(Please Note: This is a modified version of my opinion paper for the Advanced Communication Arts class in my high school republished on Medium with videos and pretty pictures and the like so it’s more interesting and relatable. Internal citations have been removed and/or hyperlinked. The integration of games and interactive media in education is a very intricate topic and I realize that there are a thousand more arguments to be made about it and a bunch of examples to mention that I didn't, but this is the best I could do with the constraints I was given [3 main points and address of opposition]. If you believe there’s more that I could add or write about, please leave a note! Thanks!)
In today’s education, most of the methods of teaching that dominate a classroom are worksheets, projects, textbooks, lectures, and exams. The traditional methods of teaching curriculum concepts have been effective, but are not always successful in causing students to want to learn about subjects that do not interest them and even subjects that do interest them.
Schools are currently set up right now to encourage students to learn in tedious environments with the overshadowing threat of punishment through GPA and ever-difficult college opportunities.
Imagine if the school system could implement ways to encourage students to voluntarily learn completely independent of the need to get a good grade through something much more efficient, effective, and intuitive than traditional learning systems? Video games and other forms of interactive media can open endless possibilities to demonstrate this. Not only can video games significantly impact the classroom, how they do is what will open new and innovative voluntary/educational opportunities.
Interactivity and Agency
Video games present the use of interactivity, a core attribute that other forms of media do not share. It is through this and similar attributes of games that provide a means of communicating information in a class. Dan White, a writer on Gamasutra, a blog dedicated to emerging trends in the video game industry stated, “…Teachers, for example, need tools to save them time and money, provide insight into student learning, help them address common misconceptions, teach new students, deliver experiences that are otherwise infeasible within the constraints of the classroom, etc…”. The Federation of American Scientist’s Summit on Educational Games found that the rate of progress in the world is rapidly outpacing the educational concepts learned during school. Video games have the potential to remedy this problem in today’s society. Minecraft, a non-linear “sandbox” type game created by Swedish independent developer Mojang has been used extensively by educators across the world (Gaming in Education 2).
In Minecraft, players interact with a world constructed out of blocks representing different types of materials. qCraft, a modification of the game’s base code, simulates the concepts of quantum physics inside the game world.
The developers state on their official website, “We’ve done our best to create something that we hope will be fun to experiment, build and play with while also introducing players to the fascinating and… counterintuitive way that quantum entities interact…In addition to individual players, we hope that parents and educators who want to introduce quantum physics concepts to curious kids will find it useful.”
Another teacher in Kuwait created a massive world for his students to explore in Minecraft to educate them on ancient cultures through visiting historically-accurate locations and employing clever teaching techniques in the form of in-game interactions with entities. Games can also be used to promote concepts of agency. Daniel Floyd, narrator from the video lesson series Extra Credits, stated “A lack of agency can manifest itself in numerous ways: students feeling like they don’t have an option to go to college, the perception that pregnancy is something that just happens, or students feeling like they simply have no power over the life path and choices that their parents make for them… a sense of agency isn’t a binary thing. It’s a scale.
The more agency you feel over your life, the better you tend to do, and the more ambitious goals you tend to be willing to set for yourself… In a game, the cycle between choice and result is generally much shorter than that in life and much more clearly indicated. In a game, the player tries something, fails, tries something new, and keeps making new decisions until they succeed. Games teach us that different choices have different outcomes, and we control the choices we make,” (Gamifying Education). The Walking Dead Season 1, a game that revolves around giving the player a sense of agency through making important decisions that affect the story, is being used by a teacher in Norway to teach ethics and supplement his religious studies curriculum (Norwegian School Teach Ethics).
Tangential Learning, Voluntary Drive, Gamification, and Incentive
The potential for games and interactive media in school also encompasses the stimulation of voluntary drive to learn outside of class and creates incentive for problem solving. This is done through tangential learning. Daniel Floyd explains tangential learning as “not what you learn by being taught, rather it’s what you learned by being exposed to things in a context which you’re already engaged in…it’s the idea that some portion of your audience will self-educate if you can introduce them to topics in a context they already find exciting and engaging,” (Video Games and Learning). Examples include Googling about who Leonidas was after watching the movie 300 and learning about the Battle of Thermopylae in the process to deciding to become an Aerospace Engineer after watching Star Trek as a kid.
Numerous studies have shown that people assimilate information they’re interested in rather than information they are forced to learn for school or work. Floyd stated, “Right now, we’re using a grading system that is essentially demotivational and sets up a reinforcing feedback loop for failure. Today students first walk into a classroom or approach new assignments thinking of themselves as having an A+… and from there, with every mistake, there’s nowhere to go but down. We need to recontextualize grading. In games we’ve learned that progress encourages progress, and the human desire for efficiency is a far stronger motivator than the fear of falling further from one’s goal…”. Genuine curiosity and motivation will always trump the threat of failure and/or punishment.
An issue like this should not just be passed off as “just how school works”, it is something that needs to be addressed and expanded upon in order to move the educational system into a more intellectually engaging manner of operation.
This can be done in numerous ways, such as the previously mentioned teacher in Kuwait has demonstrated in his Minecraft-born World of Humanities. The official page states, “A vast, virtual environment that simulates exploration of ancient history. Similar to a ‘World of Warcraft’ RPG that engages students with the discovery of ancient history and geography. Students can discover areas themed to ancient civilizations, go on quests, meet characters from history, and collaborate to build themed projects from history… Includes over 400 pages of written text broken down into easily-digestible and fun factoids, quests, in-game books, dialogue, videos, and Internet links.”
Another method proposed by Extra Credits is to encourage students to do well by giving the players “XP,” or “experience points”, that are given out based on performance in-class, and if one student gets a higher amount of XP or a certain number of students get a certain amount of XP, the entire class benefits with some type of class incentive such as a field trip.
This would cause students to not only want to do better but also to encourage each other to do well in order to benefit the entire class, which reinforces concepts of teamwork and social skills. Obviously, an example like this is best applied in elementary and middle school environments, but this does not mean that something similar to this could never be applied to high school and college education as well.
Examples Currently in Use
There are scores of real-world applications for video games in the classroom in practice today. As mentioned before, video games have been used to teach ethics and morality through agency.
MinecraftEdu, an officially licensed modification of Minecraft designed for use specifically in the classroom, is being used in around 2500 schools worldwide. It has been used to teach English, programming and game design.
The Code.org foundation, a non-profit dedicated to raising interest in computer science for everybody, recently enacted its “Hour of Code” initiative, which, through interactive media and games about programming characters to move across the screen or perform actions have taught children as young as 5 all the way up to technologically-challenged high schoolers the basic fundamentals of programming.
Quest to Learn, a very new school in New York City, teaches almost entirely through play and interactive media. In the school, “students can design and create podcasts and video games as part of the curriculum,” (School Uses Games to Teach Thinking Skills). Quest to Learn has pulled off teaching through play outside of video games as well, which further pushes the point that traditional learning systems can be modified to make learning more voluntary rather than essentially forced.
Curriculum is interwoven with real-simulation through game-like methods, “‘In Math, we’re traveling around the world,’ says sixth-grader Rocco Rose, a student at Quest to Learn and a citizen of Creepytown- an imaginary city where his class learns math and English.
The students play travel agents, convert currencies, keep blogs about their travel experiences and budget trips…”.
Arguments Against
While video games can be an extremely positive opportunity for the classroom, how it is done is typically what causes the shortcomings and failures of the use of the medium today. According to the Otago Daily Times, the Secondary Principals’ Association president Patrick Walsh concluded “the negatives of video games often outweighed positives…’There are lots of adverse effects of playing video games, and simply just by putting an educational tag on it, doesn’t in our view demonstrate that it has any educational value at all…’” (Video Games Not Educational 1). This contention is made very frequently today with absolutely no thought put towards the aforementioned possibilities through play. Rather, it is an argument based upon the shortcomings of today’s mainstream video game titles and poor execution of video games in the classroom. In terms of educational video games specifically, a number of edutainment titles today used in school ignore an extremely important facet: games are voluntary.
You cannot force-feed the experience and expect positive results. Daniel Floyd specifically tackles this, “Play is nature’s way of getting us to learn. It’s why it’s so great for education, because it’s something we and pretty much every other animal are hard-wired to want to do… The instinct to play is the most basic, innate, and natural way for us to learn. But a big part of that is something we think we choose to do…unfortunately this isn’t fully part of a collective thinking on games in education in the US…the general idea seems to be that we will build games, we’ll put them in schools, kids play them in class, and things will be better… doesn’t really harness the full power of games… play has to be an act of volition.”
Schools should be obligated in every respect to ENGAGE students, not necessarily entertain, and games can facilitate both when executed well.
Another argument is that even educational games can become obsessive. Eric Klopfer, professor and director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Scheller Teacher Education Program contended to the New York Times in relation to Minecraft, “While the game is clearly good for kids, it doesn’t mean there should be no limits. As with anything, I don’t want my kids to do any one thing for overly extended periods of time. Whether Legos or Minecraft; having limits is an important part of their learning,” (Minecraft Obsession and Educational Tool 3).
This is true. But many of those against using interactive media in education conclude that obsession and addiction alone should account for not using games in the classroom. As if concepts of discernment, responsibility, and discipline will be thrown out the window if we were to develop school curriculums around play. Are we to forgo a potentially game-changing medium for education simply because there is a risk of obsession? People become obsessed with football, music, theatre, and even the more (subjectively) arbitrary subjects such as astronomy, engineering, and complex literature quite often, and yet these are all accepted as valid “obsessions”. To impute that video games will have an adverse effect on education simply because of their addictive factors (which clearly can be used to an advantage in education) is counterproductive and egregious.
The possibilities for live application of play, interactivity, and voluntary/tangential learning presented barely scratch the surface of all the changes that can be made. Because of the medium itself, games can convey and inspire ideas that people could never think of until widespread classroom use is common. It opens up a broader scale for ingenuity and creativity, which will in turn usher in an even more rapid rate of progress.
This is only just the beginning. As technology grows to be a fundamental part of education, so will active play in tandem with a very new and efficient standard. It will be far from perfect. Then again, nothing ever is. But as humans, we do our best to overcome the imperfections. And a radically different system of education with interactive media carefully and eloquently integrated with it is precisely how we can go about it.
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