Games and Learning

Recently, there's been a lot of buzz about educational games and gamification of educational content. There's no doubt that games hold a lot of promise for educators and learners alike. They provide problems in situated contexts that promote systems thinking and improve metacognition all in an environment that allows for failure after failure with no real-world consequences. They tap into our brains and release tons of good-feeling endorphins and push intrinsic motivation to keep on playing for the sake of simply solving the game's problems. It's no wonder that educators are waiting to see what educational games have to offer in the classroom.

Here's a brief video of James Paul Gees's discussing what a good educational game has to offer. There are a series of videos on youtube where James Paul Gee talks about his different principles on how games help learning and I encourage you to travel down that rabbit hole.

Visually, games can change how we actually see. For example, as we play games we are conditioned to expect movement to come in from the sides of the screen, especially in action games. This conditioning pumps up our peripheral vision.

This video on vision and video games from the Coursera course "Video Games and Learning" from The University of Wisconsin in Madison explains it in more detail:

You can browse the Coursera videos here, including the James Paul Gee videos.

I'm playing Skyrim at the same time I am taking my classes and as I play, I can relate learning and cognition theories to what I experience within the game. Visually, Skyrim is highly interactive and beautiful. I often find myself riding my virtual horse and watching the two massive moons high overhead or I'll catch an amazing vista from the top of a mountain. The virtual world is so immersive and gorgeous that it supports an open-ended discovery-based type of gameplay with quite a bit of hidden easter eggs. This type of game can keep me going for hours and hours. 

Image from http://www.ign.com/blogs/guardianike33/2012/06/22/pokemon-world-the-next-pokemon-console-game-made-by-bethesda

At the moment, game use in education is still in its infancy. There are still many unanswered questions about how games teach, how they change our cognition and - the big question - will info learned in a game environment transfer to the real world. It's also quite possible that playing games may not be enough to truly learn. But building games, creating content surrounding games and developing problems for others to solve in the context of a game has the potential to teach us quite a bit about systems, how they work and how to solve problems embedded in systems. Bringing up the next generation of systems thinkers to tackle the world's problems may seem like a tall order but maybe we can discuss it the next time we meet up and go raid that orc camp.