January 2006 — Features
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Game On!
Game-Based Benefits
Assuming the education community can afford it, DGBL promises to bring broad learning benefits on several fronts:
• Provide deep digital engagement to students who have come to expect it.
• Offer motivation for persistence in completing courses.
• Enable customized learning experiences.
• Promote both long-term memory and transfer of learning to practical, everyday life endeavors.
Planning and problem solving.The key to unlocking potential learning gains is to find good role-playing, simulation, or adventure games that do not include violence. Such games involve strategic planning and problem solving, and enable concepts to be developed and remembered. Adventure games, for instance, enhance reading and observation skills by forcing users to read carefully and look for details in visuals, in order to plan strategies. Simulation games expand students’ common knowledge, provide real-life experiences that they might not otherwise get, and have the potential to enhance logical-thinking skills. (Players might need to select problem-solving methods and put them in sequential order to proceed through the game.) Map-reading skills are often employed in simulations, and in some simulation and role-playing games, players must create maps and take notes. The ability to take good notes, organize those notes, and find them when needed are all associated with good study skills.
Expanding vocabulary. Many games introduce new words that must be understood for the player to be successful. Thus, vocabulary building and spelling naturally improve. For example, to succeed at Civilization III (www.firaxis.com/games/game_detail.php?gameid=3), a history simulation, players must understand such terms as anarchy, despotism, monarchy, communism, republic, and democracy, along with 13 terrain types (e.g., grassland, mountains, woodland).
Improving mental agility. An expert gamer has anything but a lazy mind. In fact, superior gaming has been linked to expert behaviors such as self-monitoring, pattern recognition, principled decision-making, qualitative thinking, and superior long- and short-term memory.
Research continues to turn up additional benefits of gaming, including therapeutic effects such as the ego boost, increased motivation, and enhanced self-worth that result from excelling at complex games. Additionally, case studies have shown that video games can help develop the spatial abilities and basic skills of special-needs kids, including language, math, and reading skills (go to www.sheu.org.uk/publications/eh/eh203mg.pdf). There are even associated social benefits. Though video games are often played in isolation, they provide a common interest for children to discuss by trading tips and experiences.
According to Henry Jenkins, principal investigator for the MIT-Microsoft Games-to-Teach project (now concluded, but replaced with the Education Arcade initiative at www.educationarcade.org), who examined the educational potential of computer and video games, games lower the threat of failure, foster a sense of engagement through immersion, link learning to goals and roles, are multimodal, and support early steps into a new domain.
The business world is already tapping in to the potential of game-based learning. Companies are turning to DGBL to reach audiences for difficult assessment and certification issues, complex process understanding, what-if analysis, and strategy development and communication.
But educators are catching on. The Alabama Department of Education recently spent $200,000 to give every fourth-grade student access to the online video game STAR Sportsmanship (www.learningthroughsports.com), which it believes will be a strong asset to its mandated character-education program. The New Hampshire Department of Education adopted the standards-based Achieve Now program for use in its No Child Left Behind-mandated Supplemental Education Service tutoring program for Title I students. Achieve Now is a game-based K-8 curriculum from Plato Learning (www.plato.com).
Learning Techniques
Interactive learning techniques used in DGBL vary from sophisticated problem solving to basic memorization.
• Practice and feedback, sometimes associated with drill-and-kill programs, can be valuable for learning facts or basic skills through repetition.
• Learning by doing adds the elements of exploration, discovery, and problem solving.
• Learning from mistakes is lifted from reality (trial and error). Players move forward until an error is made; sometimes they must return to the beginning and start over.
• Goal-oriented learning is related to learning how to do something, and motivates students to push on to overcome failures.
• Discovery learning and “guided discovery” are associated with adventure games, which involve problem-solving scenarios.
• Task-based learning involves students solving a series of tasks or problems that build on each other and gradually increase in difficulty. Guidance and modeling are provided to assist players with learning skills.
• Question-led learning is connected with quiz games in which players reason among options.
• Role-playing provokes reflection, which is an important part of learning. Simulation, adventure, strategy, and puzzle games require players to consider options, which means that games incorporating these strategies might move at a slower pace.
