Water Cooler Games - Education Arcade, day 1

Education Arcade, day 1
May 10, 2004 - by Ian Bogost

Today witnessed Day 1 of the Education Arcade, organized by Henry Jenkins and the cool cats from MIT Comparative Media Studies. A couple hundred people filled the upstairs theater at the LA Convention Center. It's great to see so many people from many backgrounds -- including academics, teachers, administrators, game designers, journalists, TV producers, and others.

Here's my rather lengthy summary of the panels from today. These are my best attempts at accurate notes from the presentations, but keep in mind that I am assuredly not properly representing the speakers in these summaries.

Update: read my report on Education Arcade, Day 2

PANEL 1: ARE GAMES EDUCATIONAL
Henry Jenkins (MIT -- moderator)
Wagner James Au (Salon)
James Paul Gee (UW Madison)
Warren Spector (Ion Storm)
Brenda Laurel

Henry Jenkins
Henry started by sharing an anecdote about his son learning the electoral college from playing Randy Chase's Doonesbury Election Game (1996). When his son took the game to school, he was prohibited from playing -- while educational software was allowed, games were not. Henry pointed out that "game" is a threatening enough word that teachers did -- and often still do -- feel the need to exclude them.

Henry shared the media that influenced him, including films like Operation Frontal Lobe and Isaasc Asimov sci-fi novels. He agued that every other pop culture medium has been involved in education, and games need to catch up. Even Hollywood markets films with education guides (e.g. The Alamo, which has one available on the official website).

Some stats Henry shared:

100% of entering college freshman play games

65% call themselves regular game players

48% said games keep them from studying "some" or "a lot"

32% play during classes
With that many students playing, said Henry, maybe the teachers should join them.

Henry called for a movement from static simulations, which are used in many classrooms, to active or interactive tools, moving from traditional education to something new. What this knowledge does, and what it is useful for, underscores a general problem in American education today.

Henry closed by exploring some of the common criticisms of educational games:

(1) "Educational games don't sell." There is a circular logic here, argued Jenkins. Games with educational elements seem suddenly to repudiate their educational value when they sell (e.g. Sim City) It seems that the criticism of educational games is thus that "sucky eduational games don't sell" -- but who wants to make sucky educational games?

(2) "Educational games suck." Educational games are out of date, and have both poor educational and poor entertainment value. Henry offered Oregon Trail as a counter example, and suggested that one challenge has to do with distinguishing which games are good and which are bad, and why.

(3) "Educational games aren't games." The industry has explored such a small percentage of what games can do, that they are caught in the mindset that anything that teaches or has educational value just isn't a game.

(4) "Educational games aren't fun." Jenkins suggested that we replace "engagement" for "fun."

(5) "Educational games don't teach." There's no genie in games; cComputers aren't magical boxes, but allow you to do things that you can't do otherwise.

(6) "Educational standards are too great an obstacle." Even though drill & practice is the dominant mode, in American education especially, educational games can be used as part of broader pedagogical strategies.

(7) "Educational games communicate misinformation." Games allow configurative learning; players can redesign different models in games.

(8) "Educational games cost too much." Commercial games are widely available at reasonable prices and can provide educational value, and some commercial games have been repurposed as educational games (e.g. Typing of the Dead).

Wagner James Au
Au described his role as an embedded journalist in the MMOG/Virtual World Second Life. He explored whether commercial games are complex enough to be coopted for education, and shared Battlefield: Vietnam, which he recently covered for Salon. He cited Deus Ex's representation of complex society, and also noted examples of "in-world classes" in Second Life, including a theater student who used the VW for setbuilding.

James Paul Gee
Gee noted that his primary interest is the educational value of commercial of the shelf (COTS) games. He argued that games have the potential for improving learning by creating a "third being."

Commercial games, argued Gee, have very little in common with schooling as we know it, but a lot in common with cutting-edge science. When we play games, our minds and bodies reach into another space. It is not just the player who plays the game, nor just the game character, bur rather a "third being" that is a combination of these two. That being has a power that does not exist n regular curricula, a power characterized by "embodied movement in a virtual world."

