Learning and Gaming Together in the Classroom: Possible?
The Eighth Chais Conference
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Learning and Game Strategy
One area of interest to the participants was digital games and their impact on learning. Can digital games be more than just fun? Can they be a serious pedagogic tool?
In introducing one of the two keynote speakers, Prof. Douglas Clark of Vanderbilt University, Prof. Yoram Kalman elaborated on this question, "One of the important roles of our research is to link scientific thinking with everyday life, which is essential to scientific education. Doug is attempting to achieve important outcomes through the application of digital games. Players should not only be learning from games, but they should also be learning the right things, and then transferring the knowledge they have gained in the virtual world to the real world."
Here, in fact, is the crux of the problem, according to Prof. Clark: whether students are able to apply what they learn or the skills they acquire in the digital world to the real world.
Much research over the past decade, rather than focusing on this has focused on whether games are good or bad. According to Clark, "they are neither, they are simply a medium with specific importance."
In looking at digital games as a potential pedagogic tool, one must first understand that the classroom is often in dissonance with the outside world. "The focus of the classroom tends to be on what a person can do by himself, while that is not what happens in the outside world," Clark explained.
However, this dissonance can be bridged by designing game strategy so that it answers the pedagogic needs of the classroom, and the need to prepare a student for the outside world.
Games offer some very powerful 'learning skills' that can be easily applied to the classroom as well as the outside world. Games offer players:
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difficulty curves, whereby one must master certain skills before proceeding to the next level
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high levels of motivation as players compete with themselves or others
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opportunities for players to develop and experiment with new strategies and tactics not necessarily involved in the normal flow of the game, thus helping to scaffold development of players' skills
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a gatekeeper who prevents players from continuing until skills are mastered
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continual challenges
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a feeling of success which reinforces motivation
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role-playing particularly in epistemic games where players take on identities of everyday functions
While these qualities do blend with many pedagogic objectives, Clark points out that they do not necessarily meet 'higher' pedagogic objectives. "What we have seen in our research is that conceptual understanding and the ability to engage in scientific practices and discourse -- types of learning skills -- are not supported with digital games."
It is with this objective in mind that Prof. Clark and his research team have begun to explore ramping up the strategic design of digital games. "We've built a single-player game where we try to focus on individual players. However, there is so much automatic collaboration that happens that you can't stop it. Initially there was a very low level of conceptual discussion, but once we added a forum there was a much higher level of conceptual discussion and a larger number of students participating."
Much remains to be researched to fully understand how to implement scaffolding between virtual and actual, classroom learning and gaming, and between skills acquisition and conceptual understanding but clearly major strides have already been made.
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