video games

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The Power of Play in Learning

January 4, 2012 | 9:49 AM | By

Flickr: Ernst Vikne

By Aran Levasseur

The goal of the videogame “Civilization” is to build a civilization that stands the test of time. You start the game in 4000 B.C. as a settler and, with successful gameplay, can create a civilization that lasts until the Space Age. Throughout the game, you need to manage your civilization’s military, science, technology, commerce and culture.

One doesn’t read “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” to develop strategy before playing the game. One starts by playing. This is true for all videogames. You start by exploring the world with curiosity and begin to develop a hypothesis of what you’re supposed to do. Through trial, error, pattern recognition, logic and chance you continually reformulate your trajectory.

Students begin to develop a self-reliance that enjoys independent experimentation and exploration.

This model of learning is not only effective for videogames but for all digital tools, and I would argue that play — especially in the digital sense — is emerging as a pedagogical keystone for education in the 21st century.

Stuart Brown, M.D., explains in his book, Play, how a range of scientific disciplines have revealed the importance of lifelong play. Playfulness amplifies our capacity to innovate and to adapt to changing circumstances. Adults who are deprived of play are often rigid, inflexible and closed to trying out new options. Play is an active process that reshapes our rigid views of the world.

THE POWER OF PLAY

Play is also a powerful vehicle for learning, something that’s been underscored for me in my work at San Francisco University High School where we began a one-to-one iPad program in the fall.

The iPad has been hyped as a device that will revolutionize education. And, while I’ve witnessed glimmers of this potential, it isn’t microwavable. Migrating from an analog to a digital environment sounds simple enough, but the reality has been more disruptive.

Disruption can signal the onset of innovation, but this isn’t comforting to the organizations and individuals that are at the epicenter of such turbulence. Yet with a schema of play, we can start to Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Learning Methods, Games, play, video games

What Do Wii Remotes Have to Do With Science? Ask Sixth-Graders

November 1, 2011 | 1:09 PM | By

WiiScience

Amidst grim reports this week that California schools are “failing to invest enough time, money and training to teach science well,” and that only one out of 10 elementary school students gets to play with hands-on science experiments, a shining counter-example is  happening at the Nueva School in the wealthy San Francisco suburb of Hillsborough.

Sixth-grade students are using Wii remote controls to collect scientific data on things like positive and negative acceleration and thinking about conceptual issues like the difference between engineering and science.

Led by Stanford researchers, the class is using Wii remote controls (available online for anywhere from $15 to $40) to create things like a rat-trap car, a marble roller-coaster, and balloon-powered vehicle to test different theories.

With the rat-trap car, students have created a Wii-strapped vehicle with CDs as wheels, like a skateboard. They’ve already experimented with smaller mousetraps and lighter batteries to see if the cars would go faster, but landed on the rat trap as the best way to measure the information they needed.

The main objective of the experiment is not necessarily to measure speed, but to show students how to capture data like scientists do. Kids are typically confused by graphs, but with the Wii experiment, they could see the horizontal, vertical, and lateral aspects of the accelerometer.

With the Wii remotes, students are using interesting new technology and participating in the creation of their own designs.

“Kids see patterns in data,” said Wendy Ju, one of the Stanford researchers working with the students at the Innovative Learning Conference held at Nueva recently. “What does that data do to Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, Teaching With Tech, Games, video games, Wii, WiiScience

Is Gaming the New Essential Literacy?

October 17, 2011 | 11:30 AM | By

TB

By Aran Levassur

“When people learn to play video games,” said James Paul Gee, “they are learning a new literacy.”

This is one of the reason kids love playing them: They are learning a new interactive language that grants them access to virtual worlds that are filled with intrigue, engagement and meaningful challenges. And one that feels more congruent with the nature and trajectory of today’s world.

As our commerce and culture migrates further into this emerging digital ecosystem it becomes more critical that we develop digital literacy, of which video games inhabit a large portion.

Gee, a linguist and professor of literacy studies at Arizona State University, thinks we should expand the traditional definition of literacy beyond reading and writing because language isn’t the only communication system available in today’s world. And there is no better example of a new form of media that communicates distinctive types of meaning than video games.

THE LITERACY OF PROBLEM-SOLVING

Although games can be immensely entertaining, it would be a mistake to consider them as only a form of entertainment. Games are fun, but their real value lies in leveraging play and exploration as a mode of learning the literacy of problem-solving, which lowers the emotional stakes of failing.

