Emerging Technologies Consulting

This little nugget about an NYU course on video games and cognition popped up in my reader.  It sounds like a cool course, but the end of the article focuses on parents thinking that it, like other courses on popular culture, is watered down.  This is a common reaction to courses by everyday folks, and especially parents, who are shelling out thousands of dollars, thinking, “if I wanted my kid to learn about video games, I would have plopped her in front of the xbox.”  But not studying video games is actually a bad idea.  We want students to think critically, and one way to do that is to have them read and write about Shakespeare.  But, much as Shakespeare’s ideas still hold true today, students don’t always connect the dots to today.  Taking a closer look at video games and how they are shaping our culture gives students the opportunity to think critically about something they may do every day without really thinking about its effect on their lives.  The NYU course proposes to focus on cognition, which could be a quite fruitful avenue to explore.  How do people learn to play Guitar Hero?  What strategies do they use?  And can those strategies be applied to other areas, such as math or science?

While parents may balk at these courses, we can’t just ignore the world around us.  Video games are a part of our lives and learning more about them is one way to learn more about our world.

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The following video is an entertaining and effective explanation of how video games intended for entertainment only can teach something or spark interest in learning by providing small elements that reference real-world items or events.  By providing ways for players to follow those interests in game–without disrupting the game–can turn an entertaining game into a learning one.  Here’s my own personal example. When my son first started playing Runescape, he needed to create bread, but the game doesn’t quite tell you how.  The game is semi-medieval in its time-frame, so he needed to know how bread was made in that time period.  He asked me, and I explained that they would have had to mill their grain first into flour and then use yeast and other ingredients to make the bread.  The milling was the crucial piece of the puzzle for him and now he knows how bread was made (and still is, though more mechanically).  I have written about this before (with the same Runescape example, plus others).  I think the more examples we have of how to tap into the learning potential of games, the better.

Steph's drawing of SIMS house

Many parents and teachers lament the obsession kids have with video games and have concerns over the violent and sexualized content, but not all games are bad and many of them, even the ones that look bad on the surface, can actually help kids learn.  James Paul Gee has argued that the way kids approach games should be a lesson to educators about how to make learning more engaging.  On the left is a picture my daughter drew to help her design a house in The SIMS, a game she really loves.  She spends all kinds of time arranging rooms and houses, building stories from the different characters she creates.  She’s nine, and already she’s developing spatial skills that may lead to an interest in architecture or engineering.  In creating stories, she learns about social interactions between people, how to develop a narrative, what people will be interested in (appreciation of audience), and description.  A couple of days ago, she replicated The Biggest Loser in The SIMS, creating Bob and Jillian, and several “contestants,” who got to move out of the house once they were fit enough.

I think we don’t always know what a kid will get out of a game.  My son learned about baking from Runescape and has helped me do some actual baking since.  My daughter also plays Spore and has learned something about evolution from it.  In social games, kids also learn about how to interact with kids of different ages.  My son regularly plays Runescape with an 18-year-old who’s in the army.  As long as parents stay involved in these interactions and monitor them, they can be good ways for kids to learn appropriate behavior around others.

There are pleny of people out there researching how games can be used in teaching and learning and many games are being built specifically for learning, but we shouldn’t knock some of the teaching and learning moments offered by those games we play “just for fun.”

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