A number of years ago, I attended a conference for heads of school where a representative from Nickelodeon spoke. She talked about the amount of time children spent watching television versus the time they spent in school, and about the compelling nature of video games, still quite a new phenomenon. She was trying to get us educators to pay attention to children's activities outside of school, and more specifically to how much more engaged they were in those activities compared to school. Horrified, most of my colleagues unequivocally rejected her message. I, however, found her very thought provoking. If digital media, especially games, deeply engaged children, shouldn't we as educators at least explore whether we could adapt them to educational purposes? USA Today's national educational and demographics reporter Greg Toppo in The Game Believes in You: How Digital Play Can Make Our Kids Smarter explains how this adaptation is happening.
Toppo began his quest because he was worried about his otherwise perfect 11-year-old daughter's lack of interest in reading, despite having been surrounded by books her whole life. He set out to find out whether reading was dying and if so what was killing it. He suspected that technology might prove the culprit. "Then," he explains, "almost as soon as I began to lose hope, I began hearing about projects like Walden."(155) You read that right, Walden. It's a video game that simulates Thoreau's experience as recounted in his book, Walden. The game, which apparently presents a beautiful and exceedingly accurate visual and aural simulation of Walden Pond and surrounding woods, allows players to progress through the four seasons, engaging in the activities in which Thoreau himself engaged: "you gather, fish, sew, build, stroll, explore, think, talk, watch, listen, read, and rest." It is intended as "an invitation to read and think about Walden, the book, to absorb its worldview and see for yourself what it's like to 'live deliberately,'" to quote Thoreau (154) – certainly a worthwhile pursuit in our hyper-busy, materialistic world.
While Steiner-Adair made me more concerned, I didn't learn much new from her. With Toppo, I entered a world I knew virtually nothing about, ignorance I'd venture I share with most educators over a certain age. I had no idea there were games like Walden, or Stride and Prejudice, which speeds you through Pride and Prejudice, or a virtual-reality version of James Joyce's Ulysses. Much to his surprise, most of the game designers Toppo met didn't view games in opposition to books, but rather, "they were beginning to see games as a way to save them." Tracy Fullerton, Walden's designer, is exploring "the potential of the form to breathe new life into the classics."(154)
Toppo explores gaming, a term that is not confined to video games, in a variety of contexts, but to me the most interesting question is whether games can help students learn. Toppo answers that question with a resounding yes. As Steiner-Adair worries about how the dopamine fix we get from our screen activities can lead to addictive-like behavior, Toppo and others see it as a powerful motivator. He quotes game theorist Jane McGonigal who describes World of Warcraft as "the single most powerful IV drip of productivity ever created."(125) The rewards systems of games keep people playing, and while you might not choose World of Warcraft for your child, you might well choose a game that gets her to keep doing something until she understands it.
I imagine some of you are familiar with DragonBox, a game that as of spring 2013 had been downloaded approximately 85,000 times, mostly by parents eager to have their pre-schoolers learn algebra. Toppo explains the game in this way:
By the game's end, at level 100, you've moved seamlessly, baby step by baby step, from a cute baby dragon eating a spiky two-headed lizard, to this: "2 over x plus d over e equals b over x," which you solve, fearlessly and perhaps even a bit impatiently, in exactly fourteen steps. (93)
Amazingly, a four-year-old does this. Zoran Popović, Director of the Center for Game Science at the University of Washington, enlisted 4000 students to spend five days solving algebra problems using DragonBox. Prior to this event, Popović had conducted a trial in which 93% of the students got the basic concepts down in an hour and a half. Doing algebra problems may not sound like an appealing way for children to spend their free time, but these students didn't stop on Friday when the allotted time was up. They kept doing math, ultimately devoting the equivalent of more than seven months to solving 391,000 problems. Other experiments yielded similar results. Moreover, the students did almost 40% of the problems at home, demonstrating, as Popović observed, "engagement way beyond the brick-and-mortar school day." (92)
Matthew Peterson, the designer of ST Math, a program used in schools in more than half the states and reaching 500,000 students at the time Toppo was writing, observes, "There are so many things wrong with math education, but if you picked one thing, it's persistence." Games like DragonBox and St Math, which draws on research about motivation to get participants to work through series of math puzzles, persuade students to persist. Moreover, a system where you can't move ahead until you've solved the problem or the puzzle, ensures that you master the concepts, something that traditional math teaching cannot guarantee.
The people Toppo interviewed who promote gaming in schools have been at it for decades, as long as forty years, and he describes them as "visionaries" who have "searched for ways to make learning more rigorous, more sticky, and more fun."(4) Indeed, one British neuroscientist, Paul Howard-Jones, who heads the University of Bristol's NeuroEducational Research Network, posits, "I think in thirty years' time, we will marvel that we ever tried to deliver a curriculum without gaming."(4) In essence, gaming proponents argue that "games focus, inspire and reassure people in ways school often can't." They allow you "to learn at your own pace, take risks, and cultivate deeper understanding." Those qualities seem hard to argue with.
In a time of high stakes testing that has forced a standardization of curricula to teach to the test, games offer a dramatically different learning environment, one that is highly personalized and one in which "the learning is the assessment."(5) Toppo quotes games researcher and linguist James Paul Gee who asks, "If I make it through every level of Halo, do you really need to give me a test to see if I know everything it takes to get through every level of Halo." No, obviously not. Unfortunately, Halo is violent, and probably misogynistic (I've never played it); it probably represents everything Steiner-Adair worries about in the digital world. But games like DragonBox and ST Math show that we can take the power and effectiveness of Halo and apply it to something more constructive.
Significantly, Toppo found evidence of games teaching many of the skills and qualities that Steiner-Adair worries the digital world undermines. For example, Constance Steinkuehler, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin and White House Games Scholar, has studied World of Warcraft discussion forums, finding that "eighty-six percent of the talk consisted of interactions that could be considered social knowledge construction, built around a collective development of understanding, often through joint problem solving and argumentation." (124) Studies have shown that playing video games can improve focus and emotional regulation, cognitive abilities, and working memory. Simulations, such as one of Ellis Island in Second Life, actually increased empathy and reduced prejudice; moreover, in that virtual world, the best liked students were the most helpful ones.
While the majority of educators may still fail to appreciate the potential of gaming to enhance learning, powerful and wealthy forces do. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation are funding an initiative called GlassLab, short for the Games, Learning and Assessment Lab, where the Educational Testing Service (ETS) has joined forces with Electronic Arts (EA), one of the world's largest game makers, to reconstruct testing using gaming techniques. Likewise, the U.S. Department of Education and the National Science Foundation are researching gaming while the White House's Digital Promise is promoting research into educational games. These are not fringe organizations whose interest gaming has peaked.
If you are a New York Times subscriber last fall you received some Google glasses. These glasses allow us to enter virtual reality (they're quite amazing). The Times partnered with Google because they want people to watch their virtual reality productions like The Displaced, a VR film about children driven from their homes by war. The Times thinks that this medium will bring to life these children's plight in ways that the printed word cannot. It will engender empathy. Newspapers are asking how can they creatively use technology to engage our readers. Shouldn't education do the same?