“I’m Learnding!”: Do Educational Games Work?
It’s a longstanding and often losing battle. But somehow, developers continue to push games that educate while entertaining young gamers. Today, the dark horse leading the charge is the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) and their release of Immune Attack this past May, with the help of Brown University and the University of Southern California.
Immune Attack is a 3-dimensional, interactive environment in which players guide a nanobot through the body of a girl whose immune cells must be activated to fight spreading bacteria. Educational material is intertwined within gameplay as basic immunology terms are introduced and further reinforced through missions. As FAS puts it, ”Immune Attack aims to excite students about [Biology], while also illuminating general principles and detailed concepts of immunology.”
Although the concept of playing computer games in your AP Bio class sounds like a good deal, it actually turns out to be a boring truce at best. Immune Attack is bound to disappoint students, especially when the opening segment informs you that you’ll be fighting “swimmer’s ear” (I fought swimmer’s ear at summer camp when I was 12 and it’s not as fun as it sounds). The game weakly attempts to fit the FPS format, but in reality it’s just an advanced puzzle solving game. While Immune Attack dashes the dreams of high school hopefuls wishing to play real computer games in class, it delightfully awakens memories of the glory days when “educational” computer games weren’t actually educational.
Looking back to the ’90s, educational computer games were actually fun even though they were played on oversized Macs and were graded assignments (this obviously took priority over any report on why Illinois grows soy beans). It was of course only grade school, but nevertheless there was a sense that computer games could be exciting in school. Games such as Oregon Trail and Number Munchers were simple, yet still maintained a wide appeal. One game in particular, though, truly stood out among the rest: Cross Country USA, a game that spells out nostalgia and good times.
Maybe the reality of it all is that computer games just aren’t meant to be educational. Until the focus shifts from informational to fun, the endeavors are doomed to fail. This, of course, is not to say it’s hopeless, but it does mean that the better educational games are the ones that don’t try so hard to actually teach.
Tags: educational games, FAS, Federation of American Scientists, Immune Attack
I think that so-called educational “games” which include walls of text are not games, and probably not any better at educating than a textbook. If I were designing a game about the immune system, my goal wouldn’t be to help students memorize things, but to build a context for understanding, and to develop their intuition. Also, I wouldn’t concentrate on imparting knowledge quickly, but rather imparting it in a way that will stick.
So, for instance, in my game about the immune system, there would be no text, and you wouldn’t start out in the human body. Instead, you’d start out in a simple one-celled organism, trying to fight off a virus. You would be allowed to use your nanobot to destroy anything that you wanted, but if you destroyed the wrong things the organism would react appropriately. Eventually, through trial-and-error and experimentation, you’d figure out what not to destroy, what affects what, and what you need to do to actually get rid of the virus.
The next level would be a slightly more complex organism, and you’d repeat the process. Eventually, you’d be ridding insects of diseases, and then small mammals, etc., until you arrived in the human body. You wouldn’t have any semantic knowledge whatsoever about the human body at this point, but you’d have an extremely well-developed context for understanding and intuition about how organisms work. You’d then be taught immunology from a regular textbook–but my guess would be that you would find the material immensely easier to grasp than you would have without playing the game.
Anyway, that’s my .02