Computer racing games make you a bad driver – at least, according to the findings of some recent research, both in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, and for the driving school company, BSM.
In a sense, this finding is encouraging – apparently simple games are influencing complex real-life behaviour. If computer games are having this kind of effect then educationally-stimulating and socially-constructive games could be genuinely useful for children and adults alike. April’s ‘TechNews’ report from Becta (the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency) notes the development of “Ethics Game” in Thailand, the brainchild of a civil servant in the Thai Government’s Moral and Ethical Development Office who was concerned at the emphasis on violence in arcade games. “Ethics Game” has been designed to encourage learning of the five precepts of Buddhism: do not kill, steal, lie, commit adultery, or drink alcohol.
The recent history of research into the educational and beneficial effects of computer gaming are summarised in a chapter of Becta’s 2007 Emerging Technologies report. The entire report, and the individual chapters, can be downloaded here.
The authors of the first section of the chapter of chapter 5, looking into computer gaming and education, point out that already some off-the-shelf computer games (rather than teaching software) are being used in classrooms, including Myst, Civilisation, Age of Empires, Rollercoaster Tycoon and note that computer games offer real potential in classrooms where they have immersive, complex environments that stimulate the children.
The authors measure the educational potential of computer games along two axes – game narrative and curriculum relevance. Games like Myst aren’t particularly relevant to the National Curriculum, but their environments and narrative are stimulating in their own right, whereas games without overarching storylines but with a high curriculum relevance more concrete educational reasons and for teaching specific subjects in discrete ‘packets’, much like in the Maths-Whizz method. They say the ‘holy grail’ for game-based learning is combining both aspects.
The authors say games that don’t have specific curriculum relevance are often used by teachers as rewards for as motivational rewards for students.. Even though it has high curriculum relevance, we’ve found that Maths-Whizz is often being used in classrooms as a ‘carrot’ to encourage the students to get on with their regular written activities. An elementary teacher in Seattle, USA, is even using Maths-Whizz as an incentive in his English classes! If the children behave themselves, he’s told us, they get a bit of Waths-Whizz at the end. To be honest, this isn’t quite what we anticipated when we started devloping this, but it comes as a pleasant surprise!
Of course, this doesn’t mean every child is going to want to sit and play maths games when they could be playing football or marshalling armies of orcs on an electronic landscape, but it indicates that there might not be a necessary tension between meeting educational objectives and simply having fun. The trick, it would seem, is in teaching children without them realising they’re being taught. Not even the most self-motivated student wants to get an ‘education’ 24/7….
The ‘Teaching With Games’ study, initiated by Futurelab and Electronic Arts, found that:
…teachers and students have differing views of the novice and expert continuum. What ‘counts’ as hard for students and teachers may be very different. …this flags up a basic problem of how to assess pupils’ abilities and competencies in order to understand how to shape the learning environment to their needs.
This is exactly what we’re trying to get right with our online teaching service. It’s an encouraging finding, though, because we need to be very careful students only fail Maths-Whizz exercises because they can’t do the maths, and not because they don’t understand how to play the games. It seems we underestimate students’ competence with computers and ability to learn new methods at our peril.
The second section of the chapter in Becta’s Emerging Technologies report, focussing on console gaming, notes that educational games need to have:
- engaging narratives
- graduated challenges
- consistent game worlds
- Intuitive interfaces
- Player agency
In short, students aren’t going to get much out of an educational game if it’s not designed well, now matter how many curriculum objectives it meets. It’s no longer the case that teachers can hope to teach with glorified electronic text-books. Students are often expert computer users and educational games need to meet their expectations in order to be truly stimulating and challenging and, therefore, teach most effectively.
Read the Becta Emerging Technologies report for yourself and find out what else is new in educational technology.
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