Can Games Help Kids Learn?

July 18, 2008 by Bill.

For the last few weeks I’ve been involved in an excellent Professional Development (PD) program for teachers called Teacher Game Institute (TGI). The program is managed by several professors at the University of Denver (DU) with the aid of their amazingly capable and helpful graduate research assistants (GRAs). I believe TGI is at least partially underwritten by a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The program is dubbed P4Games. The four Ps stand for Programming, Pixels(art), Pedagogy, and Play (designing and play-testing games).

The idea is at once straightforward and yet profound in its potential to dramatically affect the way that teachers teach and kids learn when they’re at school. Prior to coming to TGI for the first week we were given a text to read: How Computer Games Help Children Learn, by David Williamson Shaffer, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, ISBN 13-978-1-4039-7505-8. Shaffer eloquently dialogs about the things I’ve been thinking about public education ever since I began (my third career) teaching Computer Science at a Colorado high school three years ago. Personally I believe much of contemporary education (including lots of today’s educational philosophy as pushed by post-secondary institutions) is sooooo 20th century and very broken. Classes are generally not terribly hands-on.

Students enter the classroom, obtain a textbook, go through some sort of a content delivery process (I hate the word “lecture”), are given a worksheet or homework or both to help augment the learning, and dismissed after 55 minutes of class time to go on to their next session. Students are expected to sit up, pay attention, listen carefully to what’s being said, take notes, and make every effort to contribute as much as they can to their educational process. It is, after all, their education. Students are tested, tested, tested and then tested some more because somewhere in the goofy No Child Left Behind (NCLB) philosophy, bean-counters have decided that unless we objectively see numbers, we have no way of knowing if a kid’s learning what we’re teaching. (While there’s some merit to this, and I’m a believer in formative and summative assessments, I think we’ve gone overboard in the testing process and are now actually doing our children a disservice by assessing them so much.)

The problem is this: Today’s kids don’t fit this mold very well. First of all there are way too many things competing for their attention: boyfriends and girlfriends and friends in general, family members, both parents working, single parent households, poverty, affluence, video games, drugs, and sports not to mention the whole universe that makes up the school’s ecosystem - “stoners”, “skaters”, “jocks”, and so forth: in other words the school’s cliques.  Not to mention all of the flash and advertising they get from media content in all its forms. My guess is there is hardly a place kids can go that lacks the pizzazz of living in media-driven America. (Think church is the one sanctuary? Guess again. In most larger churches, there are coffee-shops and with them the various banners and buzz associated with the church’s programs. Churches actually have customized coffee cozies that look like Starbucks, but advertise the church’s program(s) du jour.

Second, near as I can tell, kids don’t read anymore. I don’t mean they never pick up a book, magazine or newspaper and read a snippet or two. Of course that goes on. But I believe the notion of actively reading the printed page to gain information isn’t within the purview of most American students. Of course there are exceptions. I’m not saying all students are this way. I’m just saying that as a general educational trend, students don’t get their information from books and periodicals. They’re much more inclined to go to the Internet for their information, or obtain it second-hand from friends or other sources. Urban myths abound in this communication system, and kids believe nearly anything.

 Thirdly, and probably most importantly, it appears that students are as comfortable or maybe even much more comfortable in the virtual world than they are in the physical. For example, there is a sense of empowerment and usefulness that comes with the World of Warcraft (WOW) universe which students may have a very hard time duplicating in their regular lives. I’m just a 16-year-old high-school student by day, but in the privacy of my bedroom I become a warlock, priest, warrior or other important person in the virtual world. I actually mean something to somebody and can be of productive assistance.

This, I believe, is the most important differentiation between us adults and our kids. If you and I escape into a golf game or run away to a Cancun all-inclusive for a few days, we’re still connected to the world around us. But kids who immerse themselves into WOW aren’t. They’ve disconnected and they’re deep into a new world that we don’t understand. They’re at play, yes. But they’re also engaged with virtual others in a completely new and different universe, where roles and goals are quite different from the mundane today. I can appreciate that this is terribly satisfying. Who among us would not like to completely get away from our world for an extended period of time? Truly, does this not explain adults’ need for happy hour during the week?

My point here isn’t to  trash WOW, though I’m not a big fan, or praise alcohol, which I imbibe in moderation. Blizzard Entertainment, WOW’s owner, is amazingly successful with millions of users paying $20/month to participate in the WOW universe.

