Society | DOI: 10.1145/1536616.1536624
Leah Hoffmann
Learning Through Games
Electronic games can inspire players to explore new ideas
and concepts. By gaining a better understanding of the dynamic
between player and game, researchers hope to develop more
interesting and effective approaches.
It WAsn’t Until after he’d stopped working as a mid- dle school choir teacher and joined one of Microsoft’s soft- ware testing units that Jeremy
Tate first encountered Guitar Hero. A
gaming enthusiast, Tate was quickly
hooked. And as he grew more familiar with the game and observed others at play, he noticed how Guitar Hero
helps gamers master challenging musical concepts, such as phrasing and
rhythm, notions he had struggled to
teach his own students.
“Players are taught instantly, as a
function of the game,” Tate explains.
“Want a better score? Do it right next
time.” He’s now talking to several teachers in his old school district about putting his observations to use and bringing music video games like Guitar Hero,
Lips, and others into the classroom.
Photo Gra Ph by Wło DI
In many ways, of course, it’s not surprising that educators could make use
of an electronic medium teens have
already widely embraced. According to
a 2008 survey conducted by the Washington, D.C.-based Pew Research Center, 97% of children between the ages
of 12 and 17 play computer, Web, portable, or console games. Among many
adults, the popular perception of these
games is that they have little redeeming value and may harm children by
desensitizing them to violence. Over
the past few years, however, a new body
of research has begun to demonstrate
how games can have a positive effect
on youngsters by stimulating their
imaginations, sparking their curiosity,
and promoting the exploration of difficult issues and concepts. Off-the-shelf
games like Sim City, Civilization, and
Railroad Tycoon have been successfully
used in the classroom to help students
understand complex social, historical,
and economic processes. Tim Rylands,
a teacher at a primary school near Bris-
Games like Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock simulate the playing of a real guitar and teach
players how to master challenging musical concepts, such as phrasing and rhythm.
tol, England, made headlines in 2005
for his award-winning use of Myst to
improve students’ writing skills. And
World of Warcraft has been praised by
educational researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for its ability to foster abstract thinking among
middle and high school students, who
meet online to share strategies and
ideas about the game.
“Games are goal-directed learning
spaces,” says James Gee, a professor of
literacy studies at Arizona State University who has done extensive work on the
subject. According to Gee, games give
children the tools they need to explore
complex systems and experiment with
different possibilities and outcomes.
Rather than simply memorizing figures
and statistics, children learn to constructively use facts to solve problems.
In a game whose objective is to design
and build a city, for example, kids end
up not only learning about building
codes, but how to put them to use. In
Civilization III, a game in which players
lead a civilization from 4,000 B.C. to the
present, students are frequently motivated to consult maps, Wikipedia, and
other external resources to get ahead.
“Could there be a better learning
philosophy for the 21st century?” asks
Gee.
Games as Interactive Platforms
The tricky part, of course, is figuring out why certain games advance
learning. What factors keep students
engaged? What features encourage
them to apply what they’ve learned to
real problems? Too many titles that
are currently marketed as educational games, experts say, are little more
than digital flashcards, presenting
students with straightforward drills
in subjects like math and grammar
rather than giving them an interactive
platform through which to explore
new ideas and concepts. By gaining
a more sophisticated understanding
of the dynamic between player and
game, researchers hope they can de-
