Video Games in the Classroom

When I was a kid, I had two older brothers who loved playing video games. As the littlest kid and the only sister, I had no choice but to sit down next to them and watch. I remember my brothers playing a range of different types of games over the years: I have a memory from perhaps age 5 when my brothers played some shoot-the-ducks game on the original Nintendo with a console controller shaped like a large hunting gun. Later, I remember my brothers being excited about Mario Kart and Super Smash Bros on N64, Mario Party, and finally Dance Dance Revolution on PS2. Once I myself became an adolescent, I remember going to my friend's house to play the Sims.

As recently as last month, one of my housemates in my college group-house brought from home his collection of perhaps 30 PS2 games that he had built up over the years. He hadn't played them in years. Inevitably and immediately, though, a group of 5 guys in my house gathered around and entertained themselves for hours with those darn games.

My brothers spent countless hours of their childhood on these games - clearly they're not the only ones. If education could be conducted through a system that stimulates as much internal motivation as video games do, we'd end up with a highly (and happily) educated population.

Currently, there are countless games on the internet meant as "educational." I played the BBC Interactive History game on Iron Age Life. I found this thoroughly underwhelming: this game was nothing like the games that consumed my brothers. You could hardly call this a game. As the "player," you clicked around on artifacts that you thought people from the Iron Age used to create a fire. If you guessed correctly, text would pop up that would explain to you how this particular item was used. Once you correctly guessed all 7 items, the game would demonstrate how they all fit together to create a fire, and you could later take a multiple choice quiz on this same information to test your resulting "knowledge."

I don't call this a game and I don't call this educational. To correctly be considered a game, I say an activity needs to genuinely challenge the player to creatively problem-solve. There was no creative problem solving here - only educated guessing. And to correctly be considered educational, I say an activity needs to guide you through a new method of thinking; this "game" did not.

So, when video games are sufficiently complex as to create an entire mini world in which multiple courses of action are available to achieve a multi-step goal, they can certainly be educational, and as a result they certainly belong in the classroom. When "games" are simply a series of mini webpages that present information passively to the student, however, they do not belong in the classroom.

When games aide students in actively constructing knowledge, I fully support their use. When they do not, they belong in the garbage heap with all the other passive methods of "gaining" knowledge.