Gee argued that the environments in games are not just eye candy -- they constitute complex systems with unpredictable interactions. As a player, unless you orient yourself to that system you cannot play successfully -- just try to admire the aesthetics of the world in Far Cry; you'll die in about 3 seconds.

According to Gee, games allow "embodied empathy for a complex system." Of scientific complex systems, such as weather, solar systems, and subatomic motion, none are considered them "cuddly" -- but in a game like far Cry or Demon Siege, you gain empathy for the complex system you are embodied in.

The deepest way to understand such a system is by taking the real body and mind and fusing it with the system. Gee argued that the primary educational achievement of games is in making this possibility available to everyday people. For example, in Deus Ex, the player explores how abilities should be distributed in the world, and connects this understanding with their embodiment in the world. Games and science are "packages" that involve other processes, tools, interactions, etc. with other people. In Deus Ex, different players play differently, and play in different social groups. Understanding this power will help us solve the problems of seeing the world just as pictures, a great danger of our contemporary times.

Brenda Laurel
Laurel talked about how educational games haven't worked, why, and what we should do instead.

School teaches basic skills. It used to do a pretty good job, but now we have a crisis. Starting i n the 20th century, school also provides socialization and, more importantly, also babysitting while parents go to work. School teaches test taking behavior. And school teaches about authority: teachers know more and have more power; students have no power. Students' ability to express agency is limited to "petty transgressions" or "achievements of excellence" within the structure provided by the school.

Even where there is play in school, such as in sports, play carries the same hierarchical rule -based structure. Laurel argued that the teaching of hierarchy is the primary function of public education in America -- designed to create an efficient underclass (even if there's not a conspiracy to do so). School trains kids to be good workers and buyers, which is, in Laurel's opinion, BAD NEWS.

Laurel pointed out that schools are incredibly immune to change. Gaming can't change schools. The kind of learning kids need is not going to come up in schools. When used in classrooms, games become an accessory to the same hierarchy; they don't puncture the spectacle of culture of politics.

Laurel waxed pessimistic about educational games. "I have never seen a good educational game," she said, "It's crap for 30 years." Public education does not teach young people to meaningfully exercise personal agency, to think critically, to use their voices, to engage in discourse, or to be good citizens. We don't need computer games in the schools, said Laurel, we need "affordances for young people to exercise meaningful personal agency." We need to engage in a kind of discourse and critique that can be make them creative, culture makers, and future citizens.

Warren Spector
Spector talked about Deus Ex as a world of humanity that asks questions like What is family?, What is the meaning of personal freedom?, What are we willing to sacrifice for it?
PLayers can explore real world spaces and do things we don'twant them doing in the real world
Get people thinking about thigns in a different way than they might do so otherwise. Everybody has motives; if we don't get people thinking more critically we're in a world of trouble. Games can get at that goal.

Spector called for a set of games that provide escape, but offer the player an understanding of why they are seeking that escape, like the work of Asimov or Stan Lee. He articulated the struggle of designing games like this because of industry pressure to simplify ("players want a bad guy to kill"). Games are the best way to break down the hierarchy of teaching and to allow people to think for themselves. We can force people to make decisions and show them the consequences in games; we don't have to coerce or lecture. Despite this promise, Spector cited games as "the only mediuum on the plant with no subtext." We need games that are about something, not just about getting past obstacles. Why am I going through that locked door? What are the consequences of the variety of ways I can get past that door?

PANEL 2 FROM SIMULATION TO INTERACTION
Kurt Squire (UW Madison -- moderator)
Amy Bruckman (Georgia Institute of Technology)
Ben Sawyer (Digitalmill)
Scott Fisher (University of Southern California)
Andrew Court (Dateline NBC)

Kurt Squire
Kurt gave more or less the same presentation he gave at the Serious Games Summit this year at GDC (that's ok, it's a good presentation). Games are not just about building perfect representational systems. Games also function as interactive systems. They draw in identities, as Jim Gee argues, and they function as a hub of activity systems -- for discussion, argument, and thinking.

Squire described his research playing Civilization III with gradeschool students. The students took up the game for wildly different reasons.

