Learning and Gaming

Learning: Setting Fire to the Imagination; Learning through Gaming and Play

EDUC 401
Philip Bird, 270928
For Dr. Hanan Yaniv

There is something captivating about electronic gaming. I am young enough of a fellow to have caught the beginning edge of gaming's frothy surf. My childhood was a mix of broad sunny prairie, playing Cops and Robbers on bike through the town streets, and beating Ganondorf in The Adventures of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time on Nintendo's N64 console, as well as many other games on various platforms. To me, these experiences were a relatively seamless part of the fabric of my childhood, but in retrospect, it has been gaming that has consistently captured my attention.

Ganondorf

There is a powerful word that describes the world of gaming that all educators should pay attention to, in my opinion. This word is immersive; Dictionary.com defines it as, "noting or pertaining to digital technology or images that deeply involve one's senses and may create an altered mental state" (Dictionary.com). The root word, immerse, conjures up the image of plunging into something, deep waters, or more figuratively, a brand new experience. This sense of immersion is deeply native to the world of games.

Broadly, play is the heart of games. It is present just as deeply in electronic formats, as it was in the cross town caper of Cops and Robbers. Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and Roberta Golinkoff describe the five elements of children's play,

1. Play must be pleasurable and enjoyable.
2. Play must have no extrinsic goals; there is no prescribed learning that must occur.
3. Play is spontaneous and voluntary.
4. Play involves active engagement on the part of the player.
5. Play involves an element of make-believe.

(Hirsh-Pasek and Golinkoff, 2003).

The demands of curriculum often proscribe the second goal. Education often seems not very fun, or involving or anything about what the student is truly interested in. The power of intrinsic motivation is significant - if there is a way that it can be incorporated into the classroom, targeted, focused and unleashed, it would be potent stuff indeed. Omrod et. al describe intrinsic motivation as "the motivation that comes from within the individual, rather than from such outside influences as extrinsic reinforcers… one important factor in intrinsic motivation is high self-efficacy: Students must believe that they have the ability to accomplish the learning task successfully" (Omrod et. al. 2010). This sense of play and the motivation that is part of it comes from an interaction of two parties. Jane McGonigal notes that, "We like people better after we play a game with them, even if they've beaten us badly - and the reason is, it takes a lot of trust to play a game with someone. We trust that they will spend their time with us, that they will play by the same rules, value the same goals, they'll stay with the game until it's over" (McGonigal, 2010). Playing with someone requires that value of trust, a sense of boundaries, and a set of goals the players must achieve to win or to accomplish their task. Playing also assumes a level of realistic success

Gamers breathe and live in this sense of play when they are immersed in their game worlds. Jane McGonigal describes the four aspects of gamers: they engage in blissful productivity, they weave a tight social fabric, they embody and convey a sense of urgent optimism, and they search and pursue epic meaning (McGonigal, 2010). These are all positive aspects that often are overlooked when we as adults scrutinize gaming, and the youth playing the games. These are things that are worthy of emulation, that can be harnessed for good, and deployed to further their education.

Some of the environments that gamers find themselves in, including and especially massively multiplayer online (MMO) environments are highly immersive, febrile grounds for learning. Thomas and Brown describe it this way:

Imagine an environment where the participants are building a massive network databases, wikis and websites, and thousands of message forums, creating a large-scale knowledge economy. Imagine an environment where participants constantly measure and evaluate their own performance, even if that requires them to build new tools to do so. Imagine an environment where user interface dashboards are constructed by the users themselves to make sense of the world and their own performance in it. Imagine an environment where evaluation is based on after-action reviews to continually enhance performance; an environment where learning happens on a continuous basis, because the participants are internally motivated to find, share, and filter new information on a near-constant basis.(Thomas and Brown, 2011).

The rest of their article is equally salient. They see these online environments powered by an engine, "the engine that drives learning is a blend of questioning, imagination, and - best of all - play." Play is at the heart of this intensive learning.

Utilizing gaming for learning, for education, is something that does occur in unique classes. During my field observation practicum, I observed a Grade 2 teacher use a simple call and response game through the classroom's Smartboard, to help explore the concept of skip counting in math. Later, she gathered all the students in a circle sitting on the floor to play a game of "Snap!" This simple game was played thusly: a skip counting outcomes was described by the teacher, say by 10s. The children were going around the circle, each person counting up by ones, and every time a person came close to 10 or a multiple of 10, the person would yell "Snap!" This simple game helped reinforce a mathematical concept, and engaged the kids at the same time.

Another classroom, this one in a private school in New York City benefited from gaming in the classroom. Joel Levin, the school's computer teacher created a classroom experiment with Minecraft, a game about exploring, collecting resources and building in blocks similar to Lego. His experiment

"a rousing success. Not only did we have a productive and fun unit, but I would say that this was the best project I have ever done in the classroom. In my 8 years of teaching I have never seen students so excited and engaged. They run up to me in the halls to tell me what they plan to do next class. They draw pictures about the game in art. They sit at the lunch tables and strategize their next building projects. And not only the boys, but girls too" (Levin, 2011)

This kind of engagement isn't something you normally see in schools.

Learning is a vital part of gaming. Gaming creates a kind of learning momentum, a force that propels learners forward, to explore strange new worlds, and seek new vistas. Gaming captivates the imagination, it immerses its user into worlds that they are intrinsically motivated to understand and succeed. These are possibilities that can be applied to education. Education can ride this surf too.


Reference List:

McGonigal, J. (2010). Gaming can make a better world. TED Talks. Retrieved from: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/jane_mcgonigal_gaming_can_make_a_better_world.html

Omrod, JE., Saklofske, DH., Schwean, VI., Andrews, JJW., Shore, BM. (2010). Principles of Educational Psychology. Toronto: Pearson Education Canada.

"Immersive." (n.d.) Retrived November 12th, 2011 from Dictionary.Reference.com: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/immersi

Thomas, D. & Brown, J.S. (2010). Multiplayer High. Boingboing. Retrieved from: http://boingboing.net/2011/04/28/flux.html

Levin, J. (2011). A Classroom Experiment with Minecraft. The Minecraft Teacher. Retrieved from: http://minecraftteacher.net/post/3922255282/a-classroom-experiment-with-minecraft