Games in Education

Like many of my age, I grew up playing board games, video games, and the ilk, and many formative moments of my youth were based around video games; either in the play of them, or attempting to design, create, or program them.  Learning how to program games taught me a lot about logic, math, and organization.

Strangely, for a field that is stereotypically considered as being populated with isolationist loaners, games taught me a lot about people, as I could sense the ideas and preconceptions of the game designers by using their creations.

For all that I learned with video games as a motivation, I also learned how horrible "educational games" often can be.  They are created with the best of intentions, often by educators who see the power that games have over their students, and hope to harness that power for educational purposes.  Yet, something goes wrong in the process, leaving an educational game that no student wants to play volitionally.

The folks at Extra-Credits have a fine video blog, in which they discuss issues in game design and development.  One of these issues is gamification in general, and games in education, specifically, which is covered in this video.  They hold that a great problem with educational games is the way they are created and used: as a corollary to highly-controlled, instructor-driven lessons. They argue that gaming is based around play, which ceases to be play when it is controlled and mandated.

Yet, play can be an amazing learning tool, as it tends to consume our free time, even when we are not actively playing.  When we are engaged with a game, we seek to improve at it, and may find ourselves considering its strategies throughout the day.

An effective educational game would be one that encourages students to seek and explore available knowledge, by creating a competitive or reward-based framework around which such behavior is reinforced.  Games in education work best when they trust that learners will curiously seek after knowledge if they are appropriately motivated.