(1) Transgressors -- opting out of history, "lies told by the man" took to the game quickly; history as a set of ideology as geographic/materialist history -- new
(2) Mini-maxers -- mathematicians, maximize game output by exploiting knowledge of games
(3) Exploreres -- geography and exploration of resources
(4) Socializers -- talk about hte games
(5) Nurterers -- buidl societies and make them happy
(6) Builders -- build acivilization

This wide range of styles/tastes provides differential access to the curriculum -- and new approaches to learning. No matter the approach, the students learned that to become good at the game you had to understand its ideology.

Amy Bruckman
Bruckman described some of her projects, including electronic learning communities that incorporate constructionist educational philosophy to allow students to create "personally meaningful projects," and online system for the discussion of ethics in a required CS class, an open source history project that allows high schoolers to do work online and critique other students.

Bruckman warned that the use of games in classrooms can be dangerous. Games appeal to some kids more than others, but educators have to provide content for all students. Students have a high expectation of "games" -- sometimes its better to avoid "the g word." It's hard to fit games to curricular and assessment needs, and there is an issue with freedom versus standardization -- "do what you want with these tools" creates divisions between kids -- some use the games, some don't. Taking away freedoms is at tension with using games for learning.

Scott Fisher
Fisher shared some of his experiences "breaking out of the branching structure of exploratory environments." He presented a "virtuality continuum," that moves from real environment, to augmented reality, to augmented virtuality, to virtual environment.

Fisher presented a series of projects, including the interesting Environmental Media Project, sponsored by Keio University and NTT Docomo, an augmented reality headset mated to a high speed mobile data device.

Ben Sawyer
Sawyer showed Virtual U, Digital Mill's cornerstone game project that teaches how university administration works. He advised prospective sponsors of educational games to talk to game designers -- they know how to make games.

Sawyer also reintroduced the Serious Games Initiative, meant to explore the opportunities for games sponsored by government, educational, and non-profit orgs. Aside from the military, the government hasn't done much with games.

Finally, Sawyer showed off Email Connect, the first of the Project Connect games my studio Persuasive Games is working on with Sawyer's Digital Mill and the Telecom Pioneers, a suite of games to teach telecommunications technology to 4 - 7 graders.

Andrew Court
Court is a producer at Dateline NBC, and he shared stories of the impact of working on some of the investigative reporting stories he's produced for that show. He told a story about landing in the Sudan to find out if the rubble below was a chemical weapons plant or a factory creating pharmaceuticals for third world countries.

Court had some intriguing and helpful insights about
relevance -- come to realize that learning should be interactive and active .. examples of vignettes of powerful experience

PANEL 3: EDUCATIONAL GAME CASE STUDY

This panel was devoted to a case study of Zoo Tycoon, developed by Blue Fang and published by Microsoft. Zoo Tycoon has sold over 4 million copies worldwide and also has expansion packs and a new version coming soon. Zoo Tycoon was related to Where World is Carmen San Diego -- a game built for retail, not for schools, that teachers later recognized for its educational potential.

A lot was made of the fact that "learning comes naturally" in this game. The developers claimed that it targets a "casual audience," including boys to age 12, girls to 13/14, and then skipping up to older players, primarily women. The developers asked, "how did 15 guys develop a game that mostly women like?" They didn't make this observation, but the nurturing and creative nature of the game may have something to do with its greater appeal to women.

PANEL 4: BUILDING PARTNERSHIPS: NEW COLLABORATIONS AMONG UNIVERSITIES, INDUSTRY, AND PUBLIC INSTITUTiONS
Alex Chisolm (LeapFrog Enterprises -- moderator)
Bonnie Bracey (LucasArts Foundation
Todd Logan (Stanford Media X)
Celia Pearce (University of California, Irvine)
Johnny Wilson (Author of High Score!)
Tom Piper (Royal Shakespeare Company)

Alex Chisholm
Chisholm underscored the importance of connecting conceptual work with productive work. He articulated an ESRB-like clarification for learning: "The Games for Learning Seal: certified by the education arcade," a certification and labeling experiment sponsored by MIT and under pilot by LeapFrog. The seal would annotate education, quality play, and standards to "provide a touchstone in the marketplace" for parents.

