Video Games and Learning

ICS 62, April 22, 2014

Three perspectives on games and learning

• The class last week: game enthusiasts asking, why are games so engaging to me?

• Shaffer: education researcher asking, what is the context in which knowledge is acquired?

• Meyer: math teacher asking, what do games have that can make math class more successful?

“We argue here for a particular view of games – and of learning – as activities that are most powerful when they are personally meaningful, experiential, social, and epistemological all at the same time.”

Shaffer et al.Video Games and The Future of

Learning

Personally Meaningful

Video games let people participate in new worlds.

Players come to inhabit roles that are otherwise inaccessible to them.

Games make it possible for players to experiment with new and powerful identities.

Experiential

In game worlds, learning no longer means confronting words or symbols that are separated from the things those words or symbols refer to.

The inverse square law of gravitational attraction is no longer something to be understood solely through an equation. Instead, students can gain virtual experience walking in a world with a mass smaller than that of the Earth.

Social

Schools largely sequester students from one another and from the outside world. Games bring players together – competitively and cooperatively – in the virtual world of the game and in the social community of its players.

Epistemological

The way of thinking – the epistemology – of a community of practice determines how someone in the community decides what questions are worth answering, how to go about answering them, and how to decide when an answer is sufficient.

Knowledge, skills, identities, and values are shaped by a particular way of thinking into a coherent epistemic frame.

Epistemology example

What do we know about alcohol? What questions about alcohol are important?

Bartender: liquor; taste; trends; recipesChemist: molecular properties, boiling pointDoctor: impact on body and mental acuityLawyer: legal framework for manufacture and saleMinister: use in rites; prohibitions on use; moralityPolitician: highly taxed substance

Epistemology example 2

What do we know about good food? What questions about good food are important?

Epistemology example 3

What do we know about admitting non-California residents to UC campuses? What questions about admitting non-California residents to UC campuses are important?

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/la-le-0422-tuesday-uc-admissions-20140422,0,1910899.story#axzz2zdX4yv35

Epistemological

To succeed in the game, players must live by – and ultimately come to master – the epistemic frame of the game.

When knowledge is first and foremost a form of activity and experience – or doing something in the world within a community of practice – the facts and information eventually come for free.

A New Model of Learning

Theories of learning and instruction embodied in school systems designed to teach large number of students a standardized curriculum are dinosaurs in this new world.

Most educational games to date have been produced in the absence of any coherent theory of learning or underlying body of research.

The real world is overrated.

Dan MeyerVideo Games Meet Math Class

Video games have an open middle.

Dan MeyerVideo Games Meet Math Class

The middle grows more challenging and more interesting at the same time.

Instruction is visual, embedded in practice, and only as needed.

Dan MeyerVideo Games Meet Math Class

Video games lower the cost of failure.

Dan MeyerVideo Games Meet Math Class