Educators can learn from video games

Lots of adults rolled their eyes when a report surfaced recently extolling the value of violent computer games as learning environments good for developing eye-hand coordination and situational awareness useful to future high-tech warriors.

By Norman A. Lockman USA Today

Many adults see such games, called "shooters," as mindless pastimes that may even dangerously increase kids’ taste for violence. That’s a view not entirely without merit. But most stories about the report failed to explain how computer games teach complex tasks.

James Earl Gee, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, has written a book called What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, (Palgrave Macmillan, $26.95), in which he tries to explain how "good" computer games (including some shooters) use critical learning principles to quickly teach kids to play extremely complex virtual reality games.

His reasoning is sometimes laced with jargon, but one thing jumps out at you: The greatest "digital divide" may not be the gap between rich and poor kids’ access to computers, but the gap between educators and kids.

Most people over the age of 35— and that includes most education policy-makers — have little understanding of the operational theory of popular computer games. Mostly they know there are games where anything that moves is shot at or that others simulate professional sports action. We aren’t sufficiently aware of how the games transmit information and hold kids’ attention.

We do know, however, that a youngster who is bored stiff with schoolwork often goes home and devotes hours to a computer game that requires long periods of intense concentration to figure it out. What we don’t recognize often enough is that the period of concentration leads to a successful learning experience. Gee argues that such learning experiences are transferable to learning in schools — if the lessons use some of the principles imbedded in the games.

The games Gee prefers are not shooters, but simulations and role-playing titles where players immerse themselves in a virtual world where survival depends upon figuring out ways of staying alive and overcoming bad situations. Sim City, a game popular with adults as well as kids, challenges players to start a city from scratch and keep it growing for decades by balancing tax revenues against infrastructure development. Failure triggers various kinds of catastrophes. Civilization is a cultural simulation that spans thousands of years and offers the opportunity to "change history" by knowing enough about what really happened to prevent it from occurring again.

These games succeed because, according to Gee, they gradually present information that is actually needed to perform deeds. This kind of "contextual learning" makes players come back for more in order to continue the game. Frustration is balanced against rewards to maintain a competitive interest in progressing. Even some shooter games require that users learn to solve problems by making critical choices to create winning identities for combatants.

What do kids learn from that? How to transfer abilities freshly learned from doing one task to accomplish a harder task. And that, in a nutshell, is what successful learning is all about.

If our teaching traditions continue to disrespect the source of this kind of learning, it will widen the disconnection between digital-era kids and old-fashioned schools. One of the reasons the military is so successful at quickly teaching kids who do poorly in school to accomplish complicated tasks is that it has adopted some of these computer games’ contextual learning approaches. You learn today because it relates to something you have to — or want to — do tomorrow.

To be more effective, our educators need to seriously examine computer games to find out how they quickly teach easily bored kids very complex lessons.

Norman Lockman is an associate editor at The News Journal in Wilmington, Del.

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2003-06-13-gaming-theory_x.htm