Science teacher Paul Anderson says video games teach kids that failure is okay — that it’s part of the learning process.
“Trying something, failing, trying something again, that’s something we aspire to see in kids,” he says.
So he created a class around the premise of a video game — without a video game. Anderson honestly talks about what worked and what didn’t. Check out how it turned out.
MinecraftEDU
Educators have been tapping into the wildly popular online game Minecraft for its potential as a learning tool for a while now — to teach physics, math, and computer science. But until recently, the game was mostly the territory of computer science teachers, and even they were forced to use the commercial version of the online game.
So a few months ago, two teachers, Santeri Koivisto and Joel Levin, decided to make the software more accessible and relevant to teachers. They joined forces to found MinecraftEdu and started offering discounted educator licenses to Minecraft. MinecraftEdu now offers a plug-in, which enables teachers to tailor the software to individual curriculum. And a fresh new wiki is dedicated to sharing ideas with topic suggestions such as “How To Use Redstone, (a fictional mineral) To Teach Electricity.” Teachers can also work with others to co-develop lesson plans within the game software.
Teachers like to use Minecraft because it’s a “sandbox” game — it provides players nearly limitless freedom to build within it. As a player’s skill develops, the game’s complexity increases ad infinitum. In multi-player levels, players collaborate on building complex structures, use programming features to build contraptions, games, or compose music. Meanwhile, beginning players use their problem solving skills to scavenge for materials. They learn to mine stone for building, and coal for making fire.
“Many educational games start with the question, ‘What should we teach with the game?’ and they forget the most important part, that it should be a great game too.”
Koivisto and Levin decided to pursue a classroom application after observing students solve complicated problems with their collaboration in the game. When Koivisto tested Minecraft at a Finnish school, one-third of the 20 teachers in the study later chose to incorporate the game into their teaching.
Koivisto and Levin, who uses the game with his second-grade students, are part of the growing movement of teachers who see video games as more than entertainment and educational games Continue reading
Take a look at how teacher Joel Levin uses the online game Minecraft to teach second-grade students how to work together and build little civilizations. The video was released as one of three case studies along with the report by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center on Teachers’ Attitudes About Digital Games in the Classroom.
“I want the kids to learn to be responsible, self-reliant, innovative thinkers who are comfortable using technology to interact and create,” Levin said in an article last year. “I want them to realize that how they treat others in a game, online, or in the physical world is all really the same thing.”
Jim Mathews
A middle school student in Wisconsin tests his new game.
Games have shown great promise for learning, but it’s not always easy to figure out the logistics of how to use them in class. Every student and teacher’s experience is unique and it takes time to calibrate and tinker to get the best out of the experience.
What’s more, using games might lead to something neither students or teacher anticipated — more work.
When it came to using the game Operation Lapis to learn Latin, the experience proved to be a mixed bag for students and teachers. In the game, students play the role of Romans in a reconstruction of ancient Pompeii (or ancient Rome) and have to learn to think, act, create and write like a Roman in order to win the game. Those are the same goals of any introductory Latin course.
After Kevin Ballestrini launched the game in his own class, ten other interested teachers decided to take a stab at using it in their classes. The prevailing conclusion? Students’ successes represent the environment and instructor as much as the game itself.
The teachers shared similar joys and frustrations with the challenges, whether it was an over-designed aspect of the game or the benefit of creating active learners. And without exception, they all said they spent more time reviewing students’ writing and were impeded by lack of technology access in the classroom.
Karen Zook, a Ph.D. student working under professor Roger Travis, one of the co-creators of the game, says students struggled with the new game when she first started using it in her college Latin class.
“The game provides an insurmountable problem because they cannot simply skid by not doing anything.”
“The first week or two is always a little rough,” Zook says. “Trying to form the students into long-term groups is hard when it isn’t clear who’s going to be in the course for the first few weeks.”
Students were also skeptical when they learned their homework was going to take the form of a game. After that initial adjustment period, though, they came to appreciate Lapis, she said.
“It forces engagement, and provides for a less-frustrating classroom experience, since it compels students to prepare for class in a way that’s [different] in a more traditional setting,” she said.
This “forcing” of student engagement was a common thread among teachers who tried the game.
“There are a portion of students who refused to buy into the system and they have since failed out of the class,” said Matthew Bennet, a high school Latin teacher and co-creator of the game. “The Continue reading
Flickr: Flickingerbrad
No longer relegated to experimental programs, digital games are becoming much more commonly used in classrooms across the country, according to a survey by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center released today.
Half of the 505 K-8 teachers surveyed said they use digital games with their students two or more days a week, and 18 percent use them daily.
There will be further, more in-depth coverage of this report in the coming weeks, but in the meantime, some more statistics from the study:
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Chocolate-covered broccoli. That’s what designers of educational games call digital products that drape dull academic instruction in the superficially appealing disguise of a game. Instead of placing the fun of discovery and mastery at the heart of the game, these imposters use the trappings of games “as a sugar coating” for their otherwise unappetizing content, note Jacob Habgood and Shaaron Ainsworth.
The two researchers, from the University of Nottingham in England, recently decided to find out whether children could detect such subterfuge, and whether they benefited more from lessons that masquerade as games—or from games that make learning an end in itself.
Habgood and Ainsworth began by creating a game, called Zombie Division, that aimed to teach math to students aged seven to 11. In the authors’ words, Zombie Division “is a 3D adventure game based around sword fighting in which the player (acting as the hero Matrices) must use different attacks to mathematically divide opponents according to the numbers on their chests.”
The scientists designed two different variants of the game: an “intrinsic” version, in which mastery of mathematical challenges produced rewards within the game, and an “extrinsic” version, in which a period of play was followed by an online math quiz. Both types contained the same instructional content, but in the extrinsic version that content was “delivered away from flow-inducing
Ineffective games bestow gold stars for good performance instead of making the incentives internal to the game.
game-play, and presented as abstract mathematical questions,” the researchers note. (“Flow,” as many gamers know, is a psychological state characterized by energetic, engaged immersion.) In the intrinsic model of the game, for example, a player who correctly divided his opponent with his sword would be rewarded by seeing his foe split into a proportional number of ghosts. In the quiz built into the extrinsic model, a player would simply be notified that her answer to a division problem was correct.
In Habgood and Ainsworth’s experiment, reported in the Journal of the Learning Sciences, one group of students was assigned to play the intrinsic version of Zombie Division for two hours. A Continue reading
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