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.