Play Hard, Learn Better with Video Games
by room2learn
Here’s a common annoyance teachers can relate to more and more often: a student looking straight down at their lap. You know they’re not sleeping because their eyes are wide open, and they’re probably not texting because their eyebrows are furled in intense concentration. More likely than not, they are playing a quick game on their phone.
As we enter a more digitized era, it’s more and more common for students to play video games. While many become classroom distractions, some video games have been proven to help students learn.
More recently, schools have found success incorporating video games into lesson plans and sometimes even entire curricula. At MATCH Middle School in Boston, a middle school teacher used the strategy game Civilization to teach students history. Civilization’s realistic game mechanics allow students to observe their in-game countries evolve with similar trends to real-life counterparts like Assyria and industrial-age Britain.
In New York, a middle school called Quest to Learn has a different view on games. At Q2L, games are incorporated into almost every lesson. Students still go through standard curriculum, but in a more creative and engaging format. Professional game theorists and top educators design their lesson plans, and the success of the middle school led to the creation of a Q2L high school.
So how can video games benefit learning? Let’s take a closer look at what video games can offer to our students.
Intuition and Affinity
In his papers about video games and education, Linguistics professor Paul Gee introduces the idea of Semiotic Domain and Affinity — the idea that audio and visual cues in games help students associate what they learn in a video game to real-life concepts.
For example, in the game Portal, players can use portals to free-fall indefinitely but cannot achieve infinite speed. Players with no prior experience with physics can still infer that there is a speed limit (terminal velocity) and that something must be opposing gravity (air resistance). Though they have not formally learned these concepts, students already have an understanding by the time a class teaches these ideas.
Low-Risk Learning
Students are often afraid of being wrong in class, sometimes in fear of looking bad in front of peers. There’s an even higher risk associated to failure on exams, where poor performance on standardized tests can have long-lasting impacts on a student’s academic journey. In contrast, games provide students with a more comfortable environment to experiment and fail; the only penalty is a deducted in-game score.
The video game Kerbal Space Program exemplifies this learning style. In KSP, players control a humanoid “Kerbal” to pilot rockets and spaceships. In real life, even model rocket failures are costly and the recovery time is incredibly time-consuming. In this game, rockets are repaired with the click of a button and failures are almost humorous to experience. Instead of turning students away from rocketry, low-risk failure that occurs in gaming situations encourages students to learn from mistakes and continue experimenting. Students can then take their learnings and transfer them to a real-world model rocket, feeling more confident in their abilities as a result of their online simulations.
Role-Playing Students
Gaming also allows students to take on new roles when interacting with each other. With a lower penalty for failure, students feel more comfortable assuming positions and initiating conversations that they may have shied from originally.
Going back to the Civilization game mentioned earlier, the teacher noticed that students were more willing to help each other out while playing than they were in “real” classwork. Civilization is especially well suited for this behavior, as its numerous game mechanics make it difficult for a single person to grasp its gameplay immediately — collaboration is needed. The teacher also noticed that students were more willing to call out peers for distasteful behavior in the game (e.g. terrorizing city-states, pitting countries against each other) than they were in real life. These interactions help students not only develop curriculum-specific lessons but also help in their emotional and social development.
Bringing Video Games to Your Classroom
When used with purpose, video games can breathe new life and excitement into the classroom. However, used incorrectly, video games can be tedious or distracting. Truthfully, it would be hard to create curriculum without playing a game for several hours, but thankfully many mainstream video games already have curriculum designed for certain topics. For example, Portal Education and MinecraftEdu build lesson plans around in-game missions, while KerbalEdu also provides extra functionality to help students gauge their progress and learn from its simulations.
Of course, the space around a video game classroom should be just as innovative as the lesson plan; there’s no reason that student’s creativity should be limited to their computers. In this media center at High Tech High Media Arts, soft seating invites in a comfortable atmosphere, which may help students feel more relaxed and playful as they experiment with video games in a school setting. As there are fewer physical tools needed to play video games, teachers have more freedom in transforming their classroom into spaces that can seamlessly welcome in video game learning.
Have you experimented with video games in the classroom? We want to hear about it! Share with fellow edu-innovators on www.room2learn.org and Tweet us at @HackClassrooms!