I want to make a far bigger point: Games, especially video games in all their forms (online, PC, Nintendo Wii or DS, Sony Playstation, Microsoft Xbox, etc.) are the happy hour for kids. It is their escape mechanism. The games are fun, stimulating, challenging, entertaining, enlightening, sometimes even educational (it is this sometimes part we need to work on). They take kids’ mind off of things. They teach kids how to quickly react to complex situations. (Don’t believe me? Try playing a simple game like Super Mario Galaxy on the Wii, then we’ll talk.) They encourage kids to explore and discover. They get kids connected, talking, and working in teams.

Moreover, I think games have the ability to really teach kids the things they need to know.

Even more importantly, if playing the games is so useful, wouldn’t learning how to build them be even more fun and productive?

It is this mindset in which we were immersed in our TGI workshop. Most of the first two weeks’ of the workshop were spent the same way: 2 hours of programming instruction (using a cool open source game programming product called Greenfoot), 2 more hours of learning how to draw and use another really great open source product called Inkscape,  2 hours of pedagogy around teaching kids how to build games, and another 2 hours talking about game design, actually designing our own games and then “play-testing” them.

The second two weeks we were charged with writing our own game, and developing curriculum we could use in our classrooms. At the same time, the P4Games team was going through the same educational process they’d just taught us with a group of middle-school girls. The professors came in and announced: since we’re in the middle of heated political season with the presidential elections coming up and all, we should make a game around the election. This instruction went out to both teachers and students.

What I really, really liked about the TGI program was the cohesiveness of the subject matter. For example, the art professor was very gifted at helping us understand basic things about drawing such as perspective, shapes and color. We were introduced to charcoal drawing and drawing stacks of boxes to learn about how to draw perspectives, But eventually we were moved to Inkscape and with the help of a Wacom tablet we were able to move our drawings into the electronic world.

The game design professor, an extremely interesting man with a deep background in the subject, brought all kinds of new ideas to the class about what a game is and what it is not. For example, some things we think are games are actually toys, because they have no decisive finish or outcome - you simply play them.

The Computer Science (CS) professor was a bright, capable person who took some extremely technical programming ideas and principles and boiled them down so that the average person could understand them.

There were non-technical teachers in the class. You need never have ever written a line of code, or drawn even one thing to become a game developer. We learned all about coding and drawing and crafting. Two of the teachers in class were English oriented - one wanted to use games to envelop the things her kids were reading into a game so as to bring about a stronger sense of literature and meaning. Her early foray in to this area was quite good, extremely provocative, and, I suspect, will probably be a huge hit with her students. The students will read a little of the assigned book, then jump on the game to act like the protagonist for awhile.

The big point is this: The game isn’t the end-all, be-all. Getting to the game is what we’re after–it is the journey through the technical, art, design, math, science and business worlds that culminate in a satisfying game–this where the educational process really kicks in.

For example, kids have to understand the physics and math of a collision before they understand how to code one. Just getting characters to move on a 2D screen 20 pixels wide by 20 deep can be quite a challenge at first. Kids need to understand the coordinate system in 2-space, and then the commands that get their characters onto the screen. Only then can they get them moving. That said, getting your very own characters to move correctly based upon commands you gave them is quite a gratifying process.

Further, story is extremely important in games. No one wants to play a lame game with no backbone. We want strong protagonists and antagonists with sturdy plot structures, believeable environments and plot twists, and, of course, suspense, relationships and humor. So writing, coupled with a strong knowledge of literature and how to use it is a heavy requirement for successful game development.

And so on. There is almost nothing that is currently taught in a conventional high school that would not become relevant in a game programming enviornment - from music to Spanish to lacrosse - it’s all meaningful and useful. There is no subject that is not germane to game programming, and nothing that cannot become a game. For example, our game design professor instructed us one day to come up with a game all about red. Another day we had to design a game around the topic of sad.

I am very committed and motivated to helping kids understand how to write and produce games. What we need now is to develop entire curriculums and schools focused on the subject, using guided leadership and project-centric learning, funneling students through the discovery process that results in a game. Once you’ve gone through the TGI, you begin to understand the vision–how important the impact of game production can be on our students. There needs to be a switch in American education: game-centric high-schools! 

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