How Social Gaming is Improving Education
Educators have always looked for better ways to prepare students for the real world. The mildly apocalyptic government report from the US, A Nation at Risk, warned that an outdated school system was unwittingly sabotaging America’s economic superiority. Year after year, major educational organizations would echo the report’s call with threats of dire consequences and pleas for sweeping reform, from the U.S. Department of Labor to the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology.
Audits of the U.S. educational system have revealed that the highest hurdle to adopting skills-based teaching practices is the lack of an easily implementable curriculum.
The picture in the UK is a similar affair, with publications Future Labs publications on games and learning confirming much of what we know to be a fact – namely the better the engagement, the better the learning.
Enter social games as a solution — immersive environments that simulate real-world problems. Today, technologically eager schools are replacing textbook learning with social video games, and improving learning outcomes in the process.
Contextual Learning
While university departments have cleanly separated academic subjects, solving the real-life problem of, say, building a website, requires individuals to orchestrate the expertise of communication, business, and economics, in addition to computer science. At the ultra high tech Quest2Learn school in New York City, small groups of 6th graders will marshall a range of social technologies, from video games to social networking, to solve hypothetical problems.
For instance, 6th graders learn geography from Google Earth
, collaborate through an internal social networking platform, and present ideas through a podcast. Administrators hope that wrestling with the question of “How can a system function within a larger system?” will bolster critical thinking skills. Many experts contend that so-called “Scaffolded Problem-based learning” is known to improve academic skills and enhance motivation. With all these new toys, it’s no surprise that one student admits his least favorite part of the day is “dismissal.”
Simulated Life
For some school subjects, poor test results aren’t simply a matter of personal failure, but can mean life and death; especially for security officer training. Loyalist College in Canada recently boasted “massive” test score improvements for its border officer training via simulation in the virtual world of Second Life. “No single technological addition has ever impacted grades at the college in such a positive way,” says Ken Hudson, their Managing Director of Virtual World Design. Indeed, the results speak for themselves. According to the report:
“The amazing results of the training and simulation program have led to significantly improved grades on students’ critical skills tests, taking scores from a 56% success in 2007, to 95% at the end of 2008 after the simulation was instituted.”
While security screenings are taking an onslaught of criticism for what are sometimes seen as abject failures, these kinds of successes may give hope to both security experts and the future of online learning.
Conclusion
Social video gaming has a come a long way from the days when a dozen students would squint at a 10-inch screen.
With the ubiquity of social games, its high time they were put to good use. Here at PlayGen we are developing the next generation of social games for learning and training.
