As a game developer and educator I’m passionate about game-based learning, but there are still lots of educators that have lots of doubts. Video games are often held up as a disruptive factor in education, but I think the reality is much more complicated than people realize, and there are a lot of benefits and opportunities in creating a more positive relationship between education and video games.
I firmly believe there are negatives possible and think video games can be used irresponsibly. Systems that have loose relationships with object permanence, are built to create exploitative action-reward patterns like a lot of free-to-play mobile games, or games with graphic violent content are all easy candidates for creating damaging effects in children (or even prone personality type adults). I think there’s a strong case for limiting screen times, especially in the young children. At the same time, we can’t deny the technology exists. I think schools have a powerful role in establishing healthy habits around technology, and to help guide students and parents toward healthy relationships with technology so that we can access and best use it’s positive effects and potentials.
Why Use Games
Since I recognize these downsides, why am I saying they should be used? Because there’s a lot of positives to tap into. The Entertainment Software Association, a US-based lobby group for video game developers, has a useful document on the subject. Not exactly an unbiased source, but the citations in the document are solid. The paper compiles the findings of many academic peer-reviewed studies on the subject to highlight the benefits of game use in education – https://www.theesa.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/102621BenefitsofVideoGamesinK-12Education.pdf.
Games offer learning experiences, they aren’t just entertainment. Play is the heart of learning – adaptive, self-directed, exploratory trial-and-error self-expressive agency. Games are about perception, analysis, prediction, hypothesis, strategy, and decision-making. We simply need to recognize the value of games and find games that utilize this potential, and then utilize those games. Games are wonderful, accessible, desirable tools for learning. They can create social learning opportunities, can adapt and include different learners, provide safe risk exploration, allow self-expression and creativity, build resilience and leadership, and of course, are great for engagement and participation. With such incredible potential it’s simply foolish to ignore this rich multimedia tool for learning. What we need is best practices, good games, and open-minded and trained educators to take advantage of the possibilities. So how can we use games in classrooms?
Guided Use
The simplest way to start incorporating games into a classroom is to start with direct instruction. In this case playing a game and having students follow along in classroom. This guided use of a game can help introduce a game to students in a clear way and help you as a teacher become familiar with the tool as well. It’s important for a teacher to also be a user when it comes to digital technologies, to get hands on to understand a tool from the student perspective. Guided use is a great way to show off features, choices or concepts, but if the game is in front of students it can be very hard to get them to pay attention and follow instructions – you’ve handed them a big red button, they’re going to want to push it. You’ll notice that this happens anytime they have computers, it isn’t games that are the issue. Even if they have a spreadsheet program open, they’ll engage with it. It isn’t an inherent evil in games you’re fighting, it’s the inherent need to explore, understand and self-express you’re fighting, computers are just an amazing system to support and provide for those drives.
You may want to be a leader in game, position yourself as a scout. You’ll do something ahead of them, then they can do something to catch up. You’ll try things so they can see what happens before they make their own choices/attempts. This format, and explanation, can help students understand the structure and value in waiting. Another key technique is explaining that the students will be given free time to explore on their own. If they don’t have this understanding they can feel the need to exploit the time they have to explore, fearing they will miss out if they don’t. Addressing their fears and desires directly will help. Including an incentive “see what happens to me so you’ll be better informed” can be a useful angle. Consider how much they watch twitch, they’re quite willing to watch others play games and not play themselves, but it has to be contextualized. Sometimes it can be better to let them explore first, then once they’ve gotten that initial curiosity out of their system you’ll have better luck getting them to follow. Think of it like giving them recess so they can managed to sit still after – sometimes you need to let them run their character until they tire out first.
Free Use
More often its best to have students explore games on their own, aka free use. This can be either in class or as homework if they can access the game outside of class (you’ll need to consider the digital divide here). The bonus is if students can access the game, and have the means, they’ll almost certainly do it. Not a lot of homework will have the motivation like playing a game!
Free use will allow students to fully engage their sense of agency, exploring the game as they see fit. This can help them develop personal skills like motivation, drive, goal-setting, patience, and resilience as they come across the games choices and challenges and try overcome them on their own. You’ll often find even without any prompting students will begin to form social learning systems. They’ll share their experiences, give tips, tactics, challenges and consolations to their friends and fellow students. Of course, as free agents they may not do what you want or expect. Free use will require you to create learning guides or goals to help ensure students achieve what your goals are for use of the game. Thankfully there’s a number of options to deal with that.
Worksheets
A classic tool for student exploration, worksheets can let you define particular tasks you want the students to achieve, prompting them to provide perceptions or analysis of key moments or tasks. With games that have diverse paths and outcomes having students chart their progress can be great, useful to check their progress, but also great to prompt later sharing and discussion.
Discussions
Games can, and should, be interesting and unique experiences, offering players choices that create nearly unique end results. As students share they can discover each others strategies, theories, and luck and the experiences that resulted. This can encourage some replay as students hear about other potentials of the game and want to experience them themselves.
Captures
A great way to get proof from students playing games is captures. Screen captures, or depending on the game, high scores or achievements, can provide some in-game evidence of their interactions with the game. You can gamify this within your classroom too! You can have individual, team or classroom tracking of achievements and scores to create an extra level of drive and cooperation. Team spirit can be a great angle to explore through gamification, especially when cooperation is highlighted and encouraged.
Reports
The most long form student assignment or feedback method for games would be to write a report about their experience. It’s important to distinguish between the game, and their experience with the game, since their choices will create a unique profile of the experience. The uniqueness of their experience is a very handy tool for teachers. In an era where plagiarism is a growing threat, this can provide an added measure of protection against cheating. Most AI systems will not know recent or niche games, educational games will tend to skirt under their awareness. Even if a game is popular enough, with the different play strategies, randomized starts, changing end games, AI will always have a very hard time sensibly dealing with the dynamism of a game experience, as opposed to set experiences like books and movies. You can also add in your own twists through demands or framings that can further confound plagiarism.
The Bottom Line
Games are a rich and meaningful form of media, it’s silly to think we’d engage in every type of media but not this most complex and dynamic form. Understanding games is a powerful tool for education, especially as better educational games get developed and released. Educators can and should be embracing this new technology, as should developers who want to help shape the world. We need to put this amazing opportunity to better use, hopefully with one foot in the education world and the other in game development Massive Corporation can help bridge this gap and help usher in a new and amazing era of dynamic and engaging education. If you need help to understand this amazing and changing world we’re happy to help. We’ve got presentations and services to help educators and developers do more to create and incorporate smart digital interactive experiences into education. Drop us an email (email “info” at this URL) if you think we could help!