
Students always know where they’re at in the game.”Ī PLAYER GETS A TASTE FOR THE COMPLEXITY OF CIVIL ENGINEERING WHEN THEIR BRIDGE DESIGN FAILS IN THE VIDEO GAME POLY BRIDGE. “You can see that happening outside of games too, but games do a very good job of it. “Games provide instant feedback, real-time feedback on performance, which is really powerful,” says Richard Culatta, director of the Office of Educational Technology for the Department of Education. The interactivity of video games is really the key to their educational potential. “Students learn to prioritize their spending, so as not to run out of money, and learn the impact that their decisions have on the development of the city.”

“The interactive game gives the students a chance to really grasp the complexities of city design and management,” says DiscoverE’s Maggie Dressel, Future City program manager. The group has used the game SimCity in its Future City Competition since the middle school engineering program started in the early ’90s, paving the way for the more recent movement to use video games as tools for teaching. “There’s these really rich, data-laden, numerical kinds of conversations that they have.”ĭiscoverE has also proven the educational potential of commercial video games. “ actually have really serious debates around data and analysis of that data and what it might mean,” says MIT Professor Eric Klopfer, director of the university’s Scheller Teacher Education Program and Education Arcade. For example, Constance Steinkuehler, a researcher of cognition and learning in online games, has published a number of studies on World of Warcraft and how it encourages players to develop scientific and mathematical thinking habits.Ī 2008 study of World of Warcraft discussion forums by Steinkuehler and fellow researcher Sean Duncan found 86% of posts engaged in social knowledge construction, more than half evidenced systems-based reasoning, one in 10 evidenced model-based reasoning, and 65% displayed an evaluative epistemology in which knowledge was treated as an open-ended process of evaluation and argument. Even commercial games, developed purely for entertainment, have surprising potential as tools for teaching. NASA and MIT have both developed their own games, and even more government agencies, universities, and independent groups are researching video games and establishing educational programs and projects that use them.Ī video game doesn’t need to be made by NASA or developed for the classroom to be useful as a teaching tool either.

The Institute of Play isn’t the only group exploring the educational potential of video games. The school now boasts three winners of the New York City Mathematics Project’s Math Olympiad and an average student performance on both English language arts exams and science exams that significantly surpasses the city as a whole-by 56% and 43% respectively. Opened in 2009, the school is a lab for developing game-based approaches to teaching using both video games and nondigital games.

Both video games and attitudes have evolved, however, and a growing amount of research and success stories not only challenge old stereotypes but show video games can be both beneficial and an incredible tool for teaching.Ī popular example that has made headlines in recent years is the Institute of Play’s Quest to Learn school in New York City. It’s never really been in doubt that video games can create excitement, but for much of their history, the mainstream view of video games has been to label them a guilty pleasure at best and a corrupting, brain-atrophying influence at worst.
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Played regularly by 155 million Americans, according to the Entertainment Software Association, video games could be the best answer yet. The engineering profession has for decades been asking itself how it can improve public understanding of what engineers do, provide better engineering education to grade school students, and get those same students excited about careers in engineering. Trove is a new video game released in July-a brightly colored take on massively multiplayer online role-playing games like World of Warcraft and resource collecting and building games like Minecraft-and while it may be light on real-world engineering principles, it’s bursting with engineering creativity, much like LEGO bricks have been for more than 50 years. It’s a trippy scene to be sure, but also one that could spark a grade school student’s interest in designing real-world structures. Then she’s off on horseback, fighting her way through angry, anthropomorphic ice cream cones to get the ore she needs to build the final floor of her gingerbread skyscraper. THIS CANDY BARBARIAN FROM THE VIDEO GAME TROVE USED HIS SPOILS TO BUILD A CREAMSICLE-SHAPED HOME.īarbarian studies the cotton candy-colored landscape for a moment.
