Education and Gaming: Innovative Uses of Games in the Classroom

By: Sam Ford, PepperDigital

Earlier this summer, we had a couple of out-of-town guests crash at our place who were headed to the Games for Change conference here in New York City.  The conference featured a keynote from retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who announced a new initiative using games to help people learn about the judicial process, entitled "Our Courts."

According to data presented there, 59 percent of teens know the names of the Three Stooges, compared to 41 percent being able to name the three branches of the U.S. government.  Meanwhile, 94 percent of teens know the identity of the "Fresh Prince of Bel-Air," while 2.2 percent can name the identity of the U.S. Supreme Court's chief justice.

See a full write-up from Leigh Alexander at Kotaku here.  In short, the game is being designed for classroom use and will be located here, along with various resources for learning about the government.

These sorts of innovations demonstrate a variety of concepts: first, that educators and educational institutions often provide great resources for companies to look toward in learning about how media can be used in innovative ways.  While advergaming is on the rise (see more from my friend David Edery's forthcoming book with Ethan Mollick entitled Changing the Game: How Video Games Are Transforming the Business World), initiatives like these demonstrate that there are a wide variety of ways in which game play can be engaged with in order to pass along a message, whether that be for public service announcements, news content, news parody, or education.

Here, we have the perfect public relations solution.  If we think of the judicial system as a client or company, we have identified a real pain point, not just for the company but for the nation--the judicial system provides a service vital to our government's core, yet most teenagers do not understand its fundamental principles.  The point of the game is, then, to reach people through a medium the enjoy (games) with a message that wasn't reaching them previously.

What's most important, if done well, "Our Courts" will present the information in a contextualized format which explains the relevance of the judicial system in relation to teens' lives, rather than as rote memorization of supreme court justices or hierarchies of the judicial branch.

"Our Courts" is a great example of work that has been done among educational and university groups for some time, on how gaming fits into public education initiatives and specifically school systems.  In particular, for those doing non-profit PR work or working with philanthropic or public education initiatives for clients, games like these help expand our concept of what "advergaming" can do.

The conference headlined by O'Connor's keynote, Games for Change, falls into a deep tradition of discussion about where gaming fits into the educational system.  Initiatives such as "Our Courts" looks further at how the Internet provides the perfect platform for distributing these games.  I remember a childhood spent playing games like Math Blaster, the most overtly educational of the games I played, but also the Carmen Sandiego series, The Oregon Trail, and Cross Country USA.

Each was designed with an overtly educational gaming component but with game play that made the learning fun.  In Henry Jenkins' notes from attending the International Games and Learning Forum in Shanghai, he writes:

Games in China, then, are seen as part of a national cultural policy aimed at restoring pride in Chinese history and cultural traditions, traditions which were severely disrupted by the Cultural Revolution and just now beginning to gain some traction in the society once again. [ . . . ]  Social responsibility was also being expressed in terms of promoting games which encouraged ethical reflection and thus transmitted the country's philosophical traditions and in terms of the potential educational uses of games. Games companies had a much stronger commitment to the development of serious games, even though most of them were no closer towards developing a business model to support edutainment titles than their counterparts in the west.

One unfortunate downside of this emphasis on games as a means of transmitting national culture was a tendency to link the idea of educational games to a particular kind of content -- to this idea of historical reconstructions -- rather than to a pedagogical process. Several of us in the group of westerners attending the conference were struck by how little our Chinese counterparts spoke about game play as a learning process, saying very little about what you did in the games and much more about the worlds that players could observe. At a western conference on serious games, there is much more likely to be a schism between educators who have a curricular focus and game designers who insist that good game play is necessary for games to be able to motivate or facilitate learning. As a result of this conceptual gap, the two delegations spent a lot of time talking past each other rather than sharing insights about the challenges of designing educational games.

For me, this description emphasizes what will be vital to the success of "Our Courts."  If the game will ultimately resonate with kids in the classroom, game play is of the utmost importance, specifically utilizing the types of learning game play encourages rather than making it a traditional lesson in a game's clothing.

One of the leading groups doing work on where games fit into education is MIT's Education Arcade, which I had the pleasure of working beside during my time at the Convergence Culture Consortium.  According to their official description, "The Education Arcade explores games that promote learning through authentic and engaging play. TEA's research and development projects focus both on the learning that naturally occurs in popular commercial games, and on the design of games that more vigorously address the educational needs of players."  Find more here.