NOTE: I talked extensively with Chisholm and Henry Jenkins about the threat that such a label would become merely a convenience label for LeapFrog, but both assured me that they are going to great pains to involve a broad range of developer and educational partners to insure its viability. We'll see how this issue pans out

Johnny Wilson
Wilson clarified some of the problems with corporate and government partnership. He suggested that corporate partnership is difficult because there are conflicting issues of audience, distribution, and practicality for the sponsor and the developer. The one who controls the pursestrings controls the point of view. The complexity of conflicting goals, roles, and problems, including management change, schedules, corporate images, grant vs. investment, competitive issues, security or trade/ secrets, assumptions, and accuracy of content.

Government is worse, according to Wilson. Platform issues are a major issue, since many governmental orgs are far behind the hardware curve. Agenda issues are a bigger problem. Regulatory impacts and assumptions, data security issues, and game design disconnects can plague such collaborations.

Wilson also warned that games empower players, and empowerment goes against the grain. Games teach intuitively and cannot follow an obvious agenda. Games use unproven technology or push the envelope instead of sticking with safe tech. Games do not offer comfortable feedback mechanisms. All of these factors contribute to the challenge of partnerships.

Bonnie Bracey
Bracey discussed the integration of games in other environments. She called such environments "activity systems," not games, insisting that she never mentions games in educational contexts. She showed a game called Kinetic City, a collaboration between government and NPOs that teaches national science benchmark material through smallish games that test retention of other activities.

Todd Logan
Logan described Stanford's Media X project, a collaborative/interdisciplinary initiative across departments. The program boasts partnerships with several companies, including Nokia, Toyota, Macromedia, Boeing, and Fisher-Price. Logan described the applicability of his project to future business initiatives, mentioning workshops Media X has run to help companies. He also hinted at the possibility of embedding work in video games, a kind of "future of work," e.g. in MMOGs.

Celia Pearce
Pearce argued that all games are educational. She reminded us that games are hard to play and also hard to make -- newbies should keep this in mind. Games threaten the government, traditional education, and the media hegemony.

She then introduced the Cal-(IT)2 program, whose mission is to extend the reach of the internet throughout the physical world. UCI and UCSB participate in this program through an interdisciplinary relationship.

As she has explored collaborations with corporate partners, Pearce explained that she often has to remind industry that UCI is not a vocational training school, nor a source of interns. Rather, it is a research institute. They want collaborators not for profit, but for brains. We can't make you money, she argued, but we can think past next Christmas, which is the limit of the traditional industry, and we can think about a lot of things the industry doesn't have the luxury to think about.

Tom Piper
Coming from the Royal Shakespeare Company, Piper admitted that he felt a bit like "a virgin in an orgy." He described the Royal Shakespeare Company / MIT collaborations.

Piper noted that RSC has the experience of 1,000s of iterations of the same plays. This provides a rich framework to understand the various imaginative, immersive space. He sees games as an alternative way to use imagination and question the visual representations of the world.

He then described a project RSC and MIT are working on, a game experience similar to the Tempest. A "cabinet of curiosities" creates an experience similar to the play. transforms the world by manipulating objects and experiencing similarities.

Piper also shared some lessons from the collaboration. He admitted that he had assumed that MIT would "take care of things," and the RSC would just put its brand on the product, but he soon realized that the production needs momentum from both sides. IP issues, mutual understanding, timescale financing, project management, and market reception issues were challenges Piper articulated.

That's it for today! More tomorrow, for day 2 of the Education Arcade.

Comments (54) | Post a Comment | TrackBack (4)

Comment from BridgetAG on May 11, 2004

As one who could not attend, thank you for letting me stand in the back of the room and listen.

You must be a ferocious notetaker!

Comment from frans on May 11, 2004

Thanks Ian!

There are limits to the travel one can take, and getting updates like this is really great. Maybe we should collect reports like this (or links at least) to www.digra.org?

Best,

- Frans

Comment from Dennis G. Jerz on May 11, 2004

Thanks, Ian, for letting me peep in on these doings. I agree that we can all learn a lot from more events that feature this broad spectrum of participants.

Comment from andrew stern on May 11, 2004

Wow, thanks for the detailed writeup, very useful

Comment from Dan Roy on May 12, 2004

Thanks for the summary, Ian.

