Educational Gaming: Achieving the WoW factor?
November 7, 2008 by basilcapizzi
I read Warky’s blog posting on Gee’s article, Learning by Design: Good video games as learning machines, which I had also read.
I absolutely agree with the three points he raises on using gaming the classroom. I’ll admit I’m also a nerd, I play World of Warcraft (WoW) and teach computers and I think that puts me up with Stephen Hawking and Bill Gates on the nerd factor. However, my experience with gaming has led me to the same conclusions Chris arrives at.
- If gaming is forced upon you, it can become a chore and no longer fun. If someone forced me to log into WoW when I didnt feel like it, I would certainly become bored and disenchanted. I’d imagine moderators of the game would get to this stage eventually.
- Not everyone likes gaming, and whilst some people do, the like different games. I have a friend who will happily play Lego Star Wars for hours, but would not get near a sport, role-playing game (RPG), first person shooter (FPS), or pretty much any other console/computer game.
- Gaming does involve rewards. Perhaps this is the one aspect that learning with games can most easily address. Suitable rewards may be included within the game, or if that is not achieveable then possibly an external reward tied to receiving a certain outcome in an educational game.
My major difficulty with seeing game use work in the classroom is that I can’t visualise how I could achieve this well in a Mathematics KLA (although obviously it would apply very easily to my IT/computing classes). Maybe it’s time to do some more exploring!!!
PS: The picture included above isn’t really how I picture it, but I wanted to post a Warcraft related photo! ;-P
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Haha, awesome!
Education games, such as the maths games currently in use in school were predominately developed by educationalists to help the teacher project the subject centrally in the classroom. The real breakthrough would be to harness the skill of the games developer to design an entertaining educational game that would entice children to play the game outside of school.
I absolutely agree with what you see as the real breakthrough. When I say I find it difficult to imagine what a Maths game would look like in a classroom I really am picturing a Maths game with the same level of engagement / playability as any popular game enjoyed by thousands of students every afternoon.
I’d certainly like to have shares in the software developer who could produce such a game, ;-P.