Education and Games - How Gamification Transformed Classrooms

Millenials, or those born between the ‘90s and early 2000s, were born into an age where technology was just starting to make its way into the public sector. Cable television was developed, beepers were widely used, and computers were just becoming affordable, and once technology like mobile phones were invented, they had just become old enough to know how to use them.

They were exposed to more technology than any generation before them. At home, they had television, and at school, they had computers. Computer Education was taught in some schools as a separate course, and students began to explore the intricacies of the computer.

The school made use of computers for the first time, and while administrators began migrating their files to digital storage, educators began migrating their teaching to digital means as well. Teachers began utilizing educational video games, and students were given time to complete these games in order to grasp the day’s lessons.

As the millenials made way for the next generation of eager minds, so did the teachers’ digital material. Teachers will be familiar with JumpStart, or Jump Ahead in the UK, an educational media franchise for children, which consisted of a series of PC games in the mid-to-late ‘90s. The franchise has since grown to include workbooks, iPad apps, and even a massively multiplayer online game on their website, JumpStart.com.

So does gaming really help students learn? It sure looks like it. For the past decade or so, researchers from the Games Learning Society have been trying to find the link between video games and learning, and they’ve discovered that good video games can indeed be valuable in education, but only through careful design and delivery.

 On March 12, 2012, President Barack Obama challenged the educators of TechBoston academy “to create educational software as compelling as the best video game.” Video games are engaging, and when executed correctly, video games have the potential to teach children without them even realizing that they’re learning.

Games can also take knowledge of the student’s level of learning, and adjust its level of difficulty accordingly. Most video games have the element of “levels”, where a player needs to accomplish a certain goal in order to advance to the next level. At the end of the session, a teacher could check who reached the highest level, since this could mean a more advanced understanding of the lessons involved than that of the other students.

The use of video games in the classroom is definitely beneficial for students, who find these mediums of learning more enjoyable than typical classroom lectures and more conventional quizzes and tests. But this is also beneficial to teachers. Video games have the potential of making their jobs easier, allowing for easier assessments and data gathering, and even simpler delivery of learning material -- provided that they have the necessary follow-through on the lessons.

Of course, one cannot just assume that a video game has done its job. Classroom interaction is still necessary for successful education. Video games are meant as a supplement to a teacher’s techniques, and not as a replacement. Teachers may be able to develop curriculums around the games, creating activities that allow students to tie the information they’ve collected together, and further refine the ideas they’ve picked up.

Educators may also choose to develop their own video games according to the needs they’ve gathered from their students, and the skill sets that they’ve been assessed to possess. There are plenty of resources for the teacher who wishes to delve into the realm of designing and developing a video game, but these may seem too daunting for a teacher just beginning to discover the joys of using video games in class.

The most important benefit of using video games to teach is a lot simpler than all those listed above, however: it brings studying closer to home. As the Quest to Learn school in NYC states, digital games are now central to the lives of the new generation, the post-millenials who grew up around mobile phones and iPads, around fast-speed internet and even faster laptops. Today’s mobile phones have become equipped with more than just call and text services, with the latest phones hosting a number of features that developers in the past could only have dreamt of, including more streamlined parental controls. The S5 on O2 is described as having a “Kids Mode”, which lets children enjoy the phone as much as their parents do without them being able to access restricted content. Features such as these ensure that students are able to focus on mobile lessons without veering away to the other distracting aspects of mobile phone usage. Using the medium they’ve all come to love in order to teach important classroom-related lessons is a big leap in terms of being able to do what every teacher has longed to do: connect with students.

With video games now finding their place in the four walls of a classroom, it might not be long before those four walls themselves come down. Video games usher in a new era of classroom teaching, and who knows, maybe teaching will soon be occurring beyond the classroom.

Image courtesy of: COM SALUD via Flickr Creative Commons