Comment from kurt squire on May 12, 2004

wow! awesome job! you got a lot in there... now i know who the real typist is...

i fear though, that the main thrust of my talk was lost. right now, there's a small debate going on on whether we should build prototypes, study COTS games, do more research, etc. i was arguing that we need four interrelated foci of research:

1) better basic research into learning through games. propositions like jim gee's "the value of 3D and immersion" are important and need to be studied. we can study this, and other issues like social interaction in SWG or how communities support learning today. without this we won't know what to design for. I believe that studying games will lead to new models of learning.

2) Media literacy / teacher education. without educating parents and teachers, we could have this, the we could make the best game in the world tomorrow, and they'll ignore it like they did sim city and the others.

3) Researching COTS in classrooms and after school settings. there are a lot of issues inherent to using COTS that may mean that COTS are unfeasible in a school context. we need to hash these out before we go any further -- or at least get better answers to them.

4) build new prototypes. prototypes allow us to build new conjectures and test new ideas. supercharged, while limited, allowed us to learn some new things about design and learning. these probably won't come from commercial contexts.

anyway, this was the main walkaway i hoped people would get. i know i had too much in there,, so it may have been lost.

thanks for doing this -- a real service to the community.

if anyone wants to talk about the semi-controversial learning seal, i'd like to discuss it. i have some ambivalence about it myself, but think it could do us some good (and can imagine damaging scenarios).

Comment from Ian Bogost on May 12, 2004

Kurt-- Thanks for clarifying your talk! I agree that I only captured part of your talk here -- I may not have been in proper note taking mode yet ;) Anyway, I'll put a note in the main text to refer people down here to your comment.

Comment from Alex Chisholm on May 13, 2004

Ian --

Extraordinary summaries! I'm actually blown away at how thoughtful your comments and encapsulations are. Having worked for almost a year to get the conference up and running, the team sure appreciated the active participation in discussions and pushing the envelope on the topics we introduced.

As promised, I will keep you posted on details as the pilot for the seal progresses. Again, I want to do more for the greater good than simply creating a mark to move LeapFrog SKUs. We all need a more expanded space for educational games. Having walked the floor of E3 this afternoon, I immediately saw opportunities for us to expand discussions in the next iteration of the conference. We'd welcome your input, for sure!

Enjoy the rest of the show.

-- Alex

Comment from Ian Bogost on May 14, 2004

Thanks, Alex! It was cool to meet you and your colleagues. I'll be posting more about LF in the coming days, and I'll make sure we send our feedback your way. Thanks for listening!

Comment from Don Singles on May 15, 2004

I noticed the mention of the Doonesbury Election game above and thought some of you may be interested to know that Randy Chase is in the process of producung a followup to the Doonesbury game called Power Politics III. I have been helping him with some fo the behind the scenes stuff such as tech support for the varios versions of Windows, etc, and have been really impressed with the game.

Randy has already announced a partnership with the Christian Science Monitor and Rock the Vote is due to announce in the next few days. The new version of the game is formed around the online Free/Pay gaming model Randy introduced in his last game, SpiritWars(TM).

You can read more about it at http://www.powerpolitics.us

Comment from Ian Bogost on May 15, 2004

Don -- Yep, Randy's a WCG visitor and commenter and we've talked about his games here before. Check out the Political Games Archive.

Comment from mark chen on May 17, 2004

Hi Ian,
I appreciated your questions at the end of each session!

I put up my thoughts on the Education Arcade also, with some photos.

Comment from mark chen on May 17, 2004

er.. the URL is http://www.markdangerchen.net/cmgp/index.php?p=137

Comment from Bill MacKenty on May 17, 2004

Ian,

Thank you so much for posting this. I teach middle school computer science, and I am struggling to use games in a pedagogically sound manner.

Thanks, I'll keep reading your entries!

-Bill

Comment from Ian Bogost on May 19, 2004

Bill -- Glad to help! Let us know what you're working on, we'd love to hear about it.

Comment from Max on May 19, 2004

Re:

(1) If everything is "crap" then make a contribution - even a suggestion - for something better. That'd be a bit better than mere acidic carping.