A critical part of being literate in the digital age means being able to solve problems through simulations and collaboration.

In Sir Ken Robinson’s TED talk, Do Schools Kill Creativity?, he reminds us that our educational system has stigmatized mistakes. As a result, kids are frightened of being wrong. Yet if we are not prepared to be wrong than we won’t be able to come up with anything creative or solve complex problems. Videogames, on the other hand, embed trial and error into the foundation of gameplay.

Kids aren’t naturally great at gaming the first time. They develop mastery through disciplined practice — a path marked by dead-ends, wrong turns and blunders. Yet gamers aren’t angst-ridden Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, Teaching With Tech, game-based learning, Games, James Gee, video games

How Games Can Influence Learning

October 14, 2011 | 12:57 PM | By

Quest to Learn

Students at Question to Learn school in New York use game techniques to learn about every subject.

By Nathan Maton

What do games have anything to do with learning? We spoke to nationally recognized researchers, teachers, game-based schools and companies that develop educational games and asked how they see games fitting into the education landscape.

IT’S ABOUT INTERACTION, NOT ISOLATION. “At the end of the day, a game is successful only if each individual gamer has an interaction with it that makes him or her want to come back for more,” says Nt Etuk, CEO of Dimension U, an educational games company.  “Even the massively multi-player games [such as World of Warcaft] are successful only because they have tapped into a million individual need to interact, or to compete, or to form groups.”

GAMES CAN HELP STRUGGLING STUDENTS.  “[Games] don’t cause behavior problems but eliminate them,” Ananth Pai says. Pai teaches students from second to fifth grade in Parkview/Center Point Elementary school in Maplewood, Minnesota. Pai took the time to develop a game-based curricula, and says he’s seen the rewards of his efforts.

In his gamified classroom, students who performed below proficiency contributed the most to the double-digit growth in achievement. “These are the students that make up the whole education reform debate. Gamification helps them from falling through the ever widening achievement gap as they move forward from third grade,” he said.

IT’S HIGHLY PERSONALIZED. With the best games, the player is challenged at exactly the right level and in the right way to keep the player playing. “Maybe the question we need to ask is what about games causes youth to engage that our traditional approach to education lacks,” says Brian Alspach, Executive Vice President of E-Line Media, an educational games publisher well known for their game Gamestar Mechanic. “Perhaps applying games to classes is hard because they work on Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, Teaching With Tech, Games, video games

Video Games Built Just for Girls

June 23, 2011 | 10:57 AM | By

School 26

The stereotypical video game player is a young male under age 18, but study after study has shown that majority of the game-playing population does not fall into that demographic. Only 18% of gamers are under age 18, and women over 18 represent a significantly greater proportion of this population (37%) than do boys age 17 or younger (13%).

With the explosive growth in social gaming, particularly on Facebook, more games are being targeted at women. Games like Farmville and Pet Society, while not explicitly aimed at women, have been embraced by an older and female gaming population.

But what about girls? As we have written about often here at MindShift, video games are increasingly considered an important tool for learning. And even though plenty of women do play video games, there is still a sense — particularly among girls — that games are a “boy thing.”

There isn’t swordplay here. No princesses to rescue. No alien invaders to vanquish.

That girl-gamer audience is the focus of the Vancouver, B.C.-based gaming studio Silicon Sisters. The first female-owned and run video game studio in Canada, Silicon Sisters is committed to building games for women and girls by women and girls. Founded by former Radical Entertainment executive producer Kristen Forbes and former Deep Fried Entertainment COO Brenda Bailey Gershkovitch, the studio released their very first game, School 26, to critical acclaim back in April. (We featured the game in our April round-up of the best new educational apps of the month.) The studio plans to release their next School 26 game — “Summer of Secrets” — next month.

The School 26 games are geared towards tweens and teens, and the storyline is built around the very complicated social hierarchy of high school. You play the game as a young girl who’s a newcomer to a school. She comes from a nomadic family, which has made it difficult for her to maintain long-term friendships. As she enrolls in this, her 26th school, she strikes a bargain with her parents: If she can make friends, they’ll stay put. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Teaching With Tech, Games, School 26, Silicon Sisters, video games