Education Arcade Brings Learning Experience, Will Wright To E3

Thanks to Water Cooler Games for its in-depth report on Day 1 and on Day 2 of the Education Arcade, an E3-related conference which discusses "the development, the use, and the marketing potential of games in education." Among the highlights: the contention by the Leapfrog CEO that "Video games are a trojan horse -- a way to get better educational content into the home", and Maxis' Will Wright discussing how his titles educate, pointing out: "As game designers, we're trying to build a model in people's head. And that probably has a lot to do with education."

Real Learning

Interesting stuff. Given how much time people will spend mastering the intricate systems of various MMOGs, what if we change those systems so they're really simulations of the actual world? For example, a game where you can use your knowledge of real chemistry to advance. Something to think about.

Re:Real Learning

A lot of historically based strategy games make great educational tools. Civilization and Age of Empires come to mind as games that have a decent amount of history in them. What better way is there to learn history than to play through William Wallace and Joan of Arc campaigns yourself?

For science, I personally really enjoyed The Incredible Machine. While this game was a bit cartoony, a more realistic version could be a great introduction to physics.

Game-sensei, please teach me

I've learned quite some things from playing games, mostly different methods of solving problems, strategic insight and patience.

I think the mistake most developers of edu-tainment make is that they concentrate too much on the educational aspect of the game and don't make it fun enough.
Some edu-games I've tried were about as much fun as reading a dictionary and blowing a whistle.

In my games, I want a good story and good gameplay (for me a good example is Knights of the old Republic, the story was great, the gameplay was great and the way of playing was open enough to encourage you to try different solutions to problems and the game doesn't really punish you if you fail, you just get on with it)

Re:Game-sensei, please teach me

Most important thing I've learned from playing video games: When the ghosts come after you, eat the pills so that you can eat the ghosts instead of them eating you.

Fascinating

I think the various top designers that attended here are now really engaged in the process of developing ideas of what games are capable of(rather than being fixated on the past) and it shows through in this. The general feeling seems to be that "yes, we can make a game educational" but the approaches vary; nobody has a definitive answer on how to get There.

What's most fascinating is that I don't think there was hardly as much thought devoted to the topic even five years ago. It shows a sort of maturing within the industry.

Learning education

Didn't we see this before in the SNES days? Who remembers "Mario is missing" as anything but a crappy game no one wanted to play?

The hardest thing about building models

in somebody's head is getting the masts in. If you go through the ear, you have to angle it really sharp which limits your mast size, but if you go through the nose you have to do it before you start adding ribs to the keel.

Ahh hell, while I was typing this I dropped the foremast and now it's rattling about. Screw it, I'm going back to building models in bottles.

Is Namco involved?

Unless Namco is there producing the updates they promised me 20 years ago for Professor Pac-Man, I'm not interested.

Trade Wars 2002

The MUD Trade Wars 2002 has taught me lessons about wealth, greed, and loyalty that I could never have learned anywhere else.

Put people in an open-ended environment and they'll express more of themselves. The world is run by people so it's really good to learn as much as you can about how they behave.

my thoughts on the Education Arcade

Here's an excerpt of what I've written about the Education Arcade conference:

I saw two camps of thought on the usefulness of games in education. On the one hand, the old school thought holds the belief that modeling educational software after computer and video games can be a way of getting kids interested, almost fooled, into interacting with the software. I saw this idea mostly among the attendees of the conference, and they held these ideas even after some of the sessions were over which is too bad since the other thought, and the one that I think was being stressed by the academics like Jim Gee, is that current commercial games are frought with learning opportunities. We just need to find out what they are and use them to best effect. Obviously, there were some ideas in between like all the projects coming from MIT which can been seen as a new breed of educational games based on constuctivist models rather than behaviorist models.

In other words, there seem to be a good deal of industry folks and educators making educational software who still believe that content is the most important quality of an educational game. It might be interesting to note that the majority of people who believed this were older, say in their 40s to 60s. I believe that games of this nature can only be suited for the classroom and only because schools can limit what kids have access to. As soon as you take away that limit, in other words look at kids at home or outside of the classroom, educational software fails miserably. There's just no possible way for something made primarily for education to compete for the attention of kids against something made for entertainment. In particular I keep thinking of the "attention economy" that Lankshear and Knobel talk about ("Do We Have Your Attention?"). I would say that the games MIT is making are still being targeted towards schools. Revolution looks awesome and it might be fun for outside of the classroom, but it sounded like they were definitely making it for a classroom setting and will be creating external documents, lesson plans, and curriculum to supplement and surround the game itself.

Another trend at the conference was that games can be used to address social issues and might be a way of redefining the school system in America. Brenda Laurel gave a relatively zealous rant (to an "Amen, sister!") on the problem with educational games and how they (don't) fit into the classroom setting. She made some good points and I almost agree with her. I do think, however, that games whether overtly educational, like The Oregon Trail, or not, like Civilization, can be used very successfully in the classroom so long as the teacher plays the role of guide and provides a framework for the games (see Kurt Squire's dissertation on Civ). This moves teachers away from being the source of knowledge to people who direct the flow of attention and who get kids to think critically about what they are engaging with. (Again, see Lankshear and Knobel.) That's the problem at the root, isn't it?-that people are not being taught how to think critically.

It was suggested at the conference that a major reformation of the American school system is in order. As far as I can tell, educators in academia have been saying this since the end of WW2. Actually, if you want to go farther back, need I mention Dewey? So why is it that nothing has changed? A lot of people at the conference seemed to think that the video game generation were bringing with them a new way of thinking (see new capitalism) and that this would eventually replace the old-schoolers' methodology and the schools would naturally reform. Some people felt that it was high time to embrace the new line of thought and it manifests itself by embracing games of all sorts in the classroom. I would argue, however (see above), that, now more than ever, teachers are needed to guide students as they participate in these new classrooms. (Participation is the key to everything, for it is through participation that people become literate in wh