(2) "(A)ffordances for young people"!!??? What is THAT garbage? Gobledegoop - at best - smug, haughty nothingness at worst.

***
Other than that, thanks for the entries. They were at least stimulating.

Comment from Max on May 19, 2004

Re:

(1) If everything is "crap" then make a contribution - even a suggestion - for something better. That'd be a bit better than mere acidic carping.

(2) "(A)ffordances for young people"!!??? What is THAT garbage? Gobledegoop - at best - smug, haughty nothingness at worst.

***
Other than that, thanks for the entries. They were at least stimulating.

Comment from EK on May 20, 2004

You could enhance your credibility about the potential of games as educational tools by putting a question mark after "Educational" in the very first headline on this page.

Maybe a basic grammar and punctuation game would help you...

Comment from Ian Bogost on May 20, 2004

EK - wow, I think you may be too crabby to be interested in videogame research! Lighten up!

Comment from kurt squire on May 21, 2004

re: brenda laurel. Brenda has done more "real" work than any person i know to create educational software with purple moon. it has 'issues' as they say, and is not exactly 'educational' by some standards, but it definitely tackles all the same issues that ed. software designers tackle. if you're into the topic, i highly recommend her utopian entrepreneur book.

Comment from Bonnie Bracey on May 23, 2004

I reference the Lucas Foundation so we can see the stories of education. Games, visualizations, and imaging are a part of the gaming idea.

What would happen if kids worked using games and simulations harder in school? We have examples and ideas in Bugscope from UIUC.

http://bugscope.beckman.uiuc.edu/

Creating a learning landscape simply means to utilize every way of learning to get to the goal. So in this place I would use games, the Orkin Zoo, and find something in the way of software that allows kids to explore, examine, evaluate and be interactive in their learning.

We could talk about learning using reading for kids at lower levels. Look at www.literacy.net

Children using different learning styles who are not english speakers or english speaker can use these to learn.

There are many games , simulations and visualizations that are a lot more interesting than listening to the speaking voice. See
Xpeditions is home to the US National Geography Standards—and to thousands of ideas, tools, and interactive adventures that bring them to life. ...
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/xpeditions/

Or see this project that involves games and learning.

This one is at three different levels of learning and has many learning ways to entice, have kids explore, examine, imagine, evaluate, and learn in innovative ways.
Windows to the Universe. Welcome to our newest release of Windows to the Universe! ... WINDOWS TO THE UNIVERSE IS GRAPHICS INTENSIVE! ...
http://windows.engin.umich.edu/windows2.html

But there is a cdrom that is used where kids and schools have low bandwidth.

I have much more to say, but I am saying it to professors in the schools of education who need to teach people to create learning landscapes and technology rich learning environments.

Comment from Bonnie Bracey on May 23, 2004

Impact of Technology on Teaching'

From time to time, someone invents a product or develops a practice which has an unforeseen and massive impact on society. The printing press, created by Johann Gutenberg approximately five and a half centuries ago, was such an invention. Who would have predicted that a press initially devoted to publishing the Bible and other religious texts would someday be seen as one of the forces undermining church authority? Who would have imagined that books, then owned by few and treasured as symbols of wealth and power, would someday be accessible to nearly everyone? And who could have foreseen a system of public schools organized primarily for the purpose of teaching children to read and to help them absorb the knowledge books contain?

The results of the printing press, and all of its modern successors, are so much a part of our lives it is difficult to imagine an existence without the ability to read, and the books, journals, and newspapers that support a reading public. It is also difficult to imagine how one could organize instruction without textbooks and various associated readings. For teachers and students alike, learning at all levels of education has been primarily a process of reading what experts have written, discussing what has been read, and listening to teachers explain or expand upon textbooks. In most cases, schooling has become a process for understanding, retaining, and reporting what is found on the printed page.

Inventions of the twentieth century have the potential to influence society as much as did the printing press. The computer, video, and telecommunications of various kinds are having an impact on every aspect of our society: work, leisure, entertainment, household tasks. These inventions are also transforming the way we approach knowledge and sources of expertise. Today, people are no longer required to read about an event; they can see media versions of it unfold before their own eyes and make their own interpretation. Consequently, the ability to obtain and interpret information quickly and accurately is even more important than in the past.

