Changing the Game

Kurt Squire’s article, Changing the Game: What Happens When Video Games Enter the Classroom?, discusses the benefits and disadvantages of the use of games as learning tools in classrooms. He says that “the important question is not whether educators can use games to support learning, but how we can use games most effectively as educational tools”. As Squire says, there is no doubt that gaming will be a part of the classroom of the future; the question is how we will use these games to effectively teach.

 

Squire spent two years studying the educational value of the game Civilization III (Civ III), a turn-based historical game that simulates the historical, scientific, and cultural advances of humanity in a competitive setting. Squire’s study suggests that, while video gaming has definite pedagogical value, its success will rely on educators developing better theories about teaching through games, as well as “investigating our assumptions about the social organization of schooling”.

 

Squire’s study involved two different cases where Civ III was used in classroom and after-school settings to teach world history. The teachers involved sought to look for an alternative teaching method for students who showed no interest in learning history.

 

Early research has shown that games create “intrinsic motivation through fantasy, control, challenge, curiosity, and competition”. However, Squire found that bringing a commercial, professionally-made game into the classroom often served to decrease motivation. Many of the high-functioning students wondered about the purpose of playing a game during class time. Part of the problem came from the extreme learning curve of the game – six to seven hours to understand basic game concepts.   Some students took advantage of in-game tutorials and resources to learn more about not only the game world, but the real world it was simulating. However, 25% of the students felt that the game was too hard and uninteresting, and instead chose to participate in reading groups instead.

 

Squire argues that part of the difficulty in teaching games is how different they can be. No gamer is interested in every type of game, and some games, such as first-person shooters, currently have little educational value outside of developing psychomotor skills. Students may feel an inherent motivation to play video games, but they won’t feel that for every video game, and a deeply complex game like Civ III that can take hundreds of hours to master may not appeal to most K-12 students at all. As Squire says, “managing this complexity (and particularly students' reactions to it in school settings) will continue to be a challenge”.

 

Another issue was the role of failure inherent in the game. A student who placed a growing city in a woodland instead of next to a river would find themselves in difficulty down the road. Some students would learn from these failures; identifying problems, brainstorming possible solutions, evaluating results. In short, they game became a valuable, high-order learning tool for them. Other students found this failure maddening; these losses caused many students to give up on the program and prevented learning from occurring.

 

Squire argues that gaming in the classroom shouldn’t be seen as a “silver bullet” that will magically motivate and teach their students. The culture of our schools themselves, he argues, will need to change before gaming can become an effective pedagogical tool. This includes curricula decided upon by students, parents, and teachers. This would allow students and teachers more control over what to teach and when to teach it. Squire believes that, in a Montessori system, where curriculum could be built around games such as Civ III, this pedagogical method could flourish.

 

Kurt Squire

http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=82&action=article