Podcast #47 - Games in Education

[dsheinem]

In the last of our PAX East 2012 interviews, Dave sat down with Leslie Redd, Director of Educational Programs at Valve Software, James Portnow, author of Extra Credits, and Dr. Elizabeth Lane Lawley Associate Professor in the Department of Interactive Games & Media at the Rochester Institute of Technology. The roundtable discussion touches on a wide variety of issues about the past, present, and future of video games in education.

[Blu]

Dave this was such a cool podcast! I think you really assembled a great panel, and the content was really interesting. I hadn't heard about the Learning with Portals project. I think my favorite part was the bit about games and if they're fun, then it's not work, and not a real educational experience. You asked some really engaging questions, and guided the panel well. Being an educator as well, I think this is one of the best podcasts I've listened to yet. Bravo sir!

[dsheinem]

Dave this was such a cool podcast! I think you really assembled a great panel, and the content was really interesting. I hadn't heard about the Learning with Portals project. I think my favorite part was the bit about games and if they're fun, then it's not work, and not a real educational experience. You asked some really engaging questions, and guided the panel well. Being an educator as well, I think this is one of the best podcasts I've listened to yet. Bravo sir!

Thanks, we've been sitting on it for a while since it was relatively short - but I agree it has a lot of good content. Appreciate the kudos

[J T]

This sounds right up my alley! I'm excited to listen to this one. Downloading now. Will be back later with comments, but great idea for a podcast!

[J T]

I finished listening to the podcast. I'd like to continue discussion here because I still have a lot of questions.

I teach at the college level. The main course I teach is Research Methodology in Pyschology. I am also going to teach Clinical Psychology for the first time as the instructor next quarter. I have also co-led an online course on Behavioral Disorders.

I'm excited by the idea of using games to teach largely because I think that would be a course I would want to take. It sounds fun.

I was excited when the Learning With Portals education project started because I thought I might be able to use it in my Research Methods course. I didn't end up using it though. There are barriers to entry though. I would have to be clever to come up with a way to use Portal 2 to teach Research. I could potentially design some visuo-spatial experiment, but everything I thought of felt like I was forcing it. It felt to me like I was struggling for a way to push Portal 2 into the idea because I wanted to incorporate games, but not that I was using Portal 2 because it was the best way to teach the topic. It also was going to be a lot of work. Aside from coming up with the idea, I was also going to have to create the maps and also figure out some way to make sure all of my students had access to the game and computers that could run it. I couldn't expect them to all have powerful enough computers, and I don't think the specs on the PCs in the classroom could run it either, and even if they could, it was going to be a big hassle to convince the university to install 100 copies of Portal 2 on all of their machines so I could have one class activitiy that involved videogames. I was bummed, but it just didn't seem feasible.

I've also thought more about this topic and I have a few questions I'm interested in hearing others opinions about:

1. Incorporating a game takes more time. Not only time in preparation (which is potentially astronomically more time if you are developing a game instead of a lecture), but it also takes more time in class. Lectures and assigned readings just stream content at the student as quickly as possible. The advantage of a game is that you get to play around with a topic, but I only really need students to do that if I'm trying to teach a skill rather than content. Traditionally, I train in skill with class activities where students work in groups. When teaching ethics, we might have debate teams. When teaching data analysis, we run a mini experiment in class and analyze the data we collect. I'm not sure if games have any distinct advantage over these more tradtional methods. I can see them being just as useful, with the distinct advantage of being easily mass produced and given to many universities, but as an instructor just wanting to teach my specific class, I don't necessarily care about that.

2. Is entertainment needed for education? I don't want to come across as the puritanical fuddy-duddy that they mentioned in the podcast. I'm not opposed to schoolwork being fun. I think it's great if it is. But should it be a goal to make it fun rather than a pleasant by-product when it happens to be that way? This is similar to the debate of whether art games also have to be fun. People expect games to be fun, but fun is not always your goal. If I'm teaching about the Nuremberg Trials and the effect they had on ethics policies in research practice, I'm not really looking for a fun way to teach that. The whole idea basically means that we want our educators to also be entertainers and I think that either doesn't work or requires a paradigm shift where we include acting, performance, and game theory as part of the education for teachers beyond the knowledge they need of their subject matter.

3. Do we really want to add a gamification layer of reinforcement to the existing layers. Yeah, a lot of classes are not entertaining and a lot of instructors suck at reinforcing students for learning and perhaps automating that to machines will make up for poor teachers, but assuming you have a teacher that does know how to reinforce/extinguish/punish behavior on the fly, do you really need to add a game on top of that? It's a bit redundant and takes more time?


I hope I don't sound like a nay-sayer, though I think I probably do. I'm actually really excited at the idea of using games in education, but I think there are a lot of questions that need to be asked about what benefit they add to the existing education methods, and I think there are a lot of pragmattic issues that need to be addressed about how much time is needed to implement gaming solutions in the classroom. I'd be really interested to see some successful examples of places where the Portal 2 program has been used in school and how the instructor thinks it improved upon what was done before incorporating gaming into education.

[dsheinem]

This is a cop-out answer, but the folks I interviewed were on a longer panel that addressed some of these issues. Here's the video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PyoF9cs13Ec

more later...

[Jmustang1968]

I have a personal experience of games helping with education. However, these were board games and not video games.

My 6th or 7th grade Social Studies teach was a big D&D nerd. He would host a game club with students after school. He also incorporated a few board games he created as a part of our activities.

One was a quest for the holy grail. We would be in teams, and have a team leader. We would each be responsible for decisions certain decisions the team made and discovered clues as to where the location of the holy grail is. Certain discoveries and good decisions awarded us extra resources and movement points etc.

Another game was a space colonization game. As a team, we would decide which planets to look into and research and colonize. Not too different from a watered down galactic civilization.

I remember actually looking forward to each class to play the game, and still remember some of the locations we visited and their historical significance. I would also get some early knowledge on rudimentary economics and how it functions. And bottom line, it made us all that much more interested in the curriculum.

So I think, at least at that young level, learning through games can be successful. And if it works there, I would imagine it can be made to work at the college level.

[J T]

Certainly I've heard of games like Civilization being a source of learning (or at least inspiration to learn more) in history. And Capitalism II has been used in teaching the basics of business and economics.

Does "edutainment" work though? Or is it like it's name, not fully education and not quite entertainment. I'm sure there is some magic balance where it can work, but when you think of how many ways a game can fail and how many ways an education plan can fail, and then you combine the two... well it has the potential to be massively helpful, or a massive failure, even moreso than if either of the endeavours were attempted alone.