independent sources for project information.  This could be begun by having everyone find sources for a topic and comparing and contrasting the information.  This would give student experience gathering info on their own, but also practice in analyzing the sources in an open environment without much to lose.

            With so much information to wade through, we have to be critical since much of it is necessarily contradictory.  We can’t all become experts in every field; so we have to make concessions.  The key move is which concessions are ok.