Why Games and Learning?

A significant component of my research is focused on studying how K-12 students play educational games. Lots of kids love video games, but it turns out (unsurprisingly) that not every kid is equally adept at problem-solving in educational games. This points to the need for technologies that can assess how the student is doing, and tailor the learning experience to his/her needs. But more on that later...

What I really want to discuss is why one might study game-based learning environments in the first place. What do game-based learning environments bring to the table, and how do they enhance existing instructional approaches?

First, using commercial game technologies in education gives us an opportunity to appeal to students for whom traditional teaching methods have failed. Something like 94% of teenagers play digital games in some fashion, whether it's Grand Theft Auto and Gears of War, or Farmville, Peggle, Wii Sports, Free Realms, or Club Penguin. Conventional 'teach & regurgitate' instructional methods simply fail to appeal to too many students.

Second, game technologies allow students opportunities to become active learners. Too much of K-12 education is passive, with the instructor standing in front of the class and the students writing or reviewing notes and 'absorbing' facts, definitions, concepts, etc. Games are interactive, and allow students to actively pursue, explore, experiment, and manipulate. When students are actively involved in learning and knowledge discovery, they have a better chance at retaining the knowledge and developing the knowledge structures associated with deep learning.

Games situate learning within game worlds, rather than abstracting away context. As humans, we experience the world through our senses, with physical bodies, interacting with physical objects. Actions have motivations, preconditions, and consequences, problems are tied to applications and goals, and rewards and incentives provide reasons for us to act. Games reproduce many of these conditions, in contrast to typical instructional methods which strip away context from the content & problems students are faced with.

Games take advantage of multimodal presentations of content. Video, text, figures, maps, animations, simulations, character dialog, gesture, facial expression, and other forms of communication are naturally supported in games. All of these affordances substantially increase the bandwidth for communicating with students, conveying alternative and tailored presentations of information, and divergent opportunities for learning.

Games support collaboration and communication, both with non-player characters and student-controlled avatars. Team work is an essential skill for for students to learn to be successful in the modern workplace, and games that encourage cooperation, coordination, and roleplay have this in spades. Games also have support for several modalities for communication, including text & chat, spoken voice, emoticons, avatar non-verbal behaviors, webcams, and other methods.

Games provide opportunities for using artificial intelligence to interpret student actions in the game, and use observations to tailor the learning experience to the student's needs. Similar to human tutors, using AI to model student knowledge, misconceptions, plans, and emotions, and then choose ways to prompt the student, provide hints, present new problems, or adapt the scenario, can be a powerful force for enhancing learning and engagement.

Finally, with the democratization of computing across a range of devices and populations, games are accessible. Students can use them in the classroom, outside of the classroom, and in more and more contexts. This way, students can have more time on-task