There is no longer a question about whether the new technology will be used in schools. Nearly everyone agrees that students must have access to computers, video, and other technology in the classroom. Many believe these technologies are necessary because competency in their use is an important feature of career preparation; others see equally important outcomes for civic participation. Most importantly, a growing research base confirms technology’s potential for enhancing student achievement. What is less certain is how and when these technologies will change the nature of schooling itself. For example, the technologies are already providing an alternative curriculum for students that is scarcely acknowledged by the formal school curriculum. Nevertheless, they have been mainly employed as additions to the existing curriculum. Teachers are employed who know how to use them, but knowledge of and skill in the use of technology has not been necessary for all teachers. These attitudes are surely short-sighted if technology infusion is to take root.

The introduction of computers and other technologies into schools is occurring at the same time that three decades of research in the cognitive sciences, which has deepened our understanding of how people learn, is prompting a reappraisal of teaching practices. We know from this research that knowledge is not passively received, but actively constructed by learners from a base of prior knowledge, attitudes, and values. Dependence on a single source of information, typically a textbook, must give way to using a variety of information sources. As new technologies become more readily available and less expensive, they will likely serve as a catalyst for ensuring that new approaches to teaching gain a firm foothold in schools.

Despite the technology changes in society, being a teacher in American schools too often consists of helping children and youth acquire information from textbooks and acting as an additional source of expertise. Teachers are provided role models of this approach to teaching from kindergarten through graduate school; their teacher education courses provide hints for making textbook-oriented instruction interesting and productive, and as teaching interns, they both observe and practice instruction based upon mastering information found in books.

Teachers may be forgiven if they cling to old models of teaching that have served them well in the past. All of their formal instruction and role models were driven by traditional teaching practices. Breaking away from traditional approaches to instruction means taking risks and venturing into the unknown. But this is precisely what is needed at the present time.

Games . visualizations, and imaging are a very
important part of learning. We cannot expect that kids want to only be receivers of knowledge by voice and text.

Comment from Bonnie Bracey on May 25, 2004

Are games educational? Are workbooks educational.. We talk about games as if there is no learning involved.

I learned to open my lab and let kids in and to tailor the games to what I wanted to find out, if I let them use games on that particular day. I had "educational" games and often would base them on a theme, with some URL's for websites that would help. Amazon Trail might be the game, there would be immersive games that were close to the game, and hyperstudio or powerpoint and the kids could play the game, make a project, see a movie and have a rainforest snack.. of course away from the computer.

Repeating something on paper like rewriting and rewriting until you get that little blister is a problem.

But a game is a way to test learning if it is interesting..that gives you an instant score.

You also have permission to do better. That is you can do it until you are tired of it and then go back to up that scores.

There was a child in my classroom , minority, and I am too, who did not like school. But he would beg to use the computer or push.. to get involved in a game or simulation. He was good at it too.
So I decided to take him on, and find out more.
I sent him an invitation to stay at school , with the promise of transportation so that he could use the computer.

Teachers complained that I was rewarding bad behavior. I was thinking I will check his behavior outside of the classroom setting. Still in the lab, but more informal. So, he stayed. That kid scored high in every game, Odell Down Under, Hot Dog Stand, Dinosaur Tycoon.

I am thinking how does he do it. But as I am also playing the games I observe his techniques and problems. Then I went to the machines that he worked on and played the game, but made a lower score, so he could see it.

We had some conversations. We had some competitions. He liked being at the top of the game, on games.. but not in school. So I used what I learned to say, carefully. You are so talented... no one could do these games if they were not smart , intelligent ya da yada... and
he looked at me . I just kept playing the games.

Turns out that he was embarassed about his voice, accent, that he was black and he thought , well I am not smart enough.. we had a little talk.

I let him tutor some kids who did not know the games. Long story short, he was an insecure learner by text, but an avid competitor in any kind of an interactive game. I simply transferred the skill and insecurity to the next level.

And upped his game scores too.( he was sometimes not reading the directions well)

Bonnie Bracey

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Comment from jasmine on June 16, 2006

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