Are Kids Who Make Their Own Video Games Better Prepared For The Digital Future?
It is easier than you might think for kids to make their own video games. Gamestar Mechanic is a great web based place for younger children to start. Kodu, Gamemaker, and Scratch all offer simple interfaces for more experienced kids.
When kids design their own video games, they are engaged in “learning-by-making.” Project based learning is a constructive experience. It is active rather than passive. It involves creation rather than consumption.
Coding, video game making, and interactive expression will be central to education’s future—not only because these activities encourage the STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) skills involved in digital content creation, but also because game creation nurtures the kind of humanistic personal skills that we expect from successful contributors to society.
One 2011 study showed significantly increased deep learning and intrinsic motivation when kids made their own games. Another 2009 study showed that when kids created their own game based quiz questions, they demonstrated increased content retention and better performance on standardized tests. A 2010 study “found evidence to indicate that the game-authoring activity stimulated higher order thinking skills.“
Some kids are already making their own games. The Joan Ganz Cooney Center and E-Line Media just announced the 2013 winners of the National STEM Video Game Challenge. Sixteen middle and high school students (out of 4000 entries) took the top honors. “The competition aims to motivate interest in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) among students in grades 5-12 by tapping into their enthusiasm for playing and making video games.” The winners (listed at the end of this article) receive fully loaded AMD-powered laptop computers.
Inspired by President Obama’s “Educate to Innovate Campaign,” the National STEM Video Game Challenge selected twenty-eight youth as winners in 2012 and three of those winners participated in the 2013 White House Science Fair in April. “Youth are natural inventors. They are increasingly shaping their own education by making things,” said Michael H. Levine, Executive Director of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center. In this case, they’re making video games.
Coincidentally, my 8 year old son just finished a week of video game creation summer camp. About a mile from my home, in a rented elementary school classroom at one of suburban Philadelphia’s prep schools, folks from Active Learning Services ran a week long USAChess, video game creation, and 3D animation camp. My eight year old son spent the week making his own games. Charlie Edelman, a.k.a. “coach” Charlie, taught him game design vocabulary and provided an early introduction to key ideas in computer programming.
Spending his afternoons in front of a laptop loaded with the gamemaker software, my son learned refined brainstorming. He practiced the kind of focused resilience it takes to realize a vision within a fixed system. He brought a design from his imagination to the screen using contextualized problem solving, critical thinking, and systems based storytelling skills. He learned the concept of “iteration,” where failure is replaced with ongoing re-creation. And best of all, when he finished, other people—campers, counselors, and me—participated in his interactive experience.
A video game is basically an expression, like a painting, a sculpture, or a story. And one of the key goals of education has always been to empower individuals to articulately express themselves. Hence, academia’s over abundant reliance on the typical 5 paragraph expository essay. Schools want to educate citizens that can make persuasive arguments, that are adept at the skill philosophers traditionally called “rhetoric.”
But the interactive nature of video games makes it a decidedly different kind of expression than expository writing. Because other people will eventually control their creation, kids learn important lessons about subjectivity. They learn to imagine what it would be like for other people to see things from their perspectives. Controlling my avatar is like stepping into my shoes, exploring the world through my eyes, valuing the way I make sense of what’s going on around me.
The folks who created Gamestar Mechanic explain that “through designing play, in a context they find compelling and safe, students learn to think analytically and holistically, to experiment and test out theories, and to consider other people as part of the systems they create and inhabit.” They offer a list of multi-disciplinary skills that students develop through a game-authoring curriculum:
Systems-Thinking: Students design and analyze dynamic systems, a characteristic activity in both the media and in science today.
Interdisciplinary Thinking: Students solve problems that require them to seek out and synthesize knowledge from different domains. They become intelligent and resourceful as they learn how to find and use information in meaningful ways.
User-Centered Design: Students act as sociotechnical engineers, thinking about how people interact with systems and how systems shape both competitive and collaborative social interaction.
Specialist Language: Students learn to use complex technical linguistic and symbolic elements from a variety of domains, at a variety of different levels, for a variety of different purposes.
Meta-Level Reflection: Students learn to explicate and defend their ideas, describe issues and interactions at a meta-level, create and test hypotheses, and reflect on the impact of their solutions on others.
It is an impressive list of attributes that kids can develop while doing something they love.
The 2013 STEM Challenge winners are:
Middle School (grades 5-8): Seong-Hyun Ryoo, Angel Martinez-Acevedo, Nicholas Cameron, Nicolas Badila, Bradley Schmitz, Henry Edwards and Kevin Kopczynski, Lexi Schneider.
High School (grades 9-12): Sooraj Suresh, Kieran Luscombe, Cody Haugland, Aaron Gaudette, Brianna Igbinosun, Noah Ratcliff and Pamela Pizarro-Ruiz, Janice Tran.
You can see descriptions and screenshots from all the winning games here.
Jordan Shapiro is author of FREEPLAY: A Video Game Guide to Maximum Euphoric Bliss and co-editor of Occupy Psyche: Jungian and Archetypal Perspectives on a Movement. For information on his upcoming books and events click here.
