Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

4.19.10 | For anyone who grew up in the 80s, learning via computer gaming was a simple matter. If your school district was forward-thinking and well-funded, a hulking Apple II or Commodore 64 sat in the back of the classroom. Once or twice a week, if you finished all your required reading and times tables, you could load a 5 1/4’ floppy disk and explore the “Oregon Trail.”

If things went well, you could learn about the life of American pioneers. If things went badly, you could die of dysentery before moving aside and letting another kid have a turn.

Gaming has made huge advances since the pioneer days of “Oregon Trail.” As computers have made their way into homes and pockets (in the form of smartphones), they also have a larger presence in classrooms—in many cases, shifting from back-of-the-room study break to front-and-center teaching tool.

Early games like “Number Munchers” tended to simply graft learning exercises or quizzes on to simplistic games that did little to embody the subject being taught. While these games had some educational content, they lacked educational context, to say nothing of good gaming.

“When I started, computers [in classrooms] were only for programming,” says Eric Klopfer, director of MIT’s Teacher Education Program. “Then the Apple II emerged, and that’s when the first dawn of education games started. Some teachers tried to move that to the center of the curriculum.”

Klopfer, along with Scot Osterweil, Katie Salen and others affiliated with MIT’s Education Arcade program, is the author of “Moving Learning Games Forward: Obstacles, Opportunities, and Openness,” (PDF) a paper written in 2009 to address gaming’s place in learning. Osterweil is creative director of Education Arcade, and Salen is executive director of the Institute of Play, a non-profit that promotes gaming as a foundation of learning and partnered to start the Quest to Learn school in New York City.

Games Should Encourage Failure, Experimentation, and Play

Arguing that games encourage critical thinking, collaboration and other important learning skills, the authors call for educators and game makers to think much more seriously about fun and games. Many of the ideas discussed are being attempted on the ground.

“Moving Learning Games Forward” argues that children at play should be free to fail, experiment, fashion identities and express their own interpretation of the proceedings. These qualities can be found in classic games such as tag or in computer games such as EA’s “The Sims” and “Ayiti: the Cost of Living,” a game developed by Gamelab and students at New York’s Global Kids program to teach kids about poverty in Haiti.

The ideal education gaming experience, says Klopfer, “doesn’t need to be super obvious.” 

“The game doesn’t need to have algebra equations on the screen; it needs to have the concept of algebra,” he adds. “The game needs to lay the groundwork for learning. It provides a foundation for certain principles and a common experience.”

Teachers Are Not Replaced by Machines

That common experience must include the teacher, who is more than just a leader in the classroom; she can be a member of the gaming community as well as a behind-the-scenes monitor of her students’ progress within a given game’s “playspace”—a realm Klopfer notes is “partially on the screen and partially in the community.” In the playspace, students and teacher follow a prescribed set of rules and share goals.

According to Osterweil,  “When kids enter into play, they really kind of naturally shift into a mode where they’re more adventuresome and exploratory. They take risks and have a heightened state of awareness. So if you can get kids to play and give them meaningful things to play with—you can’t guarantee it—but lots of teachable moments appear.”

“Moving Learning Games Forward,” which was underwritten by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, has already struck a chord. It’s been cited favorably by the authors of “Game Changer: Investing in Digital Play to Advance Children’s Learning and Health” and has been discussed widely online.

Speaking to critics who worry that gaming isn’t the best tool for teaching, Osterweil stresses that games—however rich or well-designed—cannot replace all classroom activity, much of which still involves a teacher, a blackboard and textbooks.

“I would agree that by the time a kid graduates, they need to learn some things that are taught by sitting in a chair. But we have 100 years of evidence that sitting kids in rows in chairs serves some kids and not other kids. Is that the way it should be?”

Before joining MIT, Osterweil was a senior designer for TERC, an education not-for-profit, and a creator of “The Logical Journey of the Zoombinis,” a game from 1996 that included a screen that prompted the user to turn off the computer and go out and play.

“Kids should not spend all day in front of a screen,” Osterweill says. “Games, as any other media, need to be used in moderation. I don’t foresee a future in which everything we need to learn comes from screens.”