Can Game Development Impact Academic Achievement?
by Richard E. Ferdig and Jeff Boyer
Electronic educational gaming has received a tremendous amount of attention within the last few years. This excitement is owing, in part, to theoretical arguments and empirical findings about the possibilities of using videogames in teaching and learning (e.g. Squire, 2006; Squire & Jenkins, 2003; Gee, 2003; Prensky, 2001). Several articles in THE Journal have also drawn attention to video game use, highlighting concern (Weinstock, 2007), health and fitness issues (O'Hanlon, 2007), multi-user virtual environments (MUVEs) & simulations (Blaisdell, 2006), and the promise of digital game-based learning (Deubel, 2006).
Interesting findings; extensive reference list; and read more at: http://www.thejournal.com/articles/21483
wikis
I agree that wikis have to have relevance for the learner -even when allowing students to decide how a wiki can be best used, they may not be sure about its value. I started using a wiki with my instructional design class and their client this semester. Another ISD class from another campus used the same wiki - we never collaborated with the other class, and the wiki was only moderately successfully. We then decided to shift to Google Docs (our campus just moved student email to GMail). This was much more successful, and works in the spirit of a wiki. Students completed their entire final project within the GDoc environment and they are appreciative that it is now a publicly available document (not completed yet, http://docs.google.com/View?docid=ddcgg39d_81dx5k7566). I think we need to consider why wikis are truly valuable - for me a big part of the value is the publicness of them.
Can the Academy Ignore Game Development?
I would reverse the question. And if game development doesn't impact academic achievement, can the academy survive? Here's the anecdote. I see kids playing Counter Strike online. They form teams (from multiple countries), establish communication rules (experienced players lead and issue directions in English; cursing allowed by anyone in French or Spanish--or your native language if you are actually shot), plan and then execute strategies to achieve an objective. They fail. They chat about what went wrong. They try again. They fail but get a little further. They throw out existing plans and try something new and crazy suggested by an inexperienced player. They fail but learn a previous piece of hidden information. They devise a new plan. They succeed. They congratulate each other. They start a new objective. They learn that not all people from Venezuela hate all people from the States. They begin to understand some nuances of French-Canadian politics and how the separatist movement has parallels with democratic movements in Burma. And pre-Revolutionary War U.S. You cannot pry their hands from the keyboards. You cannot stop them from learning. And make no mistake--they are learning from games. They may not be learning our academic subjects but they are learning.
Two days later, I see some of the same elements play out in a spontaneous online homework session. Multiple IM windows. How do you solve this Calculus problem? This is what the book says. That doesn't work. You two try what Wikipedia says. I'll go to the Homework site. What's the URL for that Math guy at Duke? This sounds crazy, but what if we used a trig function. That didn't work at all. But what about those
anti-trig functions she covered in class last week. Solution.
What I think we must do is determine the intrinsic, addictive components of games and bring those to "academic" learning topics. I don't think we have a choice.
Supporting Knowledge Sharing with Wikis
You are dead on about the likely impact of games on the preferred working/learning behaviors of current and near future students. I think we really do need to revisit pedagogy.
I would add that an interesting element in the online, multiplayer game world is the amount of productive support players create and share with each other. I don't just mean ingame, in the moment. I mean databases and blogs and portals and even third-party software addons to improve game play. In terms of formal education, I think this suggests a productive, constructive, engaged learner who wants to participate in supporting the learning community as well as in mining information from it. I think this points to the possible immediate role of knowledge sharing applications such as wikis. I study gamers, and of course, I play. In the area I am working, everyone relies on a variety of hosted, vetted, moderated, managed blogs/wikis that are chock full of advice and actual mathematical models.
For my part, I have tried for the past two semesters to weave wikis into my hybrid courses, with limited success. Part of this has to do with the fact that I'm still figuring out the best weave, and partly it has to do with the fact that my current graduate students are not, with very few exceptions, MMO gamer types. These are older students. They are not familiar with wiki style, which really sets high expectations for responsibility and engagement outside classroom Q&A. I might have more success with freshmen. *grin*
My pitch on the wikis was that we were creating something enduring, that future classes could/would add to and build out, that students themselves could return to in later semesters or even as alums if they so chose. They liked the idea, and some did a credible job of engaging, but generally it wasn't a big success. I have no intention of giving up however. I look forward to chatting with others about this this week.
Thanks for listening,
Linda
Perspective is worth 80 IQ points. -- Alan Kay
gamers construct
I think you're right on, Linda. Modding in games is constructivist learning in the best sense. I'm also amazed at the level of real-time support in games (MMORPG's and especially FPS teams). What if we could set learning goals and then students played games in teams to reach those goals and helped each other along the way because the only way you could get to the goal and win is if everyone mastered the learning goals?
Just starting to try and incorporate wikis. We may start out with a stick (your grade is dependent upon your contribution) but that seems wrong. Effective (maybe) but wrong.
Supporting Knowledge Sharing with Wikis
Thanks for this post!
I have used wikis in my graduate classes with little apparent success also. I had thought it was that I just don't know how to design them well enough, but your post helps me put my "failures" in perspective.
You've also given me an idea for a different type of design for the wiki. I teach graduate (and undergraduate) business law courses; I think for the graduate class I will focus the wiki on designing an employee handbook (or other semester project) where students are including elements of the handbook based on what they read and discuss and must include justifications of the information they include). Something like that might just work.
These discussions are so helpful to help me learn how to help students learn!
The challenge
How we do this requires us to learn more about our learners. We need to identify learning bottlenecks. Most of our assessment strategies don't really do much to reveal more than what students know and don't know in very narrow ways. To compete with games we need to learn much more about how students approach the key constructs of what we teach, and we need to be able to organize that material in more useful ways than what we see in the topical and linear table of contents of text books and